Introducing Miranda Palmer and Kelly Higdon, the founders of ZynnyMe. They are two licensed therapists coming together to empower private practice owners to serve at their highest and best, improve clinical outcomes through business planning, and to break the statistic that mental health clinicians are the worst paid Masters’ degree.
In this conversation, they let me get extremely nosy about how things work behind the scenes with their very successful and popular flagship offer.
Meet Rae McDaniel: A non-binary gender and sex therapist-turned-coach who works with transgender/non-binary/questioning folks feeling lost while transitioning their gender identity. They are the creator of GenderFck: The Club, a one-of-a-kind, research-based online group coaching community of transgender/non-binary/questioning folks who are on a mission to transition with less suffering and more ease. Rae is the founder of Practical Audacity, a gender and sex therapy practice in Chicago. They also provide training for medical and mental health professionals wishing to uplevel their knowledge in trans-affirming care. Rae holds a Master's of Education in community counseling.
I invited my pal Jeff Guenther back on Rebel Therapist because I've noticed 2 things he does brilliantly well in his marketing. Not only is he great at marketing, but he's also really honest and willing to give you zero BS as he explains what he does and why.
I expect you to listen to everything he's sharing here and borrow the parts that might work for you in marketing your incredible and unique business.
Just so I don't bury the best part, due to how Jeff has been using TikTok, his company Therapy Den has had a 50% increase in therapy referrals. That's absurdly high.
Looking over some of my 2021 Reflections
Expense creep vs. thoughtful spending and being in a position to be more generous.
Embracing being the breadwinner
Letting go of judgement around making a greater amount of money than my partner.
Knowing that I am making ethical choices with my money, that my clients are making ethical choices, including that we're not trying to pay others as little as possible.
I appreciate Kelly Diels and Rachel Rodgers for their influences on my thinking about money this year.
Listen to how my guest is zigging when others are zagging. This is a business owner who is growing a unique and profitable business by doing things her way, thoughtfully. She speaks to a particular audience and has no desire to appeal to everyone. She's building her thought leadership, and she's not doing it on social media.
I want you to listen to how she does her marketing and then think about how you could borrow some of her ideas and make them your own.
Podge Thomas is a business coach and management specialist. She works with women business owners to help hire and grow strong teams in order to find financial, systemic and structural sustainability.
I love bringing you behind the scenes of successful businesses so that you've got lots of examples of different ways to build YOUR business. In this week's episode of Rebel Therapist, I'm talking to a healer and entrepreneur who has built a robust ecosystem with high priced offerings. I asked her about how she's developed her offerings, her sales and marketing processes, and how she's scaled back her work hours.
Meet Cate Stillman.
Cate established Yogahealer.com in 2001, and Yoga Health Coaching in 2012 for wellness professionals. Her books include Body Thrive and Master of YOU.
If your program doesn't fill, first of all, welcome to the club!
This secret club includes me and almost all of the people you see running successful programs right now.
On one level, when your program doesn't fill, it means absolutely nothing. It means nothing about your future success, your brilliance, or your ability make this business fly.
In this episode I'll share how it felt to me when my own program didn't fill years ago, a mindset process you may go through when a program doesn't fill, and then some questions to help you analyze what might have caused your program not to fill so that you can make changes for next time.
Sarah Buino, LCSW, RDDP, CADC, CDWF is a speaker, teacher, therapist and the founder and president of Head/Heart Therapy, Inc. She’s a member of the adjunct faculty at Loyola University Chicago and hosts the podcast Conversations With a Wounded Healer, which examines the role of one’s own healing while being a care-giving professional. Sarah is obsessed with her 10-lb chihuahua named Batman.
So why am I so sure your first step to creating a business beyond private practice is to create a pilot program?
This podcast episode answers that question.
First, here’s what I mean when I say “pilot program”:
A high quality offer delivered live (usually online) to one person or a small group of people, which may or may not be offered at a lower price than it will be in the future.
Meet Christa Harrison, founder of Healing For Queer Healers Retreats, where she holds space for fellow queer folx.
Christa is a queer therapist in private practice in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma specializing in PTSD and trauma. She's a secular therapist in a sea of folx looking for someone they can feel safe with after religious trauma.
Introducing Ariana Lloyd.
Ariana is an LCSW and business consultant who helps therapists build liberation-oriented private practices. She proudly hails from the dry lands of Eastern Oregon, where she was raised along with her 9 siblings by her Mormon and Jew-”ish” parents. Ariana grew up farming and fighting and believes these strongly contribute to her approaches in both therapy and business. She now lives in Portland, OR with her two young children and her best friend, a golden retriever.
Introducing Sarah Santacroce.
Sarah encourages people to bring more empathy and kindness to business and marketing. As a ‘Hippie turned Business Coach’, Sarah hosts the Gentle Business Revolution podcast and works with heart-centered entrepreneurs to question their assumptions when it comes to marketing and give them permission to market their business their way.
Dr. Sand Chang (they/them) is a Chinese American nonbinary psychologist, author, DEI/organizational consultant, and trainer with more than 20 years of experience providing training and mental health services. Through compassionate engagement, they partner with organizations and teams seeking meaningful structural and interpersonal change. Dr. Chang’s work is grounded in social justice, cultural awareness, and humility. Their areas of emphasis include trauma-informed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), LGBTQ populations, trans health, and body liberation related to racial justice, and eating disorders.
Kristen is an award-winning podcaster, culture critic, royal watcher, and author. She currently hosts Movie Therapy with Rafer & Kristen, a podcast in which listeners write in with their quandaries, and she and her cohost Rafer Guzman respond with a mix of advice and viewing recommendations. She also hosts By The Book, a podcast in which she and her cohost Jolenta Greenberg live by the rules of a different self-help book in each episode. Her book, So You Want to Start a Podcast, won the Audie Award for best business/personal development audiobook of 2020. She was named a 2020 Woman of the Year by The Women's Center in Washington DC. In 2021, she was selected by the U.S. Department of State to serve in the U.S. Speaker's Program.
As you may have noticed, most of the work she does is NOT consulting. Consulting is only about 10% of her business.
If you'd like to bring your gifts to organizations as a side hustle, whether or not you want to grow that side hustle into a full time thing, listen up. You'll hear what worked for her, and what she's learned through mistakes to do differently.
As a Gender/Cultural Studies MA with a big firm management consulting background Femily speaks at and advises Silicon Valley and other male-majority sectors and teams, like law, finance, and engineering – on gender, equity, and building an ally culture. Femily's popular, digital courses give ambitious women and nonbinary people concrete, evidence-based instruction on leading in today's male-majority world, rebelling against disempowering "shoulds," outsmarting all "isms", and making big life/business changes that really "stick."
When I was making a transition from private practice to this business, I did it pretty slowly. It wasn't until about 2015 that I fully put myself into what's now Rebel Therapist. In internet years 6 years is a long time.
My guest this week, Dr. Lynyetta Willis, made the flip all at once. She had a thriving private practice, and for reasons you'll hear in this conversation, she decided to flip completely into coaching all at once.
Tara McMullin is a business strategist, podcaster, writer, and producer. She's the founder & host of What Works, a platform for small business owners building stronger businesses. She's also the co-founder of YellowHouse.Media, a podcast production agency that helps small business owners produce standout podcasts to grow their businesses.
