Why SLPs Should Stop Waiting and Start Their Private Practice Now
Jena Castro-Casbon didn't plan on building a business. She wanted to work with adults in a hospital, help people recover from strokes and brain injuries, and that was supposed to be the whole story. Her dad kept nudging her toward entrepreneurship, and she kept brushing it off. "I'm not a business person," she'd say. "I'm a helping people person."
Then two coworkers at her rehab hospital casually mentioned their side private practices. No brick-and-mortar offices. No massive overhead. They'd started in their mid-20s, just like Jena. That one conversation rewired everything she thought she knew about what a career in speech pathology could look like.
Over a decade later, Jena runs The Independent Clinician, where she's helped thousands of SLPs launch their own practices. More than 400 joined her Start Your Private Practice program in just the first few months of 2020 alone. On this episode of Clinic Chats, she breaks down the mindset shifts, pricing mistakes, and marketing fears that hold clinicians back.
You Don't Have to Be an Expert Before You Start
One of Jena's strongest convictions is that waiting for expertise before launching a practice is a trap. She sees it constantly: SLPs holding off until they feel "ready enough," often waiting until their 40s or 50s to take the leap.
Her counter-argument is simple math. If you start a practice at 27 instead of 47, you could be in private practice for 25 years instead of 10. That's 25 years of building client relationships on your terms, earning what you're actually worth, and growing your skills in the process.
"Become an expert as you build your private practice," Jena says. "You don't have to have everything figured out first."
That resonates with something every clinician knows deep down: grad school gives you a broad foundation, but real specialization comes through years of continuing education and hands-on work. You'll learn faster when you're building something of your own.
Scarcity Thinking Will Keep You Small
Jena draws a clear line between two operating mindsets. The scarcity mindset hoards clients, builds wait lists on purpose, and treats every nearby practice as a threat. The abundance mindset shares referrals, shares knowledge, and trusts that there are more than enough clients to go around.
Her free Facebook community, the SLP Private Practice Beginners group, had over 17,000 members at the time of recording. That's 17,000 speech therapists openly trading referrals, answering questions, and helping each other grow. It works because generosity turns out to be good business.
For clinicians worried about competition, Jena recommends starting as a generalist and specializing over time. If five SLPs practice within a mile of each other but each serves a different population (dyslexia, fluency, pediatric feeding, early language), everyone wins. Larger practices can take this further by hiring clinicians with different specialties under one roof, giving families a single point of contact for multiple needs.
Stop Undercharging for Your Services
Jena doesn't sugarcoat the pricing conversation. She's heard too many SLPs say things like, "People barely want to pay their $30 co-pays, so maybe I'll charge $40."
Her response: absolutely not.
Every weekend you've spent at a specialty training. Every CEU you paid for out of pocket. Every late night spent on documentation you weren't compensated for. Those are all times you've already worked for free. A private practice is a business, and businesses need to generate revenue to survive.
"Making money might not be one of your core values," Jena says. "But it is one of the core values of your business."
She also pushes back on the guilt SLPs feel about charging for telepractice at the same rate as in-person sessions. You bring the same expertise to a virtual session. If anything, you're saving everyone commute time. Charge accordingly.
Private Pay vs. Insurance: A Volume Decision
For SLPs weighing whether to stay private pay or accept insurance, Jena frames it as a growth question, not a moral one.
Private pay means fewer clients but higher per-session revenue. You can build a successful, sustainable practice this way if you keep volume manageable. Insurance means a flood of new referrals (doctors' offices send patients your way, you show up on insurer directories) but lower reimbursement per session. That's when you start thinking about hiring independent contractors or employees to handle the increased caseload.
Her advice: stay private pay as long as you can, then add insurance when you're ready to scale. She personally waited about three years before becoming a Blue Cross Blue Shield provider.
Just Start. Your Ducks Don't All Need to Be in a Row
The most common stall tactic Jena sees is "getting ducks in a row." SLPs convince themselves they need answers to every possible question before seeing a single client. How do I hire? What EMR software should I use? What if I need a bigger office?
Jena's filter is straightforward. You need liability insurance. You need a way to document your sessions. You need to figure out how you'll get paid. And you need a website so families can find you on Google.
That's it. Everything else, you figure out as you go.
