Upgrade Your Intake Process • A Training With Uriah Guilford, LMFT

Transcript is generated by computers – sorry for any confusing words it misunderstood. 

Greg Goodman
00:01 – 00:39
Hello, greetings therapists, mental health professionals. I am here today with Uriah Guilford, who is the, as he says, head nerd and founder of Productive Therapist. And what Productive Therapist does, if you don’t know about them, is it solves a very important problem that I encounter with therapists and mental health professionals that I work with in a marketing capacity all the time. And that is what happens when you get a lead, right? You go through all this effort, all this rigmarole to get somebody to reach out, whether it’s Google ads or psych today, or any of the myriad other marketing methods that we can use.

Greg Goodman
00:40 – 01:14
Somebody reaches out and then maybe they fall through the cracks or you, can’t get it you know go back and forth and you can’t find a time for them to book a consult that 15-minute consult to find out if you’re a fit and you know there’s so many different ways that people get lost in between reaching out and first paying appointment. And what Productive Therapist does is it helps you to improve that intake process, whether it’s improving your own intake process or training a coordinator if you’re a group practice, or maybe you’re just a solo practitioner who has a intake coordinator.

Greg Goodman
01:15 – 01:55
And what I also love is that you offer virtual intake coordinators for people to take this responsibility off their plate. So with all that said, I’m really excited. You’re going to share with us some of your best practices, some tips and tricks. I really want this video, this recording to be value-packed. And for you, thank you for watching, for joining us to learn something. But before we dive into teacher mode, I’d like to just I’d like to hear your story because I know your story from our chat the other week, but I’d love for you to sort of share a little bit of your journey from group practice owner to business owner or productive therapist and you know, yeah, I’ll

Uriah Guilford
01:55 – 02:24
take it away. Absolutely. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for the introduction. You, you, uh, encapsulated what we do very, very well. I appreciate that. Yeah. So for anybody who doesn’t know me, which is probably a lot of folks, my name is Uriah Guilford, and I am a licensed marriage and family therapist up here in Northern California. So I’m like in the wine country area of Northern California. It’s honestly a very nice place to be. And I’ve been a therapist for over 20 years, even though I look extremely young, I know, but I’ve been doing this a long time.

Uriah Guilford
02:24 – 03:04
And I started a private practice, a solo practice in 2008. And then about seven years later, I was so busy. working with teenagers and their families as a male therapist in this area. I just I was always so full. And as you can imagine, Greg, doing all the things right from day one, designing my own websites, my own business cards, doing all my marketing and networking and social media, seeing the clients, being the intake coordinator, of course, all of the things, wearing all the hats like we all do. And in 2015, I decided that I needed some help working with these families and kind of addressing the need and meeting the need in my community.

Uriah Guilford
03:04 – 03:43
And so I started a group practice, which was not my intention at all. That was never my goal, but it’s the way things kind of panned out. And I’m really glad it did. For the last 10 years, I’ve had a group practice focused on helping teens and young adults. And once I started hiring clinicians and ramping up our marketing, you know, turning on Google AdWords and doing more SEO and all the things, we started getting a lot more calls and inquiries. And I was seeing 20 to 25 clients a week and trying to return new inquiries, phone calls, emails, all those things in between sessions, nights and weekends, well, not so much weekends.

Uriah Guilford
03:44 – 04:16
And it just became a lot. And So the truth is that I accidentally started Productive Therapist to solve my own need, which is the best way to start a business. Actually, it’s a great way to start a business, scratch your own itch, so to speak. Right. And so basically what happened the long and short of it is I hired a friend to take over the intake coordinator position. Backstory, I actually worked with a virtual assistant for five years and kind of trained her to be an intake coordinator. But then something happened. She was no longer available.

