From Refugee Caseworker to SLP Business Owner: Ibtisam Mustak on Building Andalusia Speech Therapy
Ibtisam Mustak didn't start in speech-language pathology. She started in international development, working grassroots nonprofit jobs and eventually becoming a senior government official reviewing refugee cases. It was meaningful work, but it had a ceiling. So she pivoted, went back to school in her late twenties, and earned her master's in speech therapy at the University of Ottawa. In French. Her third language.
That kind of willingness to leap into the uncomfortable has defined every stage of what came next.
A Multilingual Practice in One of the World's Most Diverse Cities
Andalusia Speech Therapy operates in Toronto, and the city's multiculturalism isn't just background context. It's central to how the practice runs. When Ibtisam hires, one of the first questions is: what other languages do you speak?
Her current team covers Bengali, French, Russian, Hebrew, German, and Spanish. Every one of those languages gets used directly in treatment. For families who speak a language other than English at home, the therapy approach is built around supporting all of their languages, not just the one the clinician speaks.
"We encourage their languages while still teaching them the strategies of language overall," Ibtisam explains. It's a model that makes clinical sense and meets families where they actually are.
Growing Slow on Purpose
Ibtisam registered her private practice as a sole proprietorship in 2015. Then a surfing accident sidelined her for months. She didn't actually open the doors until late that year, working out of a single rented room.
And she kept her day job. For two years. She worked full time in schools during the day, part time at SickKids Hospital, and saw private clients on evenings and weekends. By 2017 she dropped the school position, but she still works at the hospital two and a half days per week.
That slow pace is intentional. She's seen too many business owners burn out chasing growth before their systems are ready. Her approach: build the infrastructure first, then scale.
"The first few years of the business was this development phase," she says. "I have operation manuals, manuals for HR, manuals for each type of assessment. We have templates for each category we treat. It took years to be happy with the products we created."
By the time she's ready to expand aggressively, the playbook already exists. New clinicians can walk in and find resources, templates, and documented processes waiting for them. That's what makes growth sustainable instead of chaotic.
Templates, Processes, and the Case Against Doing Everything Manually
One of the most relatable parts of Ibtisam's story is her reluctance to spend money on tools. For the first two years, she didn't have a working laptop that could run on battery. She created invoices in Microsoft Word, saved them as PDFs, and submitted them one by one.
She eventually moved to QuickBooks for billing and says it changed everything. But she still hasn't fully adopted an EMR system, instead using Google for Business for scheduling and file storage.
Her advice on timing the upgrade is practical: "If you find you're spending more time administratively or you don't have enough time to see clients, it's time to automate the next step."
That resonates. Report writing is what Ibtisam calls "the bane of SLP's existence," and her team has spent years building fill-in-the-blank templates that cut repetitive tasks while still capturing personalized clinical data. It's the kind of problem that gets easier the earlier you tackle it.
A Social Enterprise at Heart
Ibtisam still carries her international development roots. Andalusia Speech Therapy isn't just a business to her. It's a vehicle for community impact.
She created a sponsorship package and pitched it to local businesses around the clinic. A neighborhood mechanic ended up sponsoring a child on their caseload. The team ran three free speech days in January 2020, bringing in volunteer SLPs to serve families who couldn't otherwise afford services.
The long-term vision is bigger: one free speech therapy day per week, backed by a corporate funder. She's seen how nonprofits struggle with sustainability. Her model is different. Grow the business side enough that it funds the mission side.
"I worked in the nonprofit world and I can see how unsustainable it can be," she says. "But I still want to be able to help people."
The Moment on the Beach
Ibtisam's favorite moment as a business owner wasn't a revenue milestone or a new office lease. It was the company's first annual retreat at Elora Gorge in Ontario.
Six people sitting on a beach on a Sunday, with a full day of activities planned. She looked around and realized she'd created jobs for other people. They were doing good clinical work in their community. And they genuinely enjoyed each other's company.
"It was such a beautiful moment for me after all those years of working so hard," she says. "I just really, really appreciated it."
