I hope that you all are doing well, staying healthy, and keeping COVID-19 at bay. I have been neglectful in my blog posts because we have been so busy at my practice. When COVID hit in March we took an 11% dive in client loss. Some loss was due to the urgency of closing our offices down. Another loss was from clients not wanting telehealth as “they would just sit it out and wait until this is over” and lastly some folks left due to the natural completion of their treatment. Right before we shut down our offices we had interviewed and made employment offers to 3 new therapists and had already onboarded another therapist at the beginning of March. As the world went wonky and uncertainty overcame us, I knew we had to do something I just didn’t know what.
We went into assessment mode of the business. We reviewed intakes, client calls, referrals sources, bookings, insurance, marketing, you name it we looked at it. We knew we first had to pivot as a business while getting our therapists up and running on telehealth. We had to determine what they needed and get them the proper resources fast. At that time, we had 27 people on staff and 3 job offers hanging in the air. Do we move forward, do we not? How long will this last? Do we take on staff when our client numbers have dropped? We had lots of lots of questions but no real answers.
In the past, we bring on a new clinician when everyone is at least 85% full. We had just signed a school contract and we had projected a 35% growth in clients. Well, that didn’t happen, and the school contract went on hold. We struggled with our decision to continue to bring on the four new clinicians. We had started the onboarding process for one, but do we really need the other three? The bottom-line answer was yes!
We had previously vetting these great therapists and we wanted them in our practice. As they brought skills that complemented our current team and we knew they would be a great fit. We felt that we had enough in savings to take a risk and be able to cover their salaries until we could get client numbers back up. We had made the offers, we were going to onboard theses folks to work at home.
Once that decision was made it was time to focus on client referrals. That meant we needed to contact our referrals resources and let them know we are open via telehealth; we needed to let clients know easily know on our website that we are open. We went back to our basic client generating processes. That next month our drop off was down to only 6%. Nevertheless, we also had 3 new therapists that soon would be needed entire caseloads.
We ran some Facebook and Google Ads. And we increased our marketing budget. Why you might ask? Our prediction was everyone will be going online, and we needed to be seen more now than ever. This is one place where you need to look at the analytics of what you are spending, make sure you are tracking: CTR (Click Through Rate), Impressions, and ACP (Average Cost Per Click). If you need more help look at my blog Google Analytics a Therapist’s Friend.
We have been running our Google ads now for 6 months and overall, it has paid off. We did some refining and retargeting a couple of times, but I am happy to say we have easily made up that 11% loss from March. We still could use a few more clients but most of the clinicians are busy with only a few openings. We will continue to hire if we continue to see a client need. We may push the envelope a bit to say 88-90% full. But we will continue to grow and adapt to the new environment we are in. I hope you will do the same.
If you need more help please book a consultation with me, I am here to help you
You got this,
Sherry