Uriah Guilford
04:16 – 04:57
So I hired a friend and then he wanted to work full time. And I was like, how can I solve this problem? And so I started to realize that my friends and colleagues had the same need, which was basically part-time administrative support, specifically intake coordinator help. And I thought, you know what, I wonder if, I wonder if my assistant could also work with a few other practices. And that’s kind of how it started. And then that was about seven years ago, and it exploded and has expanded quite a bit during that time. So a lot of my stories of success are sort of, I don’t want to say they’re like by accident, but they’re a surprise, a good surprise.

Uriah Guilford
04:59 – 04:59
Yeah.

Greg Goodman
05:00 – 05:12
Awesome. And so now it’s just, you know, I think you’re not actively practicing anymore, right? Like this, this has now become, you’ve shifted the balance. Is that correct?

Uriah Guilford
05:13 – 05:43
I have. Yes. I stopped seeing clients about three and a half years ago. And during this, as this process unfolded, I just discovered that I love business. I love marketing and I love building teams and solving problems, um, in a different way than being in a therapy session. So I did, I retired, and now I’m focusing mostly on productive therapists. It’s just a lot of fun for me, honestly. And solving the problems that therapists experience, especially with converting calls to clients, is just endlessly interesting to me.

Greg Goodman
05:44 – 05:51
I believe so. I’m curious, how does your therapist, your therapist background, help you in managing your team?

Uriah Guilford
05:52 – 06:23
Good question. Yes, I think it’s a, it’s a pro and a con to be honest with you. I think the, the benefit, the benefits are, um, I’ve developed a lot of emotional intelligence from being a therapist for so many years. So that makes me, I mean, I, I do hear from my people that, that they appreciate the way that I lead and the empathy that I bring and the understanding, the listening and problem solving kind of approach. Um, so I think that has helped me tremendously in, in both parenting and running a team. Definitely.

Greg Goodman
06:24 – 07:18
Sure, yeah, and an emotionally intelligent leader is such a valuable asset to the employees to foster that. It’s so important to foster the environment where your voice, your opinions matter, where it’s a safe space to say to the boss, like, hey, that didn’t feel good, which is, of course, scary for an employee to do. Definitely. very, and as a parent, of course, the emotional intelligence needed on a daily basis as a parent. Yeah. So, okay. So with all that said, you know, what is the, I’m curious, what are you, what have you found is the biggest challenge that let’s, let’s, you know, a lot of the therapists that I work with are solo practitioners or very early, you know, two to five, clinician teams, often associates.

Greg Goodman
07:18 – 07:27
So within that bracket or anything else you’d like to share too, like what are some of the biggest challenges that you see that the therapists are encountering at this stage of their intake evolution?

Uriah Guilford
07:28 – 08:15
Definitely. I mean, there are so many challenges for modern therapists, but I think a lot of us unintentionally are flirting with burnout because we’re at the heart of it. We are caregivers. We love working for our clients and helping them. But as we become solopreneurs, like I said before, we quickly take on all the responsibilities. And you don’t realize until you get into it how many things there are to do to to provide therapy and to run a business, to start and grow a private practice. And most of us, this has been said many, many times, but most of us in grad school, actually like 99.9% of us did not get any guidance or training on how to start a business or do marketing or speak to your ideal client, all the things, right?

Uriah Guilford
08:15 – 08:41
We just, we don’t have those skillsets. So we get to the point where we’re very overwhelmed, like kind of struggling to catch a breath. And especially I’ve noticed that that happens, especially when therapists get to be successful or they reach their goals, whatever that is, 20 clients a week, or whatever the number is, new challenges arise. And it really is exhaustion, burnout, and struggling to take care of yourself while doing all of those things.

Greg Goodman
08:43 – 09:18
Yeah, absolutely. And just talking about that, when you hit that desired caseload, 15, 20, 25, but I was speaking to a woman the other day, her desired caseload is 30 a week. That’s an emotional investment and a half right there. But what’s one of the first thing that goes, and I see it all the time with my own clients, with the therapists that I work with, is I just don’t have time to call people back. So I create automations, and I create systems, you know, pre-recorded voicemails and things. But at the end of the day, there’s no substitute for actually having a human being, being the one doing those.