Before she ever saw her first private client, Ibtisam took six weeks off and traveled solo through South America. She spent a week in the Amazon jungle without a phone, knowing she'd be tethered to one for years to come. That wasn't reckless. It was deliberate. She knew what she was signing up for, and she wanted to start from a place of fullness.
She still takes over two months of vacation each year. She's learned to blend work and travel rather than keeping them in separate boxes. Her clinic coordinator handles what needs handling. The processes hold.
That's what building slowly buys you. Not just a business that runs. A life you actually want to live while running it.
Building a practice that supports your team and your life starts with the right systems. ClinicNote is an EMR built for private practices and university clinics, handling documentation, scheduling, and billing so you can focus on the work that matters. See how ClinicNote works.
Transcript
Kadie: You are listening to Clinic Chats. Clinic Chats is a multidisciplinary therapy podcast that was created for students, professionals, clinic directors, and supervisors. Clinic Chats is bridging the gap between graduate programs and professionals, sharing personal journeys of the smallest of private practice startups, large and expanding practices, as well as university clinic triumphs and tribulations. We hope you'll find our podcast informative and helpful in your career endeavors. Clinic Chats is sponsored by ClinicNote, an electronic medical record company for private practice and university clinics. ClinicNote was designed to make scheduling, documentation, report writing, and billing effective, efficient, and HIPAA compliant.
Kadie: Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Ibtisam Mustak from Andalusia Speech. Hi, Kadie. Thanks for having me.
Ibtisam: Yeah, I'm so glad that you're able to join us.
Kadie: Where is your business located?
Ibtisam: In Toronto, Canada.
Kadie: In Toronto. Okay, so you're my second Canadian speech pathologist that I get the pleasure of speaking to. So I can't wait to hear your journey. When did you get started in the private practice world, and what gave you that drive to do so?
Ibtisam: So actually, I originally didn't set out to be a speech language pathologist at all. I did my undergraduate in international development, so I was this pseudo-hippie with ideas of saving the world. I worked in grassroots and non-profit, and eventually I made my way to becoming a senior government official making decisions on refugee cases.
Kadie: Wow. That is amazing.
Ibtisam: It's very different. I was reading applications from refugees and their lawyer submissions, and then researching that country and making decisions on it. So it was a lot of responsibility and very related to the global humanitarian issues I was interested in, but I couldn't see a future because that was kind of the top of the area I wanted to be in. And so I looked around for a different career, and I knew I wanted to work with people again. I wanted to help. I wanted a job that could be international if I wanted to move, but also have flexibility if I got bored with some part of it. And then SLP checked all those boxes.
Kadie: Wow. So how old were you when you switched career paths?
Ibtisam: I think I was in my late 20s. So I was a mature student, and I actually went to school in French. So it was a master's program at the University of Ottawa in speech, and French is my third language. So it was terrifying enough that I had to go back as a mature student because my brain felt like it was mush by then already. But doing it in your third language is very challenging, but it was absolutely the right decision, and I'm grateful for the opportunity because it's a really great asset when you come out as an SLP to have another language. And I recommend anyone who has that opportunity to just kind of jump in and go for it.
Kadie: Wow. So does that kind of fall into your practice now? Do you do bilingual speech therapy?
Ibtisam: I think that's one thing that's kind of unique about Toronto, and maybe the closest I'd compare to in the States is New York. Toronto is extremely multicultural. One of the biggest assets that we look for in a new SLP when we're hiring is what other languages do you speak? So on my staff right now, I have someone who speaks Russian and Hebrew. I myself speak Bengali and French. Someone else speaks German, someone else speaks Spanish. And these are all really vital to our practice because a lot of our families are multicultural.
Kadie: And all of those languages are used in the treatment with specific clients.
Ibtisam: They are. And then we also just have to be able to learn to be very good about letting the family use another language while we're using English, and they can keep whatever we're teaching them in terms of strategies, they use strategies in their native language with their child. So that's a big part of our therapy as well, being able to encourage their languages while still teaching them the strategies of language overall.
Kadie: Okay, so you went back to school. You have this background from the French master's program. And then what?
