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How can offering comprehensive employee benefits help you to grow your practice? Which benefits are recommended for W2 employees? Can you still be profitable as a group practice that offers benefits to W2 employees?
In this podcast episode, Alison Pidgeon speaks with Bren Shantz about adding employee benefits in a W2 model group practice.
Podcast Sponsor: Heard
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Meet Bren Shantz
Bren Shantz is a Licensed Professional Counselor who lives in Grand Rapids, MI. Before starting his own private practice, he worked for 6 years in community mental health and in a college counseling center.
Bren opened Unity Counseling in 2019 and worked solo for 2 years. He then made the conversion to group practice in the summer of 2021, hiring his first employee in July.
He now has 10 therapists with 2 more onboarding, and hopes to continue expanding by adding several new locations in the coming year.
Visit Unity Counseling and connect with them on Facebook. Connect with Bren on LinkedIn.
In This Podcast
- Core benefits to consider offering your employees
- The cost of offering health insurance
- Payoffs for the practice from offering great benefits
Core benefits to consider offering your employees
- Health insurance
- Holiday-pay and paid leave
- 401K
- Training reimbursement
[401K is not] something that drives people but it’s just a nice thing to have, and philosophically I wanted to make sure that I’m running a practice that not only sets people up well for the here and now but [the] longer-term [as well]. (Bren Shantz)
The cost of offering health insurance
Many practices offer their W2 employees health insurance and benefits. Even though it can be an expensive offering, it is important to consider.
You can find insurance prices that range, but the average cost is around $600 which is dependent on the employee’s age.
It was definitely a big [addition] to the overall compensation package but it seems to be the most important so it felt worth the investment. (Bren Shantz)
W2 employees are generally paid less than contractors but they receive a variety of benefits, so in the end, they earn a similar amount.
Payoffs for the practice from offering great benefits
It is always great to offer benefits to the employees and clinicians in a group practice, both for the success of the practice and for the comfort and support of the practice’s staff.
If you offer comprehensive benefits packages to your staff, you can expect:
- Greater retention of your clinicians
- Success in attracting and hiring great clinicians
- Increased work satisfaction and quality
I would absolutely attribute what we’ve been able to do and who we have been able to hire [to] the benefits that we’ve offered. (Bren Shantz)
Offering your staff comprehensive benefits packages will not only help your staff produce great work because they feel well taken care of, but it can help you to grow your practice faster and more sustainably.
Books mentioned in this episode:
Useful links mentioned in this episode:
- Visit Unity Counseling and connect with them on Facebook
- Connect with Bren Shantz on LinkedIn
- When you join Heard, you’ll work directly with financial specialists to track your income and expenses, file taxes online, and grow your practice. Sign up now at www.joinheard.com.
- Find out more about Gusto and Green Oak Accounting
Check out these additional resources:
- Helping Therapists with Money Mindset with Kiné Corder | GP 114
- Group Practice Launch
- Group Practice Boss: www.practiceofthepractice.com/grouppracticeboss $149 a month
- Email Alison: alison@practiceofthepractice.com
- PoP Group Practice Owners Facebook Group
- Free resources to help you start, grow, and scale
- Work with us
- Consult With Alison
- Alison Pidgeon on Therapy for Your Money Podcast
- Practice of the Practice Network
Meet Alison Pidgeon, Group Practice Owner
Alison Pidgeon, LPC is the owner of Move Forward Counseling, a group practice in Lancaster, PA and she runs a virtual assistant company, Move Forward Virtual Assistants.
Alison has been working with Practice of the Practice since 2016. She has helped over 70 therapist entrepreneurs start and grow their businesses, through mastermind groups and individual consulting.
Transformation From A Private Practice To Group Practice
In addition, she is a private practice consultant for Practice of the Practice. Allison’s private practice ‘grew up.’ What started out as a solo private practice in early 2015 quickly grew into a group practice and has been expanding ever since.
Visit Alison’s website, listen to her podcast, or consult with Alison. Email Alison at alison@practiceofthepractice.com
Thanks For Listening!
