The Most Renewable Resource in Business

May 27th, 2015

I hear from therapists that they’re concerned about leaving behind the benefits of an agency position even though they fear it is driving them toward burnout. But as you are reading this, I am in the West Fjords of Iceland. Taking paid vacation time.

I pay myself a salary now. Just like when I worked at an agency, but a lot more. Now I pay myself about twice what I was paid at the agency, while seeing about half the the clients. And I get paid time off, just like when I worked at an agency, except, I get 6 weeks of vacation–plus holidays… plus every Friday–and I don’t have to ask anyone to approve the time for me. And I have a retirement plan, and contribute about ¼ of the value of my salary: above and BEYOND my salary.

This didn’t happen because I filled up my schedule with more clients. And it didn’t happened because I “saved” money by “getting by” without spending a lot on my practice. It happened because I changed nearly everything about the way I structured my business, which started with the way that I thought about investing in it. And my clients and I both benefit from the changes.

Here’s how I used to think about how I should go about growing my practice:

I thought it was smart to use the resources I had at hand. And the resource that I thought I had was time: those hour slots between clients when my schedule wasn’t full; the hour when my daughter was napping; the time after she went to bed, all of which I thought of as the time that I should be spending tumbling down the rabbit holes of the marketing world (i.e. building my own website that no one ever saw), or time that my husband should be spending helping me with my bookkeeping so that I didn’t have to hire someone to help. Because that’s what I perceived as the resource I was short on: money.

Finally, I realized I could continue to piddle away my time, but I wasn’t going to get any of that back. “Investing” my time in self-taught, do-it-yourself business skills wasn’t an investment.

Investments have a return.

And spending hours trying to “get by” with something to save money wasn’t saving me money; it was wasting time. The longer I pushed my business goals back because I wanted to wait to get another client or I wanted to save up in order to invest – that was time I was losing, and really income too, but mostly it was the time. Money to invest in the business, I could get back.

Money is a renewable resource, but time isn’t.

Now I know that my first move–putting chips on the table to say “I’m in”–was absolutely critical in starting my business’s success. Are you in? Join me and the other therapists in the 6-month Group Intensive who are saying “yes, I am going to do this now. Enough delaying, now is the time.”

Talk soon,