Ibtisam: So when I was in school, I knew I wanted to start a private practice. I don't know why, because I hated business. I watched a lot of people fail at business, and it took over their life in the process. And I wanted none of that. But somehow I knew this was different. I guess healthcare business felt more of an established need and the market wasn't saturated. So I felt like I could do it. And so when I was in school, I already decided on the name and the logo.
Ibtisam: The name I wanted something to be memorable. I looked up the clinics in Toronto, and a lot of them were like Speech Toronto or Toronto Speech Therapy, and I couldn't differentiate them. So I wanted something for the long run, and people to say, oh, you should go to, and then remember Andalusia, kind of like Apple. Apple has nothing to do with its products, but it works.
Ibtisam: So I picked Andalusia Speech Therapy. It's a region in southern Spain. That's very beautiful. And historically, it's a place where people came from different cultures and religions. And they supposedly coexisted really peacefully and worked together to create these amazing feats of science and art and literature and medicine. And I've been there and I fell in love with it. So it felt like the right name at the time.
Kadie: Yeah, it's pretty different.
Ibtisam: People ask us a lot. And sometimes people from Spain call us for speech therapy. And we have to say, in teletherapy sure, but we're not in person there.
Kadie: And then you graduated. What happened next?
Ibtisam: I graduated in 2014. And I started working full time in the schools and additionally part time at SickKids Hospital as an auditory verbal therapist with the Children's Hospital. It's a very unique position to have, to be an auditory verbal therapist, and I love doing it. But it was a really tough beginning because I had a caseload at the school of 70 kids across 20 schools.
Kadie: Oh, wow.
Ibtisam: Because I was the French speaking therapist. So they had me running around a lot. And then on top of that full time job, I was also working at SickKids one day a week.
Kadie: Oh my goodness, that is a lot.
Ibtisam: It's a lot. And that's when I decided to start the practice as well. So in 2015, I registered the business as a sole proprietor and I was ready to go and I was going to jump into it. But as everyone in business knows, there are ups and downs and hiccups that you don't see coming. In 2015, I had a surfing accident and it put me out and I had to put a pause on everything and just take the time for myself. And it was also my first year of practice. So I was trying to figure out everything that I needed to learn and do at the same time.
Ibtisam: So even though I registered, I didn't actually open the clinic for another eight months later that year. And in the fall of late fall 2015, I opened up the door. So I opened one clinic, one room, and we've been going nonstop since then.
Kadie: Wow. Back to the surfing accident. That is quite an obstacle. So as far as finances for the business, by then you had stepped away from the school, I believe. How did you kind of make ends meet while you were trying to start a private practice while injured?
Ibtisam: I didn't step away from the school.
Kadie: Oh, you didn't?
Ibtisam: Yeah. I don't know if I recommend this for everyone. I opened the clinic in the end of 2015 and I continued working full time at schools and part time at the hospital and the clinic until 2017.
Kadie: Oh my gosh. There's not enough hours in the day.
Ibtisam: No, I would go work in the schools during the day and then take some evening clients or do some on the weekend, but it was just nonstop. And even now in 2020, in 2017 I eventually stopped the schools, but now I'm part time at the hospital and then the rest of the time I run the clinic. So I still haven't taken that leap of completely letting everything go yet, but getting there.
Kadie: Wow. So you started one room and then from speaking earlier, it sounds like maybe you've grown quite a bit since then.
Ibtisam: I'd say we're probably one of the more small to medium sized clinics of the people that you've spoken to. We have a second clinic in Toronto now on the other side of Toronto. It's a pretty big city. And so everyone's very geographically allocated where they go for clinics. And so I opened one up on the west side of Toronto to complement the east side one. And then in 2018, we started online teletherapy as well.
Kadie: And so you've hired a few. Do you hire as employees or contractors there, or how does that look in your business?
Ibtisam: So I hire a combination. Toronto has a certain way of running where most of the bigger companies hire everyone as contractors. And I think the lines are very gray. It's beneficial for businesses in a sense to be hiring as contractors because then they don't have to be paying into employment insurance or into the pension program and vacation pay and all of this. But I think it really creates a high turnover for employees and it's not as welcoming of an environment.