Feel free to leave a comment below or share this podcast on social media by clicking on one of the social media links below! Alternatively, leave a review on iTunes and subscribe!
Podcast Transcription
[ALISON PIDGEON]
You are listening to the Grow a Group Practice podcast. Whether you were thinking about starting a group practice or in the beginning stages, or want to learn how to scale up your already existing group practice, you are in the right place. I’m Alison Pidgeon, your host, a serial entrepreneur with four businesses, one of which is a large group practice that I started in 2015. Each week, I feature a guest or topic that is relevant to group practice owners. Let’s get started.
Hi, welcome to the Grow a Group Practice podcast. I’m Alison Pidgeon your host. I am excited to talk to you today all about benefits in a W2 model group practice. So this is a question that I get all the time from people, because maybe they have a contractor-based group practice, or maybe they have a W2 based practice, but they don’t offer any benefits. I think one of the things people assume is that it’s going to be very expensive to offer benefits and that’s actually not been my experience. So what happens in a W2 practice is that you lower the salary or the hourly rate for the staff person to make up for what you’re paying in benefits. So it’s about a wash when it comes to comparing contractor models to W2 employment, when you factor in who’s paying all the costs and how the taxes are split out and all of those kinds of things.
So I wanted to interview somebody who has a pretty robust benefits package in their group practice. So today I’m talking to Brent Shantz. He is a licensed professional counselor and he has a practice in Grand Rapids, Michigan called Unity Counseling. He started the group practice just about a year ago, and now he has 13 or 14 employees, which is amazing and he is looking to continue to expand. So we talk about what the process was like for him of adding benefits and the costs and where to go look and who to talk to and all of that good stuff. I also share some of the things that we do in my own practice in terms of benefits, what we offer and we also talk about the difference that it’s made in our own practices with retention and recruitment. So I have not had an issue hiring like a lot of people have currently and I think the big reason why is because we offer these really great benefit packages to our staff. So if you have thought about offering benefits or thought about hiring W2 employees, but aren’t quite sure how all of that works definitely listened to this interview that I do with Bren Shantz from Unity Counseling.
[ALISON]
Hi, Bren. Welcome.
[BREN SHANTZ]
Hi, thanks for having me.
[ALISON]
It’s great to talk with you today.
[BREN]
Likewise.
[ALISON]
So can you start us off by introducing yourself and your practice?
[BREN]
Sure. I’m Bren, I’m a licensed professional counselor and I have a practice in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is second or third largest town in Michigan, which isn’t saying a lot, I realized, but that’s where we’re at. I have been in private practice for about two and a half or three years now, though the majority of that was a solo practice owner. About this time last year started looking into the steps into what would it look like to do a group practice and try to figure out how I wanted to go about that. Fast forward, about 12 months, we are interviewing someone who will be our 13th clinician beyond me, I guess I make 14 and having questions about expanding offices and getting into the larger office or second office and bringing in an in-house office manager and all kinds of things. So it’s been quite the ride.
[ALISON]
That’s awesome. Congratulations. So I wanted to have you on the podcast today to talk about benefit packages for employees. That is a question that I get asked a lot and I’m curious to hear the whole evolution of how did you decide you wanted to add benefits? Did you add them all at once? Did you add them slowly? So can you go back to the beginning and tell us about that?
[BREN]
For sure. So Grand Rapids is fairly saturated with therapy practices, so I knew stepping into it that I, in order to compete was going to need to have a healthy compensation package. That was primarily what I was planning on doing right from the start. I knew I needed to offer health insurance, didn’t know it all, what that even meant how to do that, how to do that in a couple of different ways. I knew I wanted to have different benefits beyond that as well, too, just to make sure that as I was offering the positions that people had something to step into. Particularly was very sensitive of the fact that it’s just me in an office and those first couple of like bringing people on. It’s like you want to make sure that they have confidence in the practice and all of that. So short answer, yes, I was very interested right from the start to take a look at adding some of these insurance benefits, health insurance being the primary one, but trying to figure out how many other ones that I could fit in that were both attractive to bring new therapists on and retain therapists, but also that were economical biggest, bang for your buck stuff.
