My top three favorite business and practice-building episodes, curated for YOU
Hey Therapist Entrepreneurs,
This week’s Worth It newsletter is a little more philosophical than usual, but maybe I needed the reminder that hard work is worth it. I hope you enjoy! 😊
My 3 Favorite Episodes This Week
For some real talk about hard work…
Anna Walker’s podcast this week addresses a myth that you can tell she is completely on a soapbox about: the idea that business should be "easy."
Successful business is not easy. It requires a lot of hard work, strategy, and effort, and a willingness to do things that not everyone is willing to do. But sometimes, in this age of AI, people think something is going wrong if the work feels hard.
One of the points Anna brings up is that AI has really raised the bar, but it has also made everyone who is pushing the easy button sound the same. The extra effort you put into being a real human in your marketing carries more weight and helps you stand out more meaningfully. In some ways, there is a higher ROI on your effort and your humanity than there ever has been. I think that’s a really interesting perspective, and I have to admit that I agree with it.
I’m going to be very real with you personally. I don’t find business to be easy. I’m constantly challenged to try things in new ways, to take risks I didn’t expect, and to think outside the box. To be honest, I would be bored out of my mind if it didn’t present a real challenge.
Every single person I know who is running a successful practice is trying hard things and persevering, even when those things don’t work the first time. At a certain point, once you put in that hard work and get your systems in order, there are aspects of business that can get a lot easier. But the initial startup and the pivots that come down the line are the opposite of easy.
If you’re interested in hearing Anna’s views on when hard work is worth it and when easy makes sense, this episode is worth a listen.
For understanding vanity metrics and why profitability is the most important number…
This episode is a little unusual for the Worth It newsletter, but I think it is absolutely worth listening to for those of us who are building businesses beyond ourselves.
In this episode of bossbabe, Natalie Ellis interviews a yoga and Pilates studio owner whose business looked incredibly successful from the outside but had become torturous for her to run. She was dealing with many of the same problems group practice owners face: low profitability, trying to do everything herself, and focusing on the metrics that made the business look successful instead of building a business she actually wanted to own.
It turns out that running a yoga and Pilates studio and running a therapy practice are not all that different. If you want to hear how she began addressing these problems and rebuilding the business around profitability, this episode is absolutely worth a listen.
For watching me run up against insecurity and realize it happens to everyone...
Business insecurity shows up in the strangest places. For me, apparently, it shows up in interior decor. 😅
In this very candid episode of The Worth It Practice, I pull back the curtain on one area of business ownership that has me second-guessing every decision, losing sleep, and briefly becoming convinced that I am completely incompetent.
Is my level of distress proportional to the actual problem? Absolutely not. Is it very real? Unfortunately, yes.
If you would enjoy listening to a normally confident practice owner flounder, spiral, and ultimately get blindsided by a couch, this episode is for you. 😊
Last week, my daughter did two incredibly brave things. First, she started second grade at an entirely new school, with a class size four times larger than what she was used to. The second was taking her second ice-skating lesson ever.
Have you ever watched someone learn how to ice skate? When she first got onto the ice, she was paralyzed. She stumbled over to the wall and attempted to skate while holding on to it, putting all of her weight against the wall while her feet moved uncertainly and chaotically underneath her. She could barely move forward. She just stood there, staring with envy at the more experienced skaters gliding across the ice. Her instructor kept encouraging her to move away from the wall. I watched him skate over and gesture for her to follow him into the middle of the rink, but she couldn’t do it. She was too scared. She rightfully and realistically knew that she could not support herself without the wall, and she was terrified that she would fall.
From where I was sitting, though, I could see that staying against the wall was actually one of the main reasons she couldn’t skate. The ice near the wall was the worst. It slanted downward and had more rough edges. Because she kept reaching for the wall, even while attempting to move away from it, her entire center of balance was thrown off. Instead of standing straight and strong, she was leaning to one side. Both her instructor and I could see that the only way for her to skate forward was to move away from the thing that felt safest. I think, on some level, she knew it too. But she felt so unsafe, unsteady, and scared that she couldn’t make herself take that first step.
After about 15 minutes, I watched her take a deep breath and move away from the wall. She fell almost immediately and reached out for her instructor’s hand. Instead of taking it and pulling her up, he taught her how to get up from the ice herself.
She fell over and over again, but she kept getting back up and skating toward the middle. By the end of the lesson, she could skate back and forth across the ice. She was still unsteady, but she was moving forward, and I have never seen anyone look so proud.
As I watched her, I kept thinking about how tempting it is in business to reach for the thing that feels safest, even when it is making it harder for us to move forward. We keep a therapist in the practice who is not the right fit. We stay with a marketing strategy that no longer makes sense. We avoid learning a new skill because it seems too hard. Sometimes, we even know that the safe decision is hobbling us, but changing course still feels too scary.
And sometimes that fear is entirely realistic. If we move away from the wall, we may fall. We may make the wrong hire, lose money on an idea, or discover that we are not immediately good at the new thing we are trying. The question is not whether we can guarantee that we won’t fall. It is whether we can learn how to get back up when we do.
I could draw some big, grand conclusion here, but I think I’ll just let this sit.
I wish I could show you the smile on her face when she finally crossed the ice. The only picture I got was the back of her (very focused) head. 😅
Here she is, concentrating 100%
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Hope these resources help you grow your practice this week! Here's to your continued growth and success!
Worth It is a weekly newsletter for therapists building private-pay practices who want smart, thoughtful guidance—without having to spend 10+ hours a week down the podcast rabbit hole like I do. I genuinely love listening to business and therapy podcasts. I’m curious, obsessive, and always looking for ideas that help me run and grow my own seven-figure, self-pay group practice. Each week, I pick my three favorite episodes—the ones that actually make a difference—and share them with you, along with clear takeaways you can apply right away. If you’re building something meaningful, profitable, and sustainable—and you want real inspiration that’s been road-tested in a real practice—subscribe to Worth It. It’s one of my favorite things I create each week, and I’m excited to share it with you.