Ibtisam: So I've been trying to shift people into employee status and we're doing that slowly. So we're a combination. It is a big investment for me as a small business, but as much as gaining more clients, I'm trying to create a workplace that people really enjoy coming to, where there's low turnover and people's mental health I really look after. So we're definitely shifting towards ideally everyone becoming an employee soon.
Kadie: Yeah, that's definitely nice and respectable that you take that into consideration. Is the paperwork pretty hefty when it comes to hiring someone? I just feel like that's such a learning curve. Like you said, we're not really businessmen.
Ibtisam: All of it is a very, very slow learning curve for me and I read a lot about everything. So when I first started hiring, I would Google best interview questions to ask and I would come up with all these lists until I really narrowed it down. And so hiring was challenging in the beginning, but now it's becoming very easy.
Ibtisam: I create operation manuals as I go along. So I'm looking to build for the long term and be pretty big eventually. So by creating these processes, each time I do it, it becomes easier and each time I do it, it becomes easier enough that maybe someone else can do it. So I have a clinic coordinator who's starting to learn more and more of the tasks. So eventually I'm hoping to share a lot of these tasks with other people so that I don't have to be as indispensable a part of the business.
Kadie: Okay, that's actually where my mind was going next. Do you want to do more of the business role? Or do you want to hire someone for those tasks? It sounds like you maybe want to be able to rely on someone else for some of the business stuff.
Ibtisam: Yeah, I think we have a lot of big dreams and ideas. In addition to just being a business, I think we want to be a social enterprise. So I still have those international development roots at heart. Some of the things that we try to do is we have been talking to local businesses around our clinics, and I created a sponsorship package that I shared with local businesses. And the local mechanic ended up sponsoring a child on our caseload.
Kadie: And so that's really nice, but it takes a lot of time to do that fundraising. I think it's a job in and of itself.
Ibtisam: Absolutely. And we also ran three free speech days in January this year. So we had our own SLPs and then we had volunteer SLPs from the community come and we hosted it and then a lot of the families were able to benefit from it. And we basically want to eventually get to the point where we can have one free speech day a week that's backed by a corporate funder.
Ibtisam: Because I worked in the nonprofit world and I can see how unsustainable it can be, but I still want to be able to help people. So I think I want to grow, but I want to make a lot of the business stuff so automated that we can work on our other ideas that we have as we expand in terms of social enterprise or advocacy.
Kadie: Amazing. Absolutely amazing. That's definitely a first for me and I really love that concept. Creating these sponsorships and talking about these opportunities are definitely good marketing and advertising for you as well. How much time or money are you allocating to all of that at this time?
Ibtisam: So originally, because I started pretty early in my career, I was spending a lot of time honing in on the craft. So we didn't want to have a whole bunch of clients come to us. We wanted to make sure we were providing quality service along the way. So I didn't do any advertising except for we have an association for our province for speech language pathologists and there's a find a practitioner search engine there. So we listed it there and we pay an annual fee for that. And that's all I did for the first three years.
Ibtisam: And then in the fourth year, I did try a Google ad for one summer and I found that it wasn't targeting the right customers. And so we haven't done that again and everything else has been actually non-monetary. But more time, and time is still money. So it's talking to different doctors' clinics, talking to different community centers and daycares, talking to other clinic owners and just establishing ourselves. We've been doing some presentations at community centers about what are the speech therapy tips you should look out for. And I think this is getting the word out, but also word of mouth in general has really helped us grow.
Kadie: Well, like you said, it's more about making connections in the community for a lot of people. And it sounds like you're definitely on the right direction to expanding and growing even larger. Can you look back on any times that it was like a feeling of pure frustration that you just got such a hang up on something that you were close to giving up?
Ibtisam: I think I have that like every month. I have some in particular. I remember when I was opening my first room and I rented one room and I had to decorate it. And I have analysis paralysis with everything. So even paint, the pink colors, like the different shades of white are so overwhelming to me and it's very hard to come to a decision.