She tells a story about an SLP who got her very first client while wearing an SLP t-shirt in a Subway restaurant. A mother noticed the shirt, mentioned her son with autism had been going without services, and asked if she saw clients. The SLP smiled and said yes.
That's what it looks like when supply meets demand. There are families in every community going without services right now. If you're available and willing, the clients will find you. The only question is whether you'll be ready when they do.
Running a private practice means wearing every hat at once. ClinicNote is a HIPAA-compliant EMR built specifically for private practices and university clinics, handling documentation, scheduling, and billing in one place so you can focus on the clients who need you. See how ClinicNote works.
Transcript
Kadie: You are listening to Clinic Chats, the speech therapist private practice podcast, a podcast full of personal journeys where we not only talk about success stories, but also real life struggles of small business startups. Clinic Chats is sponsored by ClinicNote, a HIPAA compliant, cloud-based EMR platform used specifically by private practice owners and university clinics. I'm your host, Kadie Jackstat, and thank you for joining me today.
Kadie: So hello to all of our listeners today. I'm super excited to have Jena Castro-Casbon on the podcast today because I think we all know and love specifically how helpful she has been to our SLP community in starting private practices. So I want to first introduce Jena. Hi. How are you?
Jena: I'm great. How are you doing today, Kadie?
Kadie: I'm doing good. I can't wait for you to be able to share your story. So I'm honestly intrigued because I'm aware of a lot of your other avenues outside of business, but I would like you to start from the beginning in your SLP career and fill us in how all of this transpired.
Jena: Absolutely. So I never really thought I would have a private practice. When I was a little bit late to discover the field, in college I was taking a developmental psychology course and we started talking about typical language acquisition, then we talked about atypical, and I had one of those lightbulb moments about the field of speech pathology. I was a junior in college. I went to Loyola University in New Orleans, and I didn't really know that much about this field, and it really felt right.
Jena: So I started thinking about it and researching, and I figured out that I needed a master's degree to do it, and so I applied to grad schools, went to Emerson College in Boston, and while I was there, I discovered this whole world of working with adults. I thought I wanted to work with kids because they're cute and they're cuddly and everything else, but then when I first learned about aphasia and cognitive communication disorders, that really changed everything for me. I just wanted to work at a hospital. I wanted to work with people who had various injuries and strokes and that kind of thing.
Jena: I remember in grad school we had one guest speaker come, and that was really my only exposure to private practice other than my dad, who kept saying he's a businessman, and he kept saying, Jena, maybe you'll have a private practice one day. Maybe you'll go into business. And I was like, I don't know, Dad. Business sounds boring. I'm not a business person. I'm a helping people person. And he was like, yeah, but just keep your mind open.
Jena: Then I went to grad school, I fell in love with adults, and then I graduated and I got a job at a rehabilitation hospital. It was really a dream job for me, and I absolutely loved it. I did my CF there, and then about a year or so later, I was working, and I started to feel kind of stuck a little bit. I felt like there were just so many requirements, whether it was productivity requirements, paperwork, so much documentation. I just felt like my clients weren't really getting enough of me and enough of time, and so that started to feel bad because we want to help people and that's our primary motivator for most of us.
Jena: It was around this time that I was talking to some of my coworkers about their private practices that they had on the side of the job that they did at the hospital with me, and I literally didn't know that having an on-the-side private practice was a thing at all. I'd never heard of that, and it was just really intriguing to me. I started asking them some questions, and it turned out they both did private pay, which I'd also not really thought anything about, and neither of them had brick-and-mortar space, which I thought was like a prerequisite of having a private practice.
Jena: Not only did it turn out you didn't have to have a space, but you could also do this on the side. And then the other thing that they said that really blew my mind was that they had started their private practices when they were closer to my age, which at the time was about 24 to 26. They were probably in their mid-40s, and I thought that's probably when you just started private practice.
Kadie: Yeah, there's kind of a stigma as far as, oh, she's right out of grad school. Is she ready?
Jena: Yeah, and I wanted to be professional. I wanted to do it the right way. I think that's one of the things that I've certainly noticed over the years is that SLPs really want to do this the right way. Nobody wants to make a mistake. Nobody wants to fail or have judgment or that kind of thing.
