My Denver Therapy has become one of the largest therapy private practices in Colorado, with about 15 therapists seeing roughly 300 clients per week across three offices, but it didn’t start that way.
Our therapy practice started with one therapist (Courtneyrose Chung) working in a shared office suite just 3 years ago, where all of her clients came from word-of-mouth referrals from her time working simultaneously at 3 private practices in the Denver area.
Today, our practice receives about 50 new client inquiries every week for in-person therapy, couples counseling, Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, and more. We’ve never taken on debt or outside funding and have been profitable since Day 1 as a private pay practice that doesn’t accept insurance or Medicaid.
Over the past 3 years, especially during COVID, we’ve constantly adapted to and expanded how clients find out about us. Here are some of the ways that have worked for us:
Word-of-mouth is powerful
Before COVID, nearly all of our clients came from word-of-mouth referrals from a single therapist. These types of referrals are especially valuable because they’re much more likely to convert because the referral usually comes from a trusted person who has already let them know your rates, location, and schedule.
Word-of-mouth referrals are still relevant in today’s digital age, and it’s one of the many reasons why it’s important to focus on quality and a commitment to your clients. Unless we’re asleep, we answer new client inquiries within about 2 hours, every single day, even on holidays, and we let our therapists know in real-time when a new client inquiry is coming their way.
Local resources and directories in your community
If you or your therapists help a particular population, like LGBTQ+ or new parents looking for therapy, look for organizations in your area that have resource directories for those communities, whether they’re online or on paper.
Our therapists are passionate about helping different populations of people. Even if it’s a smaller niche, you can become a powerful resource for organizations that want to help the same people you or your therapists want to help.
Get yourself out there, in-person and online
Whether it’s speaking at a local community organization event or writing a guest blog post about therapy, look for ways that you can get your name or your practice’s name out there, particularly in contexts where you can show your expertise and passion for what you do.
Our therapists have spoken at conferences, had presences at graduate school job fairs, and written blog posts for websites focused on relationships and mental health. While some of these things might not have a direct effect on getting you clients immediately, the effects can be subtle and pay off over time whenever the topic of therapy comes up for people who have come across your name.
Make your website your second job
If you haven’t invested time and resources into your website, it’s never a bad time to start. We dedicate at least 30 minutes every day to working on our website, whether it’s fixing typos, writing blog posts like this, making updates to our therapists’ bios after they’ve completed a training, doing research, and creating new pages. We do it all ourselves.
Most of the time, those 30 minutes are found late at night or spread out in short spurts in between seeing clients, but it’s that important for us to continue to grow our presence online so that we’re easy for people to find.
Even though we’re therapists, we spend countless hours teaching ourselves about SEO, learning about how artificial intelligence will affect how people find a therapists, and experimenting with website templates. Every minute we spend on our website is time well spent.
Become active in groups that are “therapy adjacent”
As you’re trying to build awareness for yourself or a therapy practice, consider going to where people are already getting help in other ways. For example, we have two therapists on our team who also work at and volunteer for eating disorder clinics—they see all of our eating disorder clients.
Not only does it build their skills as therapists, but it gives them another place for more people to learn what great therapists they are, and those organizations will often refer clients directly to them.
Also, if you’re already licensed, offering supervision for LPCCs and MFTCs can be a great way to earn some income while you’re building up a caseload of clients.
Don’t run away from sliding scale
As a practice, we see about 50 sliding scale therapy clients every week. That means that we’re seeing 50 clients every week at below-market rates because we want to make therapy more accessible for more people in Denver. It’s also roughly how we started to grow, using what some people call the “Kia model.”
We started as a low-cost therapy option for people, but as we had more clients and full caseloads, we were able to bring up our rates to match our local market in Denver.
We see so many brand new therapists fresh out of graduate school with no additional training or experience who charge more than our therapists with over 10 years of experience and multiple trainings and true specialties. In our opinion, that’s not a recipe for success because it makes getting started incredibly difficult and usually discouraging.
Be willing to help clients other therapists won’t
As a practice, we grew because we see and take trainings to serve clients with issues that many other therapists turn away, such as complex trauma, borderline personality disorder, treatment-resistant depression, and more. If you’re a new therapist who wants to specialize in low-level anxiety and mild amounts of stress, you’re trying to “specialize” in what almost every other therapist can do.
When we hire new therapists for our team, we look for people who expand upon the collective trainings and specialties that we already have so that we can continue to grow and help even more people. It helps us naturally expand our website and develop relationships that ultimately help more clients find us.
Running a successful private practice is more than a full-time job
While these are just some of the strategies that have worked for us, in the end, My Denver Therapy has grown the way that it has because we invest immense amounts of time into our team of therapists and clients.
When we’re not seeing clients, we’re building relationships, working on the website, looking at office spaces, building financial models, answering phone calls, or replying to emails. Building a successful therapy private practice isn’t easy, but helping our clients is the most rewarding work we’ll ever do.
