When you own or are part of a therapy private practice, you quickly realize that therapy is seasonal. There are high periods, like the beginning of the year when people are fulfilling New Year’s resolutions. And, there are low periods, which include the winter holidays and August, the latter of which is often known as the “summer slump” or “summer lull.”
My Denver Therapy is one of the top therapy private practices in Colorado. Even as a private-pay-only practice, we typically receive around 50 organic new client inquiries every week throughout the year. In about 4 years, we grew from a single-therapist practice to a team of over 15 therapists with full caseloads of the types of clients they specialize in. We typically fill a new therapist’s caseload in one or two months, and they earn well over $100,000 per year.
If you’re thinking about starting a private practice, here’s how we prepare for and even manage to continue growing during the summer months.
Why is there a summer slump for therapists?
In August, families are often getting their last vacations in before school starts or just enjoying the last days of summer. Kids and teens are often traveling, going to camps, or spending time with friends before the structure of the school year. Summer is often when adults take trips or visit friends too.
Add all that up and more, and you’ve got the therapist summer slump, where new clients are few and far between, and you start to wonder if they’ll ever come back. They’ll come back, but planning ahead can help you minimize the slump and bounce back faster once fall rolls around.
Start planning early
At My Denver Therapy, we start planning for the summer slump in the spring, usually as early as March. For us, that’s go-time. Instead of waiting for the summer slump to arrive, we actively get to work creating new content for our website that will start to pay off from organic search engines well before August. This means new pages, updates to existing ones, blog posts, and more. We make it one of our busiest times to make a quieter time busier.
From March to June, we spend at least 10 hours every week analyzing website analytics, creating content, exploring partnerships, and looking for new opportunities. We also ask our therapists about any new trainings they’ve done or if there is a particular type of client they’d like to see more of. While we often go after niche search terms that seem like low-hanging fruit, we also take this time to recognize the trainings and expertise of our team of therapists by creating new pages that highlight the type of therapy they can provide.
Instead of waiting for the lull to force us to do work, which many therapy websites recommend, we get ahead of the lull so that we can fill our therapists’ caseloads before we feel the summer slump. By focusing on diversifying the pages that customers will use to discover us early, we can be well-positioned to have a surge of clients before the summer. This way, a slower trickle of clients is actually ideal because most of our therapists’ caseloads are full or nearly full by the summer.
Be smart about hiring and expansion
In general, we don’t hire new therapists in August. We know that our new client requests drop during the month, and we want to make sure that each of our newly hired therapists has a running start with a healthy flow of clients. It can be really discouraging to join a therapy practice, only to feel like they don’t have enough clients for you. We’ve never had that happen, but it’s only because we plan ahead.
For us, the most significant time that could be felt is during the summer slump. Because we know this, we don’t bring on anyone new during the month, and that helps us with retention because our therapists quickly become successful and have full caseloads in a reasonable amount of time, usually within one or two months.
Similarly, August has also not been the time to expand into a larger office for us. We have three offices with multiple therapists throughout the Denver area for our Denver therapists, Greenwood Village therapists, and Douglas County therapists. We’ve expanded our offices and team without ever taking on debt, and timing is a big reason for this.
With most commercial leases, if you’re in growth mode, you’re likely considering a space that’s larger than what you need right now. As a result, you know that you’ll need to hire more therapists to fill the space and make the move to a bigger office worth it. While hiring has its own challenges and timelines, it’s even more important to have clients for those newly hired therapists so that they can start meeting with clients and driving much-needed revenue for your business.
You can even grow during the summer slump
When you plan ahead and invest the hours into growing your business well before the summer slump happens, you may find that you’re still able to grow during the summer, or at least minimize the effects of the most challenging time of the year for your business.
Because many therapy practices accept that August is a tough month for therapists, they often also take time off and just accept that it’s the slow season. By not doing that, we’re able to grow our presence online, attract more of the smaller pool of clients seeking therapy, and continue to not only operate, but grow during the summer months.