Jena: One of the things that was really important about this whole thing is that they offered to mentor me. If they hadn't taken me under their wing at this pretty young phase of my career and taught me the ropes, taught me what kind of liability insurance to get and how much I should charge and all those kind of things, none of this would have happened. It was really their early generosity in showing me the ropes that when I started with one client, and every private practice starts with one client.
Jena: I had that one client and then I had another and another and another, and my practice grew. I just remember that freedom of leaving my one-day job and hopping in my car and heading off to my own private practice, my own clients that I was getting paid what felt like a fair value for, and I had control over what we did together. It was just so incredible to realize that you can choose your own path.
Jena: I was kind of following the path that I thought was like the only path or the expected path, but I'm the kind of person who likes to live outside the box a little bit. It was really refreshing when I found out that this other thing was an option. After I'd been going for a couple of years with my own practice, my friends started saying, Jena, what are you doing? Tell me a little bit more about that. And that was really fun.
Jena: That's really how my company, The Independent Clinician, was born, in terms of giving back, taking what knowledge I had gained through them and on my own and helping other people and paying it forward. I started The Independent Clinician back in 2008, and at the time of this recording, it's 2020. It's just been really cool to be able to have now spent over a decade teaching other speech pathologists how to start and grow their own private practices, and I really attribute that early mentorship to kicking off this whole thing for me.
Kadie: It's so cool because I think what's so scary about starting a business sometimes is thinking about the competitors around you, but when an SLP realizes how much, it's like we don't care necessarily too much about the competition. It's all about there's enough to go around. Let's all help each other out. That just sounds so rewarding that you've found that on top of your own business.
Jena: Well, it's all about mindset really. I tell people that the old way to have a private practice is to be from a scarcity mindset, and that's the kind of mindset where you want to have a big wait list and keep all the clients for yourself and not share and not refer out. But what I believe in is an abundance mindset, which is that there are more than enough clients to go around. There are plenty of people who need services out there, and I also believe in the universe and that the universe will help lead you to the people that you're supposed to know and that you're supposed to help.
Jena: That's how I teach it. Whether you're in my free communities or my paid communities, it's all about sharing knowledge and sharing resources and in many cases sharing referrals because we know that there will be other referrals that we will get eventually that other people will give us. So it's a wonderful exchange.
Kadie: And I'm just out of pure nosiness, I'm curious as far as when you started until now, are you still private pay only or what's your business model like now?
Jena: Yeah, so that's a good question. My own private practice has gotten much smaller right now because I really had to make a decision. Did I want to grow in terms of my impact? So I could continue to see a handful of clients on my own and grow my own practice, or I could help other people grow their private practices, and then they would have more clients in more communities really across the country.
Jena: I decided to grow The Independent Clinician so that I could have a much bigger impact and be able to serve not only speech pathologists, but really the real people who are benefiting from this are the clients and the families who are in communities who otherwise would not have access to services, or not have access to as good of services, or maybe they'd be trapped on a waiting list somewhere. But now because someone went through one of my programs and started their private practice, they're able to access those services they wouldn't have been able to otherwise.
Kadie: I know you said it's obviously your passion as far as helping other SLPs and clients. That's very evident. But also, normally, finances do come into play at some point. So I'm just curious how you were able to make that switch and if you've been able to maintain that with your newest business model.
Jena: Yeah, absolutely. And I think another question you asked was about private pay versus insurance. So I have done both. I started out as private pay. What I did for myself and what I recommend that others do is to be private pay for as long as you can. I believe that in every community, you can have a private pay model, but it's a difference of volume. If you are getting reimbursed more, then you don't have to see as many people.
Jena: Some of the people who have private pay only practices, and many of which have been very successful, you can have a very successful private pay only business. But the way that you do that is based on volume. You see less clients, but you get paid more for them. On the flip side, if you really want to grow, then what you do is become an insurance provider, which I also did about three years into having my own practice. I decided to become a provider for Blue Cross Blue Shield.
Jena: Then what happens is you get a ton more referrals because doctor's offices are referring to you, you're on the website of Blue Cross or whatever company you end up going with. Your referrals pick up, but your reimbursement is often less. So that's really where you get into scale mode and think, okay, now's the time where maybe you need to hire independent contractors or employees.
