Where were you in May 2022?

I was exhausted after having worked continuously for 24 months during the Covid lockdown, pivoted to online delivery and worn down because despite having advertised for 12 months on paid sites including Seek, Linked In and Indeed I had No applicants.

In April I had Covid, then my husband did, and then our son, so I had to isolate and couldn’t work.

I was worried about revenue.

At the same time my referrals were growing, I personally was not able to service them all and my books were closed.

My Virtual Assistant team was floundering to support me with their own team constantly affected by Covid related absences and calls were being missed and clients complaining. I was doing everything in the business – clinical work with up to 40 clients per week, social media marketing, accounting ( I even did the timesheets and reconciliation for the subcontractors), recruiting, writing my own contracts and developing my own materials for client related courses).

If anyone with a psychology degree had approached me in that month I would have offered them a job without asking any further questions! I was feeling quite desperate to meet the financial needs.

By May I was tired, really worried about the future of the business and doubting the wisdom of my decision to expand.

Where are you now, 3 months later?

• I no longer do my day to day accounting, reconciliations, chasing invoices or inputting of other people’s timesheets!
• I am now more hopeful about the future of the business.
• I have more clarity about what is needed to make it work.
• I have cleared a day a week next year ongoing to work on the business rather than doing clinical work.
• I have collected a lot of data – about the attitudes and expectations of my current team.
• I now understand with more clarity the business model that will work better for me.
• I am starting to understand and speak in the public space in my professional voice.
• I am hopeful that I can now pursue meaningful work that has a mixture of training, consulting and clinical work as well as running the business.

What were some tangible gains?

• My team now includes employees!
• I have sourced and hired a bookkeeper to do my BAS and payroll;
• I hired an HR company to write my contracts, benchmark salaries, induction procedures. and ensure fair work compliance;
• I have met twice with a new accountant for my tax and business planning.
• I now have three additional clinical /support team members to assist with administration and marketing as well as take on some client paid work. 
• With a team our business has created a better looking social media presence, creating content for courses to manage the needs of the waitlisted clients, and seeing clients themselves. They are working with me to develop clearer client intake procedures and client care.

What are your biggest gains since being in the programme?

• Less time on the accounting side – about 3 hours/month and 6 hours/quarter saved.
• Much more idea about what is needed to run a private practice ( I had completed other training before but it doesn’t go into any of this information at all)
• The change to who I looked for in new employees and how I approached the recruitment processes – allowed me to recruit 3 new income earners.
• The support from Valerie about the market, about what to look for in new hires, attitudes of team players, and development of a vision statement with values clearly stated has helped me draw my own lines about who I want to employ.
• My leadership attitude has changed (is changing) from the desperate what can i do to get more people to work for me to what can THEY do to develop my business. This is my biggest mental shift.

What you are looking forward to in the coming months?

• Owning and being proud of my business again and developing a workplace culture that reflects my values.
• Growing my benevolent leadership skills – finding what sort of feedback I need to obtain from team members to ensure they feel part of ‘us’, how often to touch base etc.
• Expanding my professional voice as a supervisor/consultant – webinars