[ALISON]
So let’s talk about that in a little bit more detail, because I think that’s similar to my thoughts as well. Like health insurance was definitely one of the first things I wanted to add, because I felt like that was a big deal for a lot of people. But what were the other things that you felt like either you heard people asking for or you just thought would make a big difference in terms of offerings?
[BREN]
Holiday pay and paid time off was a big thing that I really wanted to also add. So those are probably the two biggest ones that we wanted to make sure that I had in place. 401K was another one though that seems to be not something that drives a lot of people, but it’s just a nice thing to have. Then just philosophically wanting to make sure that I’m running a practice that not only sets people up well for the here and the now, but longer term. Training reimbursement was another one, one that we haven’t yet implemented though I’ve discussed a lot is some sort of parental leave. It’s one that we’re talking about. It’s hard to wrap my mind around how to add that in there. Then just thinking about insurance benefits, a lot of people, it seems like a lot of therapists have a partner or spouse in which they’re getting insurance from. So how do I make that a benefit, even for folks who are already getting insurance from someone else was another question that we were having.
[ALISON]
Ah, did you find an answer to that question?
[BREN]
Yes, sure. Sort of it, yes. So we provide a, an insurance stipend if you don’t get insurance through us, that just adds on as a bonus to the check as just a flat monthly amount. We plateau or we offer a couple of different levels of employment part-time and full-time and a couple of different options there. So we could give a $300 benefit for our part-time, so at least 18 or more clients in a given week and then full-time is 26 or above. So we give a $600 a month insurance stipend for them. It’s not tracked, it doesn’t have to specifically be for insurance but it’s it’s something that adds to an insurance benefit, even if they’re not getting insurance through us specifically.
[ALISON]
Okay, that’s really interesting because I’ve heard of some owners doing that and I was curious how that worked because I know when you offer a traditional health insurance plan, like we do in my practice, you can’t, if somebody waves it, you can’t basically like say, oh, well, if you had elected it, I would’ve ended up paying $250 a month towards it. So here’s an extra $250 since you’re not taking the insurance plan that is not legal to do it that way. So it sounds like you found a way to do that in a way that’s legal.
[BREN]
Yes.
[ALISON]
Would that be a good way of describing it?
[BREN]
Yes, that’s fine. I’m desperate to not misstep anywhere. So working with an employment lawyer we can, from what we found everybody can, that has the 18 or more hours can get insurance through us. Then we pay like 75% of their premium for themself. That covers, the 75% covers both health, vision and dental. Then if they elect not to get that, as far as our employment lawyer worked out, I don’t know if that’s different in state to state, but we’re able to give them an elected out of insurance can give a flat benefit to it.
[ALISON]
Ah, okay. So you do have like a traditional insurance for the people who elect it.
[BREN]
We do offer for — correct. So we just started that up this past January. So we have a couple of clinicians who get it myself included, get the insurance through the practice, but if they elect not to get the insurance then is when the stipend kicks in.
[ALISON]
Okay. Very nice. I have heard it where it was like you either gave the plan and then if you didn’t elect it, then nothing happened, like you didn’t get anything else and versus like you gave everybody a stipend and they had to figure out how to go find their own insurance.
[BREN]
Oh yes. We initially thought about doing it in that way but then as we grew and got to a point where we could start to offer insurance through us, that was something that a lot of people were asking about. So we looked through the plan and added it through, we applied through Gusto, which was a really easy process and offered a couple of plans through that.
[ALISON]
Okay, nice. So when you wanted to offer your employees the health insurance, is that the first place you went? You went to Gusto and checked things out there or did you look other places?