Jena: When people are just getting started and they get nervous about taking insurance, one of the things I really tell them is how quickly do you want to grow this practice? Because if you want to stay relatively small, then a good way to do that is to stay private pay. And if you really want to start to build, then insurance is really the way to go.
Kadie: So tell me a little bit about what you offer. I'm part of the free Facebook community, and I do listen to your podcast, The Private Practice Success Stories. What else is out there?
Jena: That's a great question. The main free community, the SLP Private Practice Beginners group, just as of today of this recording, there's over 17,000 SLPs in that group, which is just incredible. I know there's over 200,000 through the ASHA numbers, but it's really pretty cool to know that 17,000 of those folks are in this group. So that's my main free source of information.
Jena: For people who want the more step-by-step, follow-the-directions, paint-by-number approach, I have two premium programs. One is called the Start Your Private Practice System. There's videos, worksheets, checklists, and also ongoing support via a Facebook group where I have staff with paid mentors who are established private practitioners answering questions.
Jena: People join, they go through the content, and they get clients really fast. They're able to either stay on the side of their jobs or quit altogether and grow their practices because they have the tools to do that. Start Your Private Practice is my beginner community, and then I have another program called Grow Your Private Practice, which is for established private practitioners who are really ready to take it to the next level with hiring, more marketing, diversifying their income streams.
Jena: Start Your Private Practice is for beginners, and Grow Your Private Practice is for more established people who want extra support and also a community of other private practitioners that they're not in direct competition with. This provides a really cool space for people to network and bounce ideas off of each other without feeling like maybe they shouldn't be sharing information with competitors.
Kadie: What would you say, as far as competitors, I've always had the mindset of if everyone finds their specialty of some kind, it doesn't matter if there's five SLPs within a mile radius of me. Is that kind of your approach, or do you have a different mindset on needing a specialty?
Jena: That's a good question. What I tell beginners is to start off by seeing anyone and everyone that they can see that they are competent to be seeing. We want people to be delivering good services. But in the beginning, you can see a more generalist pool and then specialize over time.
Jena: People who have more niche or specialty private practices are like the big fish in the small pond. For example, I live in the Boston area, and there's a handful of private practices that really specialize in pediatric feeding, or childhood apraxia of speech, or those kind of diagnoses. It's really good for them to have access to a smaller pool of people who are looking for those services.
Jena: When you're first getting started, having a more generalist private practice is a great idea because you can just see more people and choose to specialize over time. The other thing I see a lot of the bigger private practices doing is they have a one-stop shop with a physical location that can serve many different kinds of diagnoses or disorders. But what they do is hire clinicians who have specialties in different things. So maybe one person on staff does most of the early language, and then other therapists do more of the fluency, or pediatric feeding, or whatever. They still have a more generalist private practice, but they have specialists on their staff.
Kadie: That's a really good thought. And then the SLPs as well feel like they're specializing in something. I always felt the imposter syndrome where if I saw too many populations at once, that was my biggest struggle.
Jena: I think you find your niche over time. When you first come out of grad school and you're having your early career, there's no way that you could know all of the things from a particular area right off the bat. That's why we have continuing education and why people do advanced certification services, CEUs and trainings. You're not expected to know everything, but you are expected to learn over time.
Jena: The flip side of this is a lot of people wait to start their private practices because they're waiting to become an expert. You get a lot of people later in their careers who have waited to become experts before starting their private practice. Instead, what I advocate that people do is to become an expert as you build your private practice. Starting now and acquiring those skills over time also means that you can be in private practice for longer.
Jena: If you wait until you're 45 or 50 to start your private practice, you're probably only going to have your practice for maybe 10 years. If you start earlier, in your mid-20s, late-20s, early-30s, you could have the benefit of being in private practice for 20 to 25 years. Think of how much more of an impact you can have because you're seeing those clients on a more individualized level and you have more control, but you also have the financial ability to get paid more over time.
Kadie: So on the podcast, I like people to share their stories and then I always try to really get into the nitty gritty. I'm not going to ask you all the details because I think you have the resources for that. How do people find the right resources?
Jena: A couple of free resources your audience can check out. One is obviously my podcast. People who are listening to this are obviously podcast listeners, so go look up the Private Practice Success Stories podcast because what you'll learn on that podcast is how regular SLPs just like you had this dream, had this idea, and decided to take action and do something with it.