Ibtisam: So I had a carpet guy next door and he offered to give me a carpet for free for the room. And I had this design aesthetic in mind where everything was going to look chic and sleek and the carpet was going to be this kind of neutral beige. And he gave me for free this thick, plush, vibrant green with flowers.
Kadie: Oh, no.
Ibtisam: When I was starting up, I didn't want to spend, I didn't have money to spend and I was buying things off Kijiji. I was trying to buy adult chairs off Kijiji and kids tables and bookshelves. And so I said yes to this carpet. And I remember sitting there on the floor, looking at the paint on the walls and just this carpet. There was nothing else in the room. And I started to cry because I was so upset.
Ibtisam: But the lesson I learned is that carpet has been amazing. It hides all the dirt because of all these flowers on it. It is plush. And if you work with kids, you spend a lot of time sitting on the floor. We work with kids and adults, but it's a nice cushion for your bum. And it actually came together very nicely when I brought all the furniture in. So this one thing that I felt that I was making the completely wrong decision and I was so hung up over ended up actually being the right decision and I was wrong.
Ibtisam: Where other people have like a gut feeling, I've learned to distrust my very high and low emotions that come up and just kind of go with the flow more often.
Kadie: That's so funny. So you still use that carpet today in some way?
Ibtisam: We still use that carpet. It's a great carpet. We use a lot less Kijiji now. I mean, now we have a bit more funds to be able to. So when we opened our new clinic, we were buying everything from Ikea and other nice furniture stores. But for sure, that's what happens along the way when you're first starting out. You're trying not to spend money and save where you can.
Kadie: That's so funny. So do you have your own buildings at this point or do you still rent specific rooms from other people?
Ibtisam: We have on our west one, our own building, and then on our east original one, it actually still worked out very well to be sharing that space. But we are expanding into a second room in that space. And on the west one, it's our own, which also is very daunting. I find every step of the way to be very daunting. So if anyone else feels scared, I'm right there with you. But you just kind of keep pushing through every single step.
Kadie: I do think that's like the moral of my podcast journey so far is that everyone is afraid and everyone ends up just treading through water. You'll make it out. Got to take that leap.
Kadie: As far as forms, I haven't really talked lately about forms. And you said you see both children and adults. I'm curious if that has increased the paperwork that you've had to find and keep on hand.
Ibtisam: A big part of why we've also been, there's two reasons why we've been growing slowly and they're both intentional. The first one is that I would like to create a company culture that makes everyone have a really good work life balance. And report writing is the bane of SLP's existence, I think.
Ibtisam: And so our goal has been to create templates that are comprehensive but are also a lot of fill in the blank and automated so that you can still get all the personalized information that you need, but there's a lot less repetitive tasks that you have to do. So I have spent a lot of time, and my SLPs have been supporting me with this, our team, in creating these templates for each of the different categories that we treat, which is the range of the categories and kids and adults, so that now it's come to the point where it's very automated and it is much easier. But we do have all that set up in place and it took years to be able to be happy with the products that we've created.
Kadie: Oh, that's smart. But you've primarily been the one to create that and work with all of your employees.
Ibtisam: Correct. And I think the first few years of the business was this development phase and making sure that everything was there. I have operation manuals, we have manuals for HR, we have manuals for each type of assessment and guidelines for it. And then we have all these templates and then we're finalizing a little bit more.
Ibtisam: But we have lists of things that you can do for each type of therapy so that when clinicians come in, a lot of these resources are still available for them. But we still also have these meetings that we have every week. I meet with the therapists about their caseload and once a month we tend to do a learning experience. Right now, our theme has been literacy and we meet once a month and we discuss different assessments we like and then different therapies we like and then the ideas for games.
Ibtisam: So now the next phase, I think after maybe the next few months, is going to be more expansion because I have all of these pathways set up for the clinic that I can now expand to more clinics or expand to online more aggressively and then start with the marketing and advertising budget.
Kadie: Absolutely. How do you keep your files and documents organized? Do you use EMR? Do you store them in another way?
