Therapy Business Brief

Why Talking About Yourself Feels Wrong Over the past few weeks, I've been working with several therapists on positioning their private practices. These are experienced clinicians. Some have been practicing for decades. They have extensive training, strong referral relationships, and years of experience working with the kinds of clients they want to attract. But I've noticed something interesting happens when we try to translate that experience into marketing. It's easy to say, I've been...

Therapists often tell me that they've learned nothing about the business of private practice in Grad School. Last week I heard this again from a client who's trying to transition from insurance to private-pay. She's been racking her brain on the right way to make this transition as she mentioned her training. My theory is that in school, your training is focused on making therapy accessible to wide swaths of population. As providers, you know that most people can benefit from therapy, so...

I just finished another novel by my favorite author, Irwin Shaw. His characters are my favorite part of the writing. They're often flawed and remarkably human. But they rarely ruminate. They make decisions, act fast and accept the consequences of their actions. I'm bringing this up because too often we spend time in self-doubt, worrying about what our decisions say about us. Decisions about raising fees, leaving insurance, expanding the practice, or investing in marketing. In the last decade...

Last week, I updated my Best Online Resources for Therapists in Private Practice guide for 2026. I've been maintaining some version of this list for several years, but as I was writing this year's version, I started wondering if we still need resource lists at all. There's so much information about building a private practice already. Podcasts about starting and growing a practice, newsletters, Facebook groups, blogs, YouTube channels, consultants, courses, and now AI tools that can answer...

Last week I discovered that the link to my Strategic Direction Call in one of my email campaigns was wrong. I'd been running Meta ads to introduce people to my work. They were downloading my Marketing Guide and entering my email sequence. But when they reached the point where I wanted them to consider working with me... I was sending them to the wrong place. Even though every piece of my marketing was working, my funnel was broken. A marketing funnel is simply the path someone takes from...

This week I had two different calls with therapists about the future of their practices. Both practices are approaching growth differently; one as private-pay and the other as an insurance-based practice. If you've been a long time TBB reader you're probably thinking that I'm biased towards the private-pay model. And I am. It allows for a greater financial independence and the freedom to do the work that you enjoy most. So you may be thinking that I would be steering the insurance practice in...

According to the Q2 New York Healthcare Innovation Report, mental health companies received just 3% of the $1.2 billion invested across New York's healthcare sector. At first glance, that might sound like bad news. But I think it could be the opposite. Over the past few years, many therapists have worried that venture-backed platforms would eventually replace independent practices. But investors have become much more selective. Rather than funding dozens of new mental health startups, they're...

During a healthcare networking event I attended this month, one word kept coming up: longevity. Within two hours, I had six meaningful conversations, and the topic surfaced in at least five of them. Mostly, the discussion centered on digital therapeutics and clinical support, but I couldn't stop thinking about what it means for mental health. People in the U.S. are becoming increasingly invested not just in living longer, but in living better. One 2026 forecast estimates the longevity market...

When my oldest son was born, I remember looking down at his tiny, perfect face and having a terrifying thought: "Somehow, at some point, I'm going to do something that screws him up." It wasn't the thought itself that scared me. It was the realization that I had no way of knowing which parenting decisions would turn out to be objectively right. So I opted for the next best thing: trying to avoid obviously bad decisions. I've found that the same principle applies to building a business. Some...

More than 250 years ago, Adam Smith argued that societies become wealthier through specialization. When people focus on doing one thing exceptionally well, they create more value that can be exchange with others. Now let me translate this to our world of private practice today. Some practices choose the path of specialization while others remain generalists. Neither model is objectively better than the other. But each one represents a different value to its clients. For people who value...