Growth is a mindset. If you want your group practice to keep expanding, you’ll need to think — and act — strategically by taking some key steps forward.
Market your practice effectively
Your practice can’t grow if prospective clients can’t find you. Good marketing is an art that takes practice, but the fundamentals of marketing your therapy group practice include:
Ensure your marketing channels and materials are compliant with HIPAA, CMS, and other regulatory marketing requirements.
Build referral partnerships
It’s wonderful when clients find you organically through your website or provider directory profiles. But a strong referral network can also be a gold mine for a group therapy practice.
Networking with other clinicians online, in your community, and through professional groups can exponentially increase your pool of potential referrers. And if referrals are your goal, it pays to be strategic in your connections. If your practice specializes in working with kids and teens, for example, it could be especially fruitful to build relationships with pediatricians and school counselors, who likely refer out to qualified therapists.
Don’t forget about the power of your existing client network, either. Torre says many of Ever After’s referrals are internal. “We see a lot of families, people whose best friends and loved ones and families come in to see us,” she says.
Hire strategically
Finding the right number and balance of providers is among the most important — and difficult — tasks that a group practice leader faces. After all, your practice is only as strong as your team.
To know when to hire, look at how busy your existing providers are, Torre suggests. “If we’re getting enough referrals that it’s hard to place [clients] in the times and days that they want, I start looking at hiring,” she says. Of course, it’s also important to ensure revenue is strong enough to pay a new provider while they get credentialed and build out their client roster.
When bringing on new providers, think about gaps in your current service offerings, Torre adds. Recently, she noticed that many clients were interested in couples therapy, but few of her providers had the bandwidth to offer it. So the practice hired a dedicated couples therapist — and her client roster filled up right away, Torre says.
Focus on the foundation
When your business is growing, it can be tempting to try to go from zero to 60. But in a group practice environment, where your clients and employees alike are counting on you, it’s better to prioritize slow, steady, and sustainable growth. For Torre, that means sticking to a simple guiding principle: “It needs to be accessible, it needs to be affordable, and the therapists need to be taken care of,” she says. “Everything else will fall into place after that.”
Look for partners who can help
The right partner makes all the difference in business. Torre’s sister, Emily, is her number-one partner, handling the business and administrative side of Ever After. “Having someone business-minded helped a whole lot,” she says. “They don’t [need to] know the clinical, but they know the other pieces. That’s what you really need.”
Technological partners can also make a world of difference. Headway, for example, offers a vast menu of free features that support the needs of growing group practices, such as fast and simple credentialing, billing assistance and clawback protection, multi-location support, and centralized reporting tools.