Greg Goodman
09:18 – 09:21
And like, I love automations and I love anything that can save time

Uriah Guilford
09:21 – 09:21
for

Greg Goodman
09:21 – 10:12
people who don’t have the time to do it. But the virtual intake coordinators or having your own intake coordinator is just such a different level of service to have that human touch that not only to know that your leads are going to be followed up with, but that they’re going to be followed up with in a timely manner, not like in the, maybe in the 12 minute crack that I gifted myself from three 48 to four o’clock before my next client shows up. Right. Like, so yeah, I just, I hear it all the time. It’s so much easier to call people back when you’re not full, but then how do you continue that level of intake or, onboarding or whatever term anyone watching this might use when you’re full or close to full and then to avoid the dip that comes with it.

Uriah Guilford
10:13 – 10:42
And what ends up happening too is that we start to feel guilty because we’re not getting back to people quickly enough. I’ve talked to many therapists who feel very bad about waiting three days, four days or even a week to call people back because we want to help. We would like to help everybody if we could. But the busier you get, the less capacity you have to provide that customer service to new potential clients. It makes sense to build in as many automations as you can without losing touch of that human component that you talked about.

Uriah Guilford
10:42 – 10:48
I think it’s still important and I certainly hope it remains important well into the AI revolution.

Greg Goodman
10:50 – 11:13
Oh yeah, it’s only a matter of time before Hal is the one making those phone calls. And it’s wild, too. I was on Psychology Today the other day, setting up and running some tests for a therapist. And I filled out the email, you know, email request to this therapist. And it’s like, great, thank you. Now we strongly suggest reaching out to two to three more therapists. Like Psychology Today, we found your perfect therapist.

Uriah Guilford
11:13 – 11:13
And

Greg Goodman
11:13 – 11:44
Psychology Today, now go contact more people. just in case there’s any doubt of how competition has increased and the importance of the service you offer, or just in general of that timely reply. Because if you’re taking three to four days and Joe, Jane, therapist down the block replied in two hours, well, who am I going to go with? I’m going to go with, even if you are more of a fit, I might be your most dream client on planet earth, but hey, they got back to me faster. So I need therapy now and it’s too late.

Uriah Guilford
11:46 – 12:25
That’s 100% accurate. The first to respond gets the client in most cases. Yeah, for sure. So I think the solutions that we’ve created with productive therapists really are targeted at helping those therapists to avoid burnout. And I think it’s really important for therapists to thrive, truly, to be happy and healthy and not sacrifice themselves for their clients. Part of the answer to that, it’s not the only answer, but part of the answer is intentionally designing an intake process that makes it easy for you and easy for your potential clients. And it really is possible. And you, we could talk about this for probably hours.

Uriah Guilford
12:26 – 12:46
from the website to the CRM to the scheduling platforms and those kinds of things. And we’ll get into, I’ll give you a rundown of the things that I recommend. But once you have that intake process thoughtfully, intentionally designed and running smoothly, it really is a thing of beauty. So you can focus on the things that matter to you and know that people are getting good care and customer service.

Greg Goodman
12:47 – 13:21
Yeah, I love those two of my favorite words, right? Thoughtfully and intentionally. Because there’s just something, there’s just a whole other energy about it when it’s, you know, consciously created, planned out, with yes, marketing in the background, but just also like, how can everything that you do, be a reflection of that same level of service that you’re going to because everything is a reflection from from website to marketing to intake experience. It’s all a reflection of what that client is going to expect and how you’re going to interact. So it should all be one seamless, you

Uriah Guilford
13:21 – 13:21
know,

Greg Goodman
13:21 – 13:22
one seamless process.

Uriah Guilford
13:22 – 13:22
Sorry,

Greg Goodman
13:22 – 13:22
please.