[BREN]
We looked other places. I looked other places first, just that I had gotten my insurance through a broker. So I was looking at that first because that’s just what I had already been using. They came back with a couple of different plans, but the whole process of going through Gusto appealed for me. Then it’s just a lot more integrated and Gusto, like withdrawals, everybody, keeps track of withdrawals and all that stuff. So that really helped it make it a lot easier.
[ALISON]
I know it’s nice when you have that all integrated into your payroll system.
[BREN]
So nice. They had a number of really good insurance plans as well, too, and just a really straightforward way to go through the whole process, which gave us some control rather than using a broker, which there was just a lot of, it was a very different process where somebody else is doing a lot of the work for you and then coming back to you and saying, here’s a couple of options. What do you think?
[ALISON]
So one of the biggest questions I get from people who are considering adding health insurance to their employee benefits is they imagine that it’s going to be very expensive for them to add it. So what was your experience of that in terms of the cost?
[BREN]
It is expensive. It is, I think out of all the benefits that we’ve looked at or that we offer it is the most expensive one that we do. It ranges pretty wildly. Getting insurance through Gusto and it also through the broker is based entirely on what somebody’s age is. So if somebody’s in their late fifties stepping out of a career in a number of different things and just finishing up their career in private practice, their insurance is going to cost a lot more versus somebody in their late twenties, early thirties. So it was really hard to like predict, but since we started out with an insurance stipend and full-time employees, about 600, it gave us a number that we could think, okay I know that we’re not going to be able to know exactly which one, what employees are going to get insurance through us but if we can have a general average of around $600 a month for those employees, then that still balances everything from what our initial looking at of, of just trying to balance percentage wise of everybody’s income to expense ratio.
[ALISON]
I think that’s actually what I found to be the case as well, like $600 is about right. We had the same offering here in Pennsylvania as the age-banded plan. So we’re hoping that maybe next year, once we have at least 20 employees on the plan, we’ll be able to go to a different fee structure. It won’t be by age anymore. I don’t know how they do it, but I’m hoping it gets cheaper.
[BREN]
It gets cheaper. Yes, it was definitely a big add to an overall compensation package. But that it seems to be the most important. It felt worth the investment.
[ALISON]
Yes. So how did you work through the numbers of knowing you wanted to add benefits and then calculating how they would be paid for sessions and was that difficult to figure out?
[BREN]
Certainly complicated. I spent a lot of time playing around with Excel. That was about the time that I had bumped into Practice of the Practice. I was in the Group Practice Launch that I think I started a couple of weeks after it had already gotten up and rolling and that was a lifesaver. Just consumed a lot of information and watched a lot of video and saw a lot of what you and Whitney were doing, other practices were doing, which that was a huge help, but essentially it just broke down what my average had been. So we were an insurance based practice. So out of all the different insurances and percentages and all that stuff about what was my average, and then I took that average and started breaking down how much did I, was I going to pay each person?
So I put the pay in there and I put other some of the benefits that were in there. Then just got all the way down to the end, tried to include some of the operating expenses as well, too, to try and figure out like with each individual clinician, what was their overall percentage for everything? It’s a little bit tricky to, I mean, there’s always like the projected and then what actually happens. So that’s been definitely a work in progress as we’ve gone through it, but at least gave us a pretty good heads up of approximately where we would be at, with a fully licensed full-time clinician versus a fully licensed part-time clinician versus, in our state they’re called limited licenses or pre-licensed therapists, bringing those on and including supervision and a bunch of other things so that we could make sure that overall we knew approximately based on stuff that we’d talked about in that consulting group.
Yes, totally just blank on the name, but just like general percentages and averages of where you wanted to be so that we could make sense of, is this going to be too much, is this going to be too little, where are we going to be at? Then also be able to compare there’s a lot of practices that pay as a 1099 in the area. So people are more used to just 70, 30 split or 65, 35, and they know exactly what that looks like. So then having to have conversations with them to compare, okay, yes, you get paid less as a W2 employee, but here’s all of the other things. Then when we get to the final number, you’re still in that 70, 30 range, 60, 40 range, wherever it’s at the numbers, right in front of me
[HEARD]
Tax season got you feeling anxious? You’re not alone. That’s why therapists turned to Heard. Built and designed specifically for clinicians in private practice, Heard offers affordable bookkeeping services, personalized financial reporting and tax assistance to ensure you’re making the most of your business and your time. Heard saves therapists an average of $5,397 on bookkeeping and taxes each year.