Ibtisam: So I think this has been my learning process in another area where I would caution other SLPs to not do what I did. I was very conservative about spending money. And an example is for the first two years, I didn't have a car in this business. I didn't have a car and I was on the buses and trains a lot and I had a laptop that was so old that you had to plug it into a wall in an outlet for it to turn on. So I lost all this precious commute time that I could have been working because I wasn't willing to spend money on a new laptop and that's very inefficient.
Ibtisam: So similar to this, I was creating invoices when I first started on Microsoft Word and then saving that template as a PDF and then submitting it one by one to clients. And I did this for too long. We did upgrade eventually to QuickBooks and that made everything so much easier for billing and invoicing. And I can do things on the phone and my clinic coordinator can do things so easily.
Ibtisam: But we still haven't migrated to a complete EMR system. We use Google for Business, which is PIPA compliant on our end in Canada. And it works because a lot of my clinicians like using Google Calendar for their personal lives. So we schedule with Google Calendar. And so both their client work, their schedule basically is all in one place. And that's been a big part of why we haven't shifted yet. But I think eventually when we're getting too big to not shift.
Ibtisam: But the more automated you can become, I recommend everyone to go there. So if you find you're spending more time administratively or you don't have enough time to see clients, it's time to automate the next step.
Kadie: I think that's a really great point. Is there any words of advice for someone to grow, whether it's the States or Canada, whatever it is, what's your advice to continue moving in the right direction?
Ibtisam: I think it's really important, and this is going to sound so cliche, to at least once in your business career life have a business plan because it will help you decide what you want to be. Do you want to just be a solo practitioner? Do you want to be a medium sized business? Do you want to be large?
Ibtisam: And I'm not saying you can't pivot along the way and change, but by having that in place, you can set some timelines for where you want to go and are you getting there and what do you need to do to get there. Because without doing it, you're not setting these ideas down on paper and they're less organized.
Ibtisam: I think the business can take you in a direction that you may not have known you were going because we started off as speech therapists. Most of us are and none of us have MBAs. We don't realize that we might slowly turn into this business person and we may not have wanted that.
Ibtisam: So sometimes I like to do this exercise where I write down a list of things that I would like to be doing in life, period, personal or business. Just what do I want to be doing in life? What do I want to be doing day to day? And then I write down beside it a list of things that I'm actually doing in my real life. And then I look to see if they're matching up and either they're not matching up but they're on the path to matching up, or some things I just don't need to be doing. And I try to cut them out.
Ibtisam: Because if we don't check in on ourselves, I think we're going to one day wake up and find ourselves doing a job that we might not be interested in. And luckily for me, I'm still interested in the things I'm doing and I see my long-term goal and path and I like it. But for others, for sure, check in with yourself about that.
Kadie: Definitely seems like you're a hard worker and have worked to grow thus far. You mentioned how much you take work-life balance into account for your employees. Do you feel that you hold yourself to those same criteria to stay balanced in work and your life?
Ibtisam: I think I'm a work hard, play hard kind of person. So when I talk to everyone about business, like if I have a physiotherapy appointment or a massage therapy appointment or an optometrist, I tend to make an appointment with the owner and then I talk to them about their business.
Ibtisam: And a lot of business owners have told me, oh, I didn't take a vacation for 10 years. Oh, I didn't take a vacation for five years. And I was adamant from the beginning that I didn't want to do that. And that's also the second reason of why we're growing at the pace we're growing.
Ibtisam: So I work part-time at the hospital and then I'm running this business, which is growing very well. I also took over two months off on vacation.
Kadie: Oh, wow.
Ibtisam: I think it's really important. The first year that I was going to take a vacation after I opened, it was about, so actually if I back up a little bit, before I started to see my first client, I took six weeks off and I went to South America on a solo trip and I went into the Amazon jungle for one week without a phone because I knew I was going to be tied to my phone for the next few years of my business. And that is what happens. So be prepared for that.
Ibtisam: But know that you've got a choice. Within one year, I took a trip to Portugal and it was very hard because in my mind, vacation was for vacation and work was for work. And I had to work on my vacation. But I learned to combine the two so that I can still take a lot of vacation and the processes are now automated. And I have a clinic coordinator who can handle things. But then I can still work a little bit on vacation without feeling bad.