Uriah Guilford
13:24 – 13:56
Yeah, I was just gonna say, you’ve had these experiences, we’ve all had these experiences, like high level, amazing customer service, whether it’s the simplest thing that somebody does at a restaurant, to a hotel experience, or whatever it is, things that just make you say, wow, that was, that was fantastic. I love that. I remember back in the early days of when EHRs were like, kind of new. And I would onboard a new client into my practice, and they would be able to sign forms digitally, and get appointment reminders, they would always say like, wow, Your practice is really like tech savvy.

Uriah Guilford
13:56 – 14:02
This is so easy. I was just always so happy because I was making it a good experience for them. Right. Yeah,

Greg Goodman
14:02 – 14:16
it is. It is every step of it. I’d love. I’d love to. I know you had some mentioned some of your framework. I’d love to switch over and have you just drop some knowledge on everybody watching this.

Uriah Guilford
14:17 – 14:53
Great. Let’s get into it. So feel free to agree or disagree with me on this one, Greg, but I think if a therapist doesn’t have enough calls or inquiries, they have a marketing problem. Hold on one second. I agree. If they don’t have enough calls or inquiries, they have a marketing problem. And then if they have enough calls, but not enough clients, they have a sales problem or a conversion problem. And that’s what we’re talking about today. And then on the back end of that, if they have enough calls and they have enough clients, but they don’t have enough profit, I think they have a retention problem.

Uriah Guilford
14:53 – 15:04
So if you get enough inquiries and you sign up enough clients, but they’re not staying long enough for you to be able to grow your practice, then that might be a retention problem. What do you think about that?

Greg Goodman
15:05 – 15:44
I agree on every single step of that. The one other thing I would interject in there is that sometimes, and this is the one part that’s so often out of the control, especially with private pay practices, is the calls. and the intake, there was this barrier of you take my insurance, right? And that’s always, even if we make it crystal clear on the website, you know, private, private pay client or private pay practice, I take zero insurance. Here are my rates. You’re still getting those, those inevitable, like, you know, 50% of the goals are like, hey, I know, do you take Medicaid though?

Greg Goodman
15:44 – 15:54
Do you take Aetna? Do you take this? It’s like, no. So that’s another thing that I love about not having the therapist have to do all of those things too, is a lead is not really a lead if it’s not a qualified lead. 100%

Uriah Guilford
15:55 – 16:03
Yeah, if somebody calls and they could never become a client of yours, that person, that doesn’t, that doesn’t count. Right? That’s

Greg Goodman
16:03 – 16:06
like the one little little thing that I would add to that. But yeah, I

Uriah Guilford
16:06 – 16:07
agree with

Greg Goodman
16:07 – 16:42
with all of that. And I’m curious to you know, the retention thing, I think part of the retention comes down to the market as well. And it’s right. It’s it’s that dream client. It is not just having a general website, but having that it’s more challenging for group practice. We have, you know, 30, 40, however many clinicians. And I worked for a group practice in San Francisco for six plus years, and we had 43 clinicians. So it was very much like, how do we have this dream client, this niche, when we have 43 different clinicians, each of which with their own specialization and really our niche is everything.

Greg Goodman
16:42 – 17:07
But it still comes down to that messaging of like, who is that core person you’re trying to bring in that actually you can serve for the retention. So to me, it’s, you know, the retention issue starts as early as the Google ad or the psych today profile or the Google business profile or whatever it is. But I’m fascinated, you know, how to learn more about how the retention plays into the intake process.

Uriah Guilford
17:08 – 17:50
Yeah, that’s not what we’re going to talk about today necessarily. But you make a really good point that if your marketing is specific to the kind of person that you want to work with, then they’re going to be the ones that are calling and emailing. And if they become clients and they get matched with the best therapist, who’s a proper good clinical match, then they’re going to have the best chance of having a successful therapeutic relationship, thus staying long enough to benefit the business and the client as well. So yeah, and I think one of the things that I’m really proud of Productive Therapists for doing is providing these virtual intake coordinators that make that human focused clinical match, knowing the therapist, knowing their specialties, getting to know the client, and then connecting them together.

