Hello and welcome to today's episode of The Business of Psychology Podcast. We are continuing today with our special theme around specialisation and how you can find the people that you really want to help in your practice.
Full show notes of this episode are available at The Business of Psychology
Links & References:
Episode 103: Why you should specialise – old gold that is still important
Episode 61: Turning a practice into a service with Dr Melanie Lee
Start & Grow: The Complete Course for Psychologists and Therapists - Psychology Business School
Rosie on Instagram:
The first thing we need to talk about today are the reasons to specialise.
Then I'm going to talk you through a few different ways specialisation can look in your practice, because I've been teaching about specialising for over three years now, and what I've come to realise is that like with everything in business and marketing, there is no one size fits all approach to specialisation.
Then finally, I've got something for you if you're not quite sure of your specialism yet, or if all of this makes your head feel a bit fuzzy. So stay tuned to hear about that.
If you've listened to this podcast for a while, you'll know that I'm really passionate about specialisation, and that is not just because it makes life easier, but it really does. It is also because it makes it easier to provide what our clients really need. We're in a fairly unique industry in mental health, in that we're in an industry where people are not only trusting us with their money, they're also making a huge emotional investment and taking a huge emotional risk when they come to work with us.
My belief is that we need to respect that and pay attention to what is going to reassure people that we can really help them. To do that, we need to build our authority in the best way that we can, and all that really means is proving to people that we care about them, that we invest lots of time in learning how to help people like them, and that we're staying on top of the evidence base.
In order to do that, I just do not believe we can do that properly as generalists. Now that might be controversial. I know that people disagree with me, and I think that it may be less true if you're working in the NHS because there you have access to CPD and colleagues and perhaps a wide range of supervision. But in private practice, let's be real, you are busy. There's only so many papers you can read, there's only so many projects you can be working on at once, only so many evidence bases you can keep on top of.
I think that patients that come to see us in private practice deserve to feel special, and they deserve to feel that the clinician that is talking to them cares deeply about the struggles that they're coming to them with. And I think the best way that we can offer that to our clients in reality as well as in marketing, is by specialising and spending a lot of time thinking deeply about a particular struggle.
I also do believe that it is easier for us. I think that's important to acknowledge. It's really overwhelming when you are faced with new problem after new problem after new problem in private practice. I'm not standing on my high horse about this, this is what I did in the first year of my practice. I would take literally anybody, and it meant that I was acting like a trainee all the time. I was reading papers right before I saw somebody. I was having sleepless nights thinking I don't really feel confident about this. I was paying out so much for different supervisors and different CPD options because I was trying to be on top of everything all of the time, and I always felt like a failure.
The imposter syndrome was massive. And my marketing wasn't very effective, so I was really only able to get clients who were looking on directory sites or who were coming to me through insurance, and that meant that the fees that I could command were much lower than they are now.
So I think there's two really strong reasons to specialise; firstly because it's what our clients want and need, but it's also because it's really hard as a solo practitioner to keep up a generalist approach and not feel like a imposter, or that you're not doing a job as well as you want to do it.
So those are my reasons. I go into it in a lot more depth in the podcast on specialising that I recorded way back at the beginning, so I've linked to that in the show notes for you. It's also something that we're going to be talking about in more depth on the training that I'm running on the 13th of September. If this is new to you, if you haven't thought about your specialism before, or you have, but you need to revisit, then make sure you register for that training now. The link is in the show notes. We're going to go into depth on the reasons that you need to specialise, that overwhelm, authority, that client need, but we are also going to dive into the practicalities of how you choose your specialism and how you make it work for you.
So let's think then about what specialisms can look like for different business models.
Firstly, if you are an individual or a solo practitioner, then it's pretty straightforward to specialise. Maybe you start out by going to networking events and meeting new people and talking about a particular area of interest. And just talking about it is ‘oh yeah, I'm a psychologist, or I'm a therapist and my special interest is…’ I always recommend that's how you start when you're developing a specialism, because when you do that, you quickly realise whether this is something that you're really passionate about and you can talk about with enthusiasm at length or whether it's something which actually makes you feel a little bit awkward, in which case it might not be the right specialism for you.
So you might start out by just talking about your special interest. Then when that starts to feel good, then you might change the copy on your website. You might start to change the wording on your directory site profiles, and then you might start to change the branding of your practice to reflect that specialism. Notice I'm talking quite incrementally here, and that's how I recommend approaching specialisation.
This isn't about saying I shall never see another client outside of my specialism. because it doesn't work like that. You're still going to get general inquiries, and until you've been established in your specialism for quite some time, you'll probably want to accept some general clients while you gradually build up your bank of clients within your specialty. And that is absolutely fine.
I think now I've been specialised for about five or six years, and now I only really receive referrals from within my specialism, but that wasn't true at all for probably the first four or five years. I was still getting lots and lots of general inquiries that I would have to turn away. And actually even now, I still get inquiries for children, even though I really don't work with children, so I'm always referring those on. You don't need to worry that all of your referral streams will dry up. You don't need to worry that current clients will think it's weird because to be honest, they don't usually notice, and if they do notice it, it's normal in healthcare for clinicians to have special interests. We’re used to seeing practitioners that have a special interest that might be slightly different to what we're seeing them for. In my experience and in the experience of the hundreds of people I've spoken to about this, nobody seems to find it that weird, so don't worry about that.
So it can look that straightforward as a individual or solo practitioner, and I think often it feels hard to do, but the secret to it is just taking the first step, seeing how it feels, tuning into what your body says about it, what your mind says about it, and continuing on through some of the discomfort that's likely to come up around it.
If you want any guidance around that and you are a solo or an individual practitioner, then please make sure you register for the training on the 13th of September, because that's where we're going to go deep into exactly what this is going to look like in your practice.
The second thing to think about is if you run a group practice or if you aspire to run a group practice.
I'm always really encouraging you to think, even if you're at the beginning of your business, where do I want this to go? Because it's so easy to set up as an individual practitioner and stay that way just because that's the easiest way to get set...