Jena: The next thing I want to offer to your audience is a free training. It's an hour long training in which I promise that you will learn more about private practice in 60 minutes than you ever learned in graduate school. People can sign up for that at startyourprivatepractice.com/webinar. That will go through my five step system and also talk about some of the major pitfalls to avoid as you're first getting started.
Jena: Between the Private Practice Success Stories podcast and the free webinar, you'll learn tons about private practice and really just make sure that it's the right step for you. A lot of people are interested in it and I think it's a great option, it's a great opportunity for people who want to pursue it. It's not for everybody, but you might as well figure that out before you jump in.
Kadie: So I've got to know. The things that come to mind to avoid, I need to know if I did them or not.
Jena: A couple of them I've mentioned in passing here. One is waiting too long, the idea of waiting too long to start your private practice versus just starting now and growing along the way. The other thing that I think is a mistake is doing anything for free, not pricing your services appropriately.
Jena: I think that especially as women, most of us in this profession are women, we tend to undercharge and undervalue our services. I hear a lot of people saying when we start talking about pricing, oh, I think people barely want to pay their co-pays, which are $30, so I don't know, maybe I'll charge $40. No.
Kadie: Thankfully I'm not guilty of either of those. And sometimes there's guilt behind that because I've heard so many others who are so passionate to the point of it's almost hindering to them. You can be passionate and stand your ground so you can support your family.
Jena: Absolutely. People tell me all the time, well, I love this profession so much, I would work for free. What I tell them is that you have worked for free and you've worked for free for a long time. Anytime that you've gone without a raise at work, which is lots of people. Anytime that you have paid for either materials or CEUs that you weren't reimbursed for. Anytime that you've worked late at night or on the weekends or times when you weren't supposed to be working, those are all times that you have worked for free.
Jena: If you want to work for free, then private practice isn't what you should be doing, because a private practice is a business and businesses are designed to and depend on making money. Making money might not be one of your core values, but it is one of the core values of your business. But you can be a helping people person and a business person at the same time, because the more you can earn, also the more you can give.
Kadie: 100% agree, because when you're owning your own business and billing for those therapy days, you're forgetting about all those planning hours you're not getting to charge for. Those CEUs that are now coming out of your own pocket, the list goes on and on.
Jena: That's another big mistake. Oh, I think being afraid of marketing and being afraid of being pushy. People say, oh, I don't have a business background. Maybe I should go get an MBA first. No, you should not do that.
Jena: What I teach in my courses is a lot of business information, but for speech pathologists in private practice. You don't need a business background. There's a lot of things that you actually intuitively know how to do. People say, oh, I don't know how to make glossy materials and I don't want to be pushy. What I want people to think about is are you pushy in real life? Because if you're not pushy in real life, you're probably not going to be pushy as a business owner.
Jena: What I have to do all the time in my groups is actually push people a little bit more to be getting out there and getting their name out. They're so worried about being pushy that they go in the opposite direction and they don't tell anybody or only a few people about their private practice. And then when they start to tell people about it, they get all of these referrals. That's how it works. If people know that you're out there and they know that you're available and they know that you're willing to serve and know what your areas of expertise are, they're going to want to refer to you, and that's how you get clients.
Kadie: There you go, yep. You have nailed my fatal flaw right there on the head.
Jena: And one other thing I'll say is that when I was first getting started with my own private clients, it was back in 2006, and business cards were what you started with. You made sure you had a business card and it just felt so official. But I found myself also not giving out the business cards.
Jena: But nowadays it's really important to have a website from the beginning. When people are looking for services, where do they look? They look in Google. If you don't have an online presence, if you don't have even a very simple website, you're not going to get found these days. People really want word of mouth marketing. Oh, I want word of mouth. Well, while you're waiting for word of mouth to happen, why not capture the low hanging fruit and get those people who are actively looking for services in your area on a website?
Kadie: And whether it's an SLP or any other medical professional, sure, I might get a word of mouth referral, but I'm not just going to necessarily get the number and call without doing any research of my own. I might get that word of mouth referral and then Google them and see how legitimate they look online. So both are helpful.
Jena: Absolutely. When people come to your website, what they're looking for is does this person look nice and helpful? Does this person look like someone who could help me or help my child or help my husband? You want to use your website to attract the right kind of people.
