For a new way of looking at marketing…

I just found a new podcast, and I am obsessed. The Roadmap to Referrals podcast is a general business podcast all about creating systems for getting and managing referrals, and honestly, it immediately made me think differently about marketing in the therapy space.

So much of good marketing as a psychologist comes down to building strong referral relationships. How can we get in front of the same people who also serve our clients? How can we build real relationships where we trust each other enough to confidently send clients back and forth, knowing they’re getting excellent care? To me, that’s what great referral systems are all about.

This episode breaks down different systems and sources for marketing in a way that felt really practical and helpful. While I was listening, I realized something interesting about myself as a business owner: I’m actually very good at prioritizing referral relationships, but I often forget about direct-to-client marketing. That’s probably an area where I could grow.

I’m curious what you’ll notice about your own marketing when you listen to this episode.

Also, be prepared for me to recommend more episodes from this podcast soon. I think I may have discovered a hidden gem!

How to avoid promoting Michael Scott …

Michael Scott from The Office was a great salesman and a terrible manager. How many times can you think of situations where someone was really good at their previous job, but then got promoted into a leadership position they actually weren’t ready for? Let’s face it, promoting the wrong person is a complete disaster for everyone involved, especially for you as the practice owner.

This episode of CEO Conversations is all about preventing a Michael Scott situation. How do we promote someone in our practice into a larger leadership role while still figuring out if they’re qualified to even do that, and how we’re going to train and prepare them so that they can actually be successful?

To be completely honest, I didn’t have a really clear game plan when I promoted my clinic director, Becca, and I’m really lucky that she has been as amazing as she is. I was literally promoting her into a job where I did not fully understand what a clinic director should be at the time. I wish this episode had existed last year!

The one thing that I do think I got right is that I spent a lot of time before promoting her paying attention to whether she could independently execute projects, communicate clearly and strategically, and whether she genuinely seemed excited about leadership herself. I did this by giving her smaller projects to do and asking for business insights and seeing how she reacted to some of these challenges before moving her into something with a greater impact.

There are some key questions that Brandy talks about in this episode that are worth asking yourself and anyone that you’re considering promoting. If you’re trying to figure out who your next leadership team should be, and avoid a potential crisis, I truly think this episode is worth your time.

For the Master Prompt you need to make Claude your assistant…

When I originally sat down with Uriah Guilford to record this episode, I had no idea that he was about to give me a tool that would completely change the way that I run my business.

Basically, this episode became my chance to ask Uriah all of the business questions about AI that I’ve been having recently. Uriah’s AI content on The Productive Therapist Podcast is honestly so strong that I kind of consider him my unofficial and free mentor when it comes to implementing AI into my practice.

I was also able to selfishly use recording this episode as an opportunity to get really good advice that I used immediately to better integrate AI into my workflow.

Just like anyone who listens to the episode, I was able to take the Master Prompt for Claude and teach it more about my business so that it could customize information for me much more effectively.

Here’s what I did in a nutshell: I fed the Master Prompt into ChatGPT, which I had already been training for six months, asked it to answer the questions, did some minor editing, and bam! Claude suddenly had a brain to understand my practice.

But this episode isn’t just about AI or Claude itself. We also talk about ways that you can actually make AI work for you as a practice owner, the real questions therapists have about using AI in their businesses, and Uriah’s framework for using it to solve the actual business problems you’re running into.

If you want to hear someone talk about AI in ways that actually make sense and feel practical, then hopefully you’ll get as much out of listening to this episode as I did from learning from Uriah’s expertise.

Here’s the link so you can download the Master Prompt right now. It doesn’t even require an email address. Uriah literally gave it away for nothing.

I do think it becomes a lot easier to use if you listen to the episode, because we give a lot more context for how to actually implement it and make it work for your practice.