Uriah Guilford
17:50 – 17:57
It really is sort of a magical thing. So let me share. I

Greg Goodman
17:57 – 18:37
love, as you’re pulling it up, I love the whole idea, and this is what we did at Well Clinic in San Francisco, of like the therapist matchmaker service, right? You don’t have to send those, oh, you found one person, send three more emails on psychology today. That’s like the nice thing about especially larger group clinics is call one person and assuming you’re intake coordinator is a empathetic person who understands all of the different specializations of the different clinicians and all of that. It’s like, well, let me match you. Let’s talk you and me, human to human, and I’m going to get you the best possible person from our variety, our team, our holistic, integrative mix of people here who

Uriah Guilford
18:38 – 18:38
can

Greg Goodman
18:38 – 18:44
help you. And this, Uriah, is the absolute best person for your family in Sonoma County.

Uriah Guilford
18:45 – 19:06
It’s a good feeling for the intake coordinator and it’s a good feeling for the client. Like there’s a relief for the client. And then the intake coordinator feels like they’re making a difference. That’s our team loves working a productive therapist because they feel like they’re actually connecting people with real problems to real solutions and giving them a good chance to be successful. It is good. It’s good work. Okay. Can you see this screen?

Greg Goodman
19:07 – 19:08
Add that to us.

Uriah Guilford
19:08 – 19:36
Perfect. All right. Thank you. Thank you. OK, so this is the framework that I created, and this is part of a program that’s a very low cost course called Intake Accelerator. So these are the seven ingredients of a high converting intake process. And there’s seven things here, but none of these are terribly complex. And I’ll kind of highlight and hit on each one. And then, Greg, if you have any interest in diving into any of these in more detail, we can. We could certainly go on number two for quite some time, I’m sure.

Greg Goodman
19:37 – 19:42
I’ll avoid geeking out on one and two because I’ve earned you to be the teacher

Uriah Guilford
19:42 – 20:25
here. Perfection. The first thing here is the ideal tech stack. Tech stack is just a fancy term for the collection of technology tools that you use to run your practice. It’s amazing how many tech tools we use nowadays to run a modern practice. probably somewhere between five to seven different things that you’re using. But when you choose the right tools, the best tools for you and your practice, and you use them effectively, it causes the intake process to be easier for you and easier for the client. So the goal here really with all these things is to streamline sort of the path from first contact to first session.

Uriah Guilford
20:26 – 20:52
And whether that’s a phone call or a text message or a web form fill out or a phone call, we found that a lot of people still like to pick up the phone and leave a voicemail or try to get somebody live on the phone, which forever and ever and ever has always been the most difficult thing. If you’re a client looking for a therapist, you know, you call 10, 15 therapists and you’re lucky if one or two of those call you back. Obviously, that’s part of the thing that we’re solving with productive therapists as well.

Greg Goodman
20:52 – 20:58
But then they call you back and you don’t recognize the phone number so you don’t pick it up and then they leave a voicemail and before you

Uriah Guilford
20:58 – 20:58
know it,

Greg Goodman
20:58 – 21:00
you’re back and forth again.

Uriah Guilford
21:00 – 21:35
It’s true. It’s true. So, um, the, the tech stack usually involves whatever technology you use for your website. I’ll just, I’ll just give you a rundown of the different things real quick. So your website, your phone system, your email system, your CRM or client relationship manager. If you use one of those that can also a stand in for that is a really good Google sheet. That’s kind of like your referral log. And then also your EHR, of course, is a big component of this. And then I like to add in somewhere to store your SOPs or your standard operating procedures.

Uriah Guilford
21:35 – 22:07
And this is maybe a little bit less important for solo practices because you probably have most of it in your head and you’re not likely going to delegate all of those things. But I will tell you, if you ever think about hiring an intake coordinator, You want to have your process written down. Everything from sort of your call script that’s in your head, the things that you say to clients regularly over and over again that help you attract the ideal ones and sign them up, to the steps to add someone to your EHR, all the things that need to get done.