When you join Heard, you’ll work directly with financial specialists to track your income and expenses, file taxes online and grow your practice. You can say goodbye to guessing your tax deductions and stressing out over quarterly tax payments, focus on your clients while Heard takes care of the rest. Plans begin at $149 per month and can easily be tailored to fit your business’ financial needs. Sign up now at www.joinheard.com.
[ALISON PIDGEON]
Great.
[BREN]
So it was a lot of work —
[ALISON]
So that was helpful to have that model, that Whitney and I present in the group about how do you pay your clinicians, but also account for all your expenses as the employer giving all these benefits?
[BREN]
Very, very much so, because there’s so many like, oh yes, okay, well, how do you work in paperwork time and how do you add all the various benefits or whatever that you’re providing, payroll taxes, all that stuff, and then wanting to make sure at the end that it still makes sense.
[ALISON]
So after you went through that whole process, did you feel like you were still able to pay your staff pretty competitively when you added in all of the benefits you were giving them?
[BREN]
So they’re obviously on a low end compared to what they would see at a 1099 split, but what we’re able to provide with having furnished office space and virtual assistant and all the many things. Once you can add all of that up for somebody, then it became a more apples to apples comparison that they realized how much less they would have to do in W2 practice. They don’t have to do their own marketing, they don’t have to do all these other things. That was really appealing to a lot of folks. Other folks were like, no, I’m really looking to get that experience because I want to do my own private practice or whatever, but for a lot of it was really appealing.
[ALISON]
Yes, for sure. I wanted to go back to one other thing you had mentioned a few minutes ago, which was the 401k plan. What was that process like for you figuring out what to offer and who to go with to set that up and all of those things?
[BREN]
This is going to be like a Gusto ad for a good portion of this, but they have been really helpful in that process as well, too. So we ended up connecting, they outsource it through guideline, I think. So we looked at a couple of different options and again, that just broke down to be one of the easiest. We had a local agent that we were looking at as well too, and talking with her, but again, to have everything integrated all through your same payroll where you don’t have to, running payroll is enough of a behemoth of a job as it is to not then also have to like do a bunch of hand calculations and go into a couple of different websites and try to figure out all these different things. It’s just all integrated right there together.
So when we were looking at 401k, we decided regardless of what the clinician was going to do, we wanted to have a certain percentage where we were already going to be giving it to the therapist regardless of what they chose. So we do a 3% of whatever their payroll is, just automatically goes in there and then they can, it’s not a match. It’s just all set up there and then they can go in and add additional amount, but we don’t match beyond that. That’s one thing that we’ve thought about possibly doing. I’ve seen in other places where they’ll do like we contribute 5% and then we match you percent by percent up to 10% or something like that. So we’ve thought about a couple of different ways to expand that a little bit, but for at the moment, it’s 3% of whatever their wages are regardless of what they do.
[ALISON]
Oh, nice. I think that’s one thing that I found interesting when I started looking into that as well, is that there were a lot of options for how you could set it up. Like we do a half a percent match for every 1% up to 3% they put in. So if they put in the full 3%, we match one and a half percent. So I think that’s the thing that a lot of people don’t realize is that there are a lot of different ways of doing it and you could even put in no money and just offer the plan and let them put in their own money. So again, that’s another one of those before you assume it’s going to be too expensive, definitely look into it and see what all the options are.
[BREN]
Yes, and that’s a nice benefit that hasn’t, it’s not a huge driver. It’s just a little bit icing on the cake, I guess. But it’s one that for people who are mindful about retirement, mindful about what’s next. That was a big added benefit and it just felt more comprehensive than just adding just the health insurance, even though the three percent’s not big. It’s a long term play for or long term benefit, rather for people who are getting into it, but still just built up an overall compensation package that felt a little bit medium.