Jena: For example, if you have an adult private practice, you don't want your website to look too pediatric because otherwise you're going to get calls for late talkers or kids with autism. You want to make sure that your website is very clear in terms of who you serve, so that people feel welcome there.
Jena: People come to your site and they're like, oh yeah, I'm definitely going to give Kadie a call. She looks like the right kind of person to help my loved one. You can use your website not only to attract people but to also filter people, so you are attracting the right kinds of folks to your private practice that you can really help.
Kadie: Tell me a little bit about what you know or how you feel about those who spend a lot of money boosting their SEO presence, or how do you do that without spending the money?
Jena: That's a great question. Our profession, depending on where you live, if you live in a more metropolitan area, there's probably going to be more private practices. But compared to other businesses, there are not that many speech therapy private practices. Think about pizza restaurants, or lawyers, where in any given area there's a much greater density.
Jena: SEO stands for search engine optimization. When you go to Google and you type in anything, there's always the first result and then a couple other results. What you have to do for your own private practice website is make sure that you are using language on your website and in the back end that is telling Google that your website is the result most in line with what people have actually searched for.
Jena: For example, if you work with kids with autism and you live in Denver, you're definitely going to want to have a keyword written on your website that says speech therapy services in Denver for kids with autism. That's telling Google, which uses bots and spiders to crawl websites and figure out what it means. Google prides itself on their search engine abilities, and when someone searches, they really want to show the best results.
Jena: It's definitely worth it to spend some time to think about who is my ideal client and what do I think they're going to search for when they're looking for me. You should start with thinking about the user and the person looking for you on the internet. Then you want to use those terms and phrases throughout your website, even if it's not exactly how you would want to word it.
Jena: For example, we sometimes don't want to use the word speech therapy, we'd rather say speech language pathology. But maybe not a family. Or how about a word like dysphagia? We're actually going to want to use swallowing on our website, because that's probably more what people are searching for. You should have both, but you want to be thinking about what real life people are going to be searching for that you want to be the result they see.
Kadie: This is so helpful. Is there something else that might come to mind that you would want to share with our audience?
Jena: I'd like to add that now is still a really good time to start a private practice. I think a lot of people are thinking, oh my goodness, we're in the middle of Coronavirus, is now really still a good time? And the answer is yes.
Jena: There are people right now in your community who are going without services. Either they're not getting good services through their school system or their hospitals. They're either getting nothing, or they're probably not getting anything close to what they were getting before. And also for the first time probably ever, there are speech pathologists who are looking for work. People have been laid off, furloughed, feel unsafe at their jobs, or they're working in conditions they're not comfortable with.
Jena: The way to fix that is to be in private practice. Because then you are available, you have expertise, you have willingness, and you have time. And you also have people who need services. Private practice is a great way to bridge that gap.
Jena: If you're not ready to quit your job quite yet, that's okay. You can start on the side. If you're already doing telepractice or whatever it is during the day, you can probably fit in a handful of sessions in the evenings or on the weekend or during the summer. That's a great way to build and scale your income by seeing even just a handful of clients.
Jena: I did the math the other day, and over 400 people have joined the Start Your Private Practice program since March 1. People are excited about this. And it's not just that people are joining. People are joining and they're getting those clients because again, those are clients who are going without services.
Jena: If I can tell one quick story. A couple weeks ago, someone posted in my group that she got her first client. She got it in a Subway restaurant. She's in Subway, and she's wearing one of those cute SLP t-shirts. A woman came up to her and said, oh my goodness, are you a speech pathologist? She said, yes. The woman said, this is my son, he has autism, and he's been going without services because the schools are a mess. Do you see clients or do you know anyone who does? And she smiled and said, oh, I actually have a private practice.
Jena: That speaks to the universe putting you in situations with the people you're supposed to meet. There are people in your local community who need you. If you're available and willing and ready to serve them, then how beautiful is that?
Kadie: That really reminded me, I had a grad school friend who wanted to focus on private practice this summer. But when schools were shutting down in March, I called her and said, you need to fast track this, families are going to be scrambling to find a therapist. How could you take this time and turn it into an opportunity? You can be both. You could jump on that opportunity and also be helping these families who have no resources.