Uriah Guilford
22:08 – 22:25
you probably don’t realize how many things you’re doing. But if you were to go and try to train someone else to do all those things, you would probably quickly be stuck and stumped because you haven’t written it down. So those I think are the most important parts of the tech stack.

Greg Goodman
22:26 – 22:51
What’s interesting too is how many different ways there are to do the same thing, right? I read an email recently, it was an analogy that stuck with me. It said, Because I spent a lot of my time training my employees and my staff on how to do things, because I wanted to be done the Greg way. Because this is the way that I perfected over my years and years of doing things. And the analogy was, if I told you, Uriah, can you make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? You could make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Greg Goodman
22:51 – 23:22
But how would you make it? Would you cut the corners off, the crust off? Would you have more jelly, more peanut butter? What’s the ratio? Would you toast it? Would you lightly? There’s so many different ways to make it. So you might give me that PB&J and be like, what is this? This is not what I want. Dude, you said PB&J. Here’s your PB&J. And that’s what it’s like when you start to scale without having those SOPs written down. Because you’ll tell someone, hey, go do an intake call, and then it won’t work. And they’re like, well, why not?

Greg Goodman
23:22 – 23:55
Well, because you haven’t been working with my dream client for 10, 15 years and know, like, if they say this, you should say this. If they say this, you say this. And that’s why it’s so critical to put it down. And the last thing I’ll say in this interjection is that what I found too is writing it down often helps me, and I’m sure it helps you and your team, to improve on the process. Because then writing it down, it’s like, oh, well, what if I then did this instead? Because all of a sudden, you’re thinking about it with a different portion of the brain as the autopilot brain that just does things instinctually.

Greg Goodman
23:55 – 23:59
It’s actually about planning the different stuff, which probably leads to number four for you.

Uriah Guilford
24:00 – 24:34
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, well said. So I’ll give you one tip and I’ll give the listeners one tip on the ideal tech stack that I think is a game changer. And it’s definitely not a new thing. It was when I started using it. But the the ability for potential clients to self schedule for a consultation call if you offer those. Because I think, you know, like to your point when people call leave a voicemail and then just the back and forth phone tag. I’ve always found that giving folks the ability to schedule that call right from the website, which is so easy to do these days with things like schedule once and acuity.

Uriah Guilford
24:34 – 25:11
and those types of tools. And I think psychologically, it’s really helpful because it gives the potential client the ability to finish an action, right? So if you’re looking for a therapist, you call 10 people, and then it’s just like free floating anxiety about what’s going to happen. But if you find a therapist that looks fantastic, and you’re able to go on their website, book a call for Tuesday at 10am, at least you know, okay, hopefully, I’m going to connect with the person that’s going to help me. So I highly recommend those. And if you’re a solo practice, you, in most cases, you can definitely use, well, I should say simple practice has that feature built in where you can put that widget on your website and you don’t have to use another tool.

Uriah Guilford
25:11 – 25:17
I don’t think all EHRs have that, but that’s something that I would do if I was starting over from ground zero today.

Greg Goodman
25:18 – 25:19
Yep. Agree.

Uriah Guilford
25:19 – 25:19
A

Greg Goodman
25:19 – 25:36
hundred percent, the conversions go up exponentially. At Well Clinic, when we implemented that, probably around 2018 or so, the self-schedule, and we saw just our conversions just went, yeah, I don’t remember the numbers, but a lot.

Uriah Guilford
25:36 – 26:11
Yeah, that’s great. So the ideal tech stack is number one and you can, here’s the thing, you can always use the tools you have a little bit better because all the tools that we use have features that we don’t even know about and that we’re not using. So I would encourage you to dig into that a little bit further. Number two is a conversion optimized website. And this is obviously another huge training that Greg can help you with. And that we could certainly geek out about the things that I focus on with the website is, well, number one, the contact page, I think is super important.