[ALISON]
I think that’s a really good point. It’s interesting because we didn’t add the 401k right off the bat. We waited a year just because we were switching up our contractors over to W2 employees and there was just a lot of moving parts and that was just one of the things I put off till the next year. That was actually one of the things when we surveyed the staff that they said they wanted, which I thought was interesting, because I was like you can just go
[BREN]
You don’t need a company for that
[ALISON]
Like retirement savings plan, you don’t need me to do it for you, but they felt like that was I guess, a value add for them.
[BREN]
Yes, I mean retirement, it’s complicated and there’s all sorts of like numbers and stuff like Roth versus traditional, there’s so much that’s there that when you have just a company plan that you can just automatically set up to just take money out of their paycheck every time and they don’t have to worry about it. I think that can be really appealing.
[ALISON]
Yes, for sure. It sounds like you offer quite a lot of benefits. Is there anything that we didn’t talk about yet or anything that you’re thinking about adding in the future?
[BREN]
I don’t know if it’s necessarily considered a benefit, but there’s a lot of places that don’t pay for paperwork and we do even W2 practices that will just like count it as a part of the clinical hour. So we have a separate paperwork rate that again, I think that we picked up from Group Practice Launch and then we pay a 20% of whatever their clinical hours. We just auto calculate 20% of that at a paperwork rate, which exceeds what it is that they’ll typically spend on any paperwork. So I consider that a benefit though. It’s probably not really, and since I’m paying them for work that they’re actually doing. We do PTO and holiday pay. If it’s a limited license or the pre-license staff, we also provide internal supervision for them toward their licensure. We do —
[ALISON]
Do you offer that like for free, like you don’t make them pay for it?
[BREN]
Don’t make them pay for it, no. So that’s a part of it. In fact, we even have one person, because of where she lived, she’s a telehealth clinician, so she gets external license or supervision that we still reimburse her for. So that was another thing of like trying to figure out all the different calculations if I’m paying, they’re also an hourly employee, so I have to pay them for their meeting time and I’m paying the supervisor to supervise them. So that was, it just works into the, had to work that into all the calculations. So for any of the limited license therapists they’re getting, they’re not only getting supervision for free, they’re also getting that hour paid for from an admin rate. It’s not a full clinical rate.
[ALISON]
That’s how we do it in my practice too. I think that’s a big added benefit for people.
[BREN]
Yes. I really, I think private practice can be really good for limited licenses to get some really good experience and I don’t know an entirely different feel and agency work and some of the difficulty that hat can sometimes be in causing some pretty high burnout rates. So to have a really robust compensation package to be able to offer limited license clinicians feels really good to.
[ALISON]
Yes, that’s great. So what’s been the effect that you’ve seen with offering all of these benefits? Do you feel like it sets you apart from the other practices in your area?
[BREN]
Yes, we haven’t had to worry too much about retention yet because again some clinicians are still onboarding. They haven’t, even the ones that we hired first haven’t been around a full year yet. But the resounding message that we got from people that we were interviewing was that we were definitely at or above what the expected benefits were for the local area, at least, which has been really good. We’ve brought on, I feel very, very fortunate with the people that we’ve brought on that have had lots of good experience and lots of specialties, so it’s really, I think, accelerated and enabled us to accelerate as rapidly as we have grown as quickly as we have to bring in really good people.
[ALISON]
You’ve gone really fast. I imagine you partly attribute that to, you’re like I’m tired.
[BREN]
It’s been a wild ride. I think we’ll have, I was just looking at it, I think we’ll be just shy of 700 appointments in the month of March, at least for what we have scheduled right now. When we first started this in July, it was just me and I had 100 appointments in a given month.
[ALISON]
Oh my gosh.