Ibtisam: And I created this lifestyle for me that's much more flexible. And I don't lose my goals for my lifestyle while still being able to build a business.
Kadie: Yes, that's very inspiring that you have been able to maintain that. And even before you started, you realized that that was important to you. And you're right. It's important to hold yourself accountable if that's something you need in your work life balance. I think all business owners deserve a break as well.
Ibtisam: They really, really do. They're kind of wearing all of the hats. Like sometimes I think I should write down a list. If I think off the top of my head, I was the graphic designer, I was the receptionist, the scheduler, the therapist, the janitor, the interior designer, the social media influencer, the marketing manager, the bookkeeper, the clinic supervisor. It doesn't end, the amount of things that you're doing in the beginning. And you need to cut yourself some slack because you're going to burn out otherwise.
Kadie: Yeah. So you said that you work in the hospital setting still one day a week with your other work days. How much time do you allocate to, say, clients versus business tasks? I'm sure it's a juggling act for you.
Ibtisam: So I actually work at the hospital two and a half days a week. So I really probably shouldn't be working that much more, but I really like the area I work in. Auditory-verbal therapy is really cool. And eventually I think I will be leaving it.
Ibtisam: But I only see in the private practice clients about maybe three or four per week. So not many at all. The ones that I see are just the ones that are very specific language that only I can serve or clients that have been with me for many years. Other than that, I'm really focused mostly on helping my employees, being the clinical supervisor, helping the clinic coordinator, networking with people in the community, just developing the business. It's probably 90 percent of my time in the business.
Kadie: And have you found that even if you're not seeing a ton of clients privately, that you've structured the business to support yourself financially as you move away from the hospital as well? I know it's a balancing act when you've got bills to pay, therapists to pay, etc.
Ibtisam: I think that's a big decision that comes up in practice. If you were maintaining another job, when is the time that you leave that other job? I think financially I'm comfortable now. And it might be interesting for people who are in my stage of private practice where you're going from yourself to small to getting to be a little bit more medium sized.
Ibtisam: The less clients you directly see, of course, you are going to initially make less money as the owner. But the more that your company grows, the more that's going to even out. And it's a scary in-between transition stage. But I think we've been successful enough now that it's always continuously growing.
Ibtisam: And right now I can step away from the hospital and just do this all the time. It's just sometimes nice to also be part of a team where I'm not the one running the show because it's nice to breathe for a few seconds, if that makes sense.
Kadie: Right. Absolutely. Well, is there anything else that you would like to add in regards to your personal journey?
Ibtisam: I think one of my favorite moments for myself as a business owner was our first annual retreat. We went up to Elora Gorge in Ontario, which has a beach and this beautiful waterfall. And we were all, I think at the time it was six of us maybe. And we were all sitting around on a beach on a Sunday. We had a whole day of nice things planned.
Ibtisam: And I was able to have a moment where I felt really proud of what I've done and that I'd created jobs for other people. And we were able to hang out socially and enjoy this company. And I knew that we were doing really great work to help the people in our community. And it was such a beautiful moment for me after all those years of working so hard. And I just really, really appreciated it and was grateful to be in that position.
Kadie: That is so amazing and unique. You even gave your employees and staff a retreat. That's so rare, I feel like in this type of industry. So I think that's something to be proud of, is that, like you said, you are successful running a business and also creating this work life balance and company culture.
Ibtisam: Thank you so much, Kadie. And can I just say that one of the things that I read a lot or listen to a lot are NPR's podcast, How I Built This. And then when I discovered your podcast, it was like NPR's How I Built This for SLPs. And I was so excited and I've listened to all of them. And I think you're doing a wonderful job and thank you for sharing so that we each feel less alone in our own silos. You're connecting us across the world. So I appreciate that.
Kadie: Well, thank you so much. I appreciate your time. Thank you for joining me and listening to Clinic Chats. If you have a moment, please leave a five star review for Clinic Chats to help other SLPs find our podcast. If you'd like to share your own personal journey through private practice, please email me, kadie at clinicnote dot com. That's K-A-I-D-E at clinicnote dot com.