Jena: It's not selfish, it's filling a void. That's the disconnect that I think a lot of SLPs have. That's what business is. Business is filling gaps in the market where people have needs and wants and desires, and you are filling them. Yes, you're charging money for them, which is okay and highly recommended, given the fact that you have a master's degree and you should earn like it.
Kadie: Has there been a switch in the typical questions you get as far as people needing to run their business from a teletherapy platform, or has that been separate from the startup conversations?
Jena: There's a lot of overlap. In March when everything went crazy, the questions were a lot about which platform should I use, which one's the best, which one has a whiteboard. Now it's more like should I charge the same, which my personal belief is yes, you should charge the same because you have the same level of expertise and you're coming to the session with the same knowledge. If anything, you're saving everybody more time by not having to commute places.
Jena: I also see in other Facebook groups people asking which telepractice company is now hiring, and I often comment under those, yours. You should have your own telepractice company. People are like, but I don't have one. I'm like, you can start one. It's just called a private practice where you offer your services via telepractice.
Jena: A lot of these telepractice companies are reimbursing $25, $30, $35. Why would you do that when you can earn significantly more money and cut out the middleman? If you're charging higher prices, you don't need that many clients versus think of how many sessions you'd have to do to make that $30 reimbursement work for you.
Kadie: That kind of relates to something you said earlier about as SLPs, maybe we're striving to do things in this specific order and in the best way. But sometimes you have to loosen the reins a little bit. Don't hold yourself to those standards or pressures of doing it ever so perfectly. Just start.
Jena: I think that's my best thing. I tell people, just start. Why not? Just start. It's all about getting the ducks in a row. Our people love to get ducks in a row. It's similar to the whole waiting thing. You can get your ducks in a row as you're building your practice. You don't have to get all of your ducks in a row before you start.
Jena: There's some ducks that you do need to have in a row first. You've got to have liability insurance, you've got to have a way to document, you have to have clients, you have to figure out how you're going to be reimbursed and paid. If you're going to see Medicare clients, you've got to sign up for that. Once you have those ducks, you don't have to have everything else.
Jena: People ask me about, well, how do you hire people? I say, are you at the point that you need to hire? What's your volume? How many sessions are you doing per week? They say, oh, I haven't started yet. Don't even think about this. At some point, you have to realize that you're going to learn a ton along the way.
Jena: If you have information and you have support, you can get through this a lot faster than if you're just searching Google or even searching my Facebook group. You can search on my Facebook group all day long and find lots of bits and pieces of information. But what people aren't going to have is the steps in the right order to go through and have this whole thing happen relatively quickly versus spending a ton of time spinning their wheels.
Kadie: I feel like we could talk about it all day long just because it's so intriguing. I don't even have a private practice anymore, but it's still so fun to talk about.
Jena: It's just a great option. The other thing, just parting wisdom I'll have for people, is I sometimes make this analogy that private practice is a vehicle. Right now, you might be in another vehicle. Maybe you're in a school or in early intervention or somebody else's private practice. You can choose whether or not you want to buy a new car in the analogy or get into a new vehicle.
Jena: You're deciding where you're going to go, deciding who you're going to work with. You're also going to decide how nice do you want that to be? How much money do you want to charge? What kind of a location do you want to be in? You can make a lot of those choices on your own. You can also figure out what do you want to move toward? What do you want more of in your life?
Jena: Do you want more clients with hearing loss and maybe less clients with something else? Or do you want more time with your kids? Do you want more time and money for vacations? What is it that you want to be able to do? If private practice is the vehicle that works for you, then get in, go for a ride, see what you think about it. You can always go back and get another job. I think that you owe it to yourself to not only ask why are you interested in doing it, but also the why not? What do you have to lose?
Kadie: I think if you're thinking about it, that must mean that the question is there and it's worth exploring, always worth exploring.
Jena: Absolutely.
Kadie: Well, thank you so much, Jena. I can't wait to post this episode. I know our listeners are going to love it.
Jena: Thank you so much for having me on, Kadie. If anyone listening wants to catch up with me again, you can also find me on Instagram at independentclinician. But otherwise, the Private Practice Success Stories podcast and then the free webinar is at startyourprivatepractice.com/webinar.
Kadie: Thank you for joining me and listening to Clinic Chats, the speech therapist's private practice podcast. 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.com. That's K-A-I-D-E at ClinicNote.com.