[BREN]
It’s been a wild ride with that. I would absolutely attribute what we’ve been able to do and who we’ve been able to hire because of the benefits that we’ve offered. I know every place is different. Again, we have a ton of therapists in this area. That’s also really enabled our growth. We’ve had a lot of, obviously a lot of need over the last couple of years in particular in a lot of like de-stigmatization it seems like or a lot of people who maybe wanted to get out for therapy for years, maybe finally were like, that’s it. I got the time now or it’s just too much. So there’s probably been a, I would imagine that there’s been a lot of factors that wrap into that level of growth, but I think our benefits have been a big part of that.
[ALISON]
That’s great. I know a lot of people who’ve said they’ve had a lot of trouble with hiring and even if they do run an ad, they don’t get that many applicants. So is that your experience as well or do you not have any trouble with hiring or getting enough applicants?
[BREN]
Yes, haven’t yet. When we first started to really advertise, I put a post on Indeed and boosted it and thinking like, okay, I’ll see how this goes for a couple of weeks. Had to turn it off after, I think it was about 48 hours because we had 30 applicants and I was like trying to just like sort through who was like, and it was a, there was a handful that were, on Indeed sometimes you’ll get somebody applying that doesn’t really feel like it makes a whole lot of sense, but there were about 22 really, really good candidates. Then had the chance to sort through and that’s been a big part of who’s currently working for us.
[ALISON]
That’s amazing. That’s been my experience as well. I know a lot of times when I hear people are struggling with hiring it’s because they are either offering contract positions or they’re offering W2 employment with no benefits. So if anybody is listening, who’s in that situation, I think Bren is a really good example of set it up correctly so that you can offer benefits and it’s going to be just a win-win all the way around. I’m assuming too, I know your practice is somewhat in the, in the new phase, but do you feel like having W2 employees has still allowed you to be profitable?
[BREN]
Absolutely. Yes, we’re still in that, I’ve been reading a lot of the Profit First book and using Green Oak Accounting. We just got started up with them and everything seems to be on par with other offices that were percentage-wise all seems to match up, which has been really exciting.
[ALISON]
That’s great.
[BREN]
That to have that ability to plan it all out ahead of time and get started with it, I don’t know, I’ve heard a lot of people saying like, well I just want to get started and then I’ll figure about adding insurance or PTO or holiday pay or some of these other things. I would encourage anyone thinking about that to just try to look and see if there’s a way that you can make it work, whether it’s stipend or some way to get insurance benefits or some of those. I think those are a huge influence on whether or not somebody can commit to stepping into your practice or not. There’s lots of options out there and at least in this area anyway, and that’s been huge for us.
[ALISON]
Agreed. Very nice. So Bren, if people want to check out your practice or get in touch with you, what’s the best way for them to do that?
[BREN]
So the website for our practice is unitycounselinggr.com (short for Grand Rapids) .com. Wanted something a little bit shorter, but that’s where we’re at. So unitycounselinggr.com and it’s got all of our, they can just contact right through the website. If it’s, to me specifically, then our office manager will get it right over to me. I’m happy to answer any questions and it’s certainly not an expert, but can at least, I’m happy to share what we do and how we did it and be happy to talk through that.
[ALISON]
Excellent. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today and I’m really excited to hear about how your practice has grown and, yes, thank you so much.
Once again, I wanted to say thank you so much to Heard for being our sponsor for this podcast episode. They have affordable bookkeeping services. If you’re interested, you can go to www.joinheard.com.
Thanks so much for listening to the podcast today. I hope that was helpful. If you are interested in hanging out with other group practice owners who are looking at making their practices better, maybe you’re thinking about adding benefits, definitely check out Group Practice Boss. That is our membership community for folks who have an established group practice. Whitney Owens, and I run it. Every month we have a different theme and we answer all your questions about running an established group practice. If you are interested in joining, you can go to practiceofthepractice.com/grouppracticeboss to get on our email list.
Have a great day. I’ll talk to you all next time.
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This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. This is given with the understanding that neither the host, Practice of the Practice or the guests are providing legal, mental health or other professional information. If you need a professional, you should find one.