Uriah Guilford
26:12 – 26:47
And one common mistake that folks make is they put too many options on the contact page. And you got to think, you got to put yourself in the mind of your potential client. They’re in some sort of crisis, right, whether it’s mild, moderate or severe crisis. And then it might even be 2 a.m. in the morning and they’re searching for a therapist. So you want to simplify, simplify, simplify and tell them exactly what you want them to do, which does definitely start with like your homepage and speaking clearly to your ideal clients. And the thing that I love to do, Greg, is I love to review and rewrite homepage headlines.

Uriah Guilford
26:49 – 27:17
My wife was laughing at me the other day because we were taking a walk and I took a picture of a flyer that someone had taped to a pole. And I was like, I could rewrite this and make it better. But it’s really like it’s, you know, what people used to do back in the day is they would build a website for their therapy practice and they would write, welcome to my website. You remember that? It’s like that is not helping anybody. So you you want to speak clearly to the person that you most want to work with.

Uriah Guilford
27:18 – 27:49
So that’s that’s number one. And then number two is clear calls to action. So the buttons or the places on your website where you tell people what you want them to do next. And honestly, for most of us, we want them to get in touch with us, whether that’s book an appointment, schedule a console call, those kinds of action oriented calls to action, which in my mind, I like to send them from any page on the site directly to the contact page so they can start that process of becoming a client. Those are three things.

Uriah Guilford
27:50 – 27:55
There’s many other things that we could talk about with conversion optimization. It’s fun, isn’t it? I enjoy

Greg Goodman
27:55 – 27:56
it. It’s what I spend my days

Uriah Guilford
27:56 – 27:57
doing,

Greg Goodman
27:57 – 27:57
is

Uriah Guilford
27:57 – 27:58
how do we

Greg Goodman
27:58 – 28:31
get people to reach out from a website? What I like to have is to even circumvent the contact page. If somebody’s clicking one of my buttons, it just has a pop-up. and not a pop-up, but a good block, and it’s just a contact form. You can ask me anything and schedule your free consult right here before we let them get to the calendar, in case they get to that calendar and they don’t find a time that matches. get that name, email, phone, and message. Hopefully, they go ahead and reach out and schedule a consult. And if they don’t, then you at least can follow up with them themselves.

Greg Goodman
28:31 – 28:43
And I don’t even take them to the, of course, there’s plenty of links to a contact page, but that’s my little power tip. Avoid the contact pages. If they’re there and they’re ready, don’t even load another page. Here’s what you want right here.

Uriah Guilford
28:43 – 29:19
That’s a very good tip. I love that. Yeah. I, again, just make it as easy as possible for that person to find the solution and get the services. And I’ll give a quick tip here too, that fits in anywhere in these seven steps. But, um, if you haven’t done this in a while, go secret shop your own intake process. So go to your website and pretend like you are a client reaching out for services or ask one of your good friends or family members to do this secret shopping. All the way to setting yourself up as a new client in your EHR and then review the emails that you get and review the process.

Uriah Guilford
29:19 – 29:31
Look at what the forms look like from the client side. I think if you do that, if the only thing you take away from this presentation today is go secret shop your own intake process, that would help you for sure.

Greg Goodman
29:32 – 29:34
Great advice. I’m

Uriah Guilford
29:34 – 30:19
going to go do that now. Yeah. Moving on to number three, quick response strategy. And we kind of touched on this before. That gap between first contact and first session often is too long and too frustrating, right? So we want to get back to people as quickly as possible. And what we were talking about a minute ago was that scheduling that console call. I think that’s a great step. The highest level of customer service to some degree is you call the business, they pick up the phone, and they solve your problem right then, right? For most solo practices, and even small to medium sized group practices, it’s not really economically feasible to hire someone to sit in the office to do that, or in other ways to solve that to provide live answer.

Uriah Guilford
30:20 – 30:52
So we got to try to figure out some ways to provide quick response. scheduling the console call, hiring an intake coordinator. Obviously that’s one solution to this. Um, and then another solution, this is just a small piece and this is something that we’ve integrated into our, with our phone system. If someone calls my practice and they don’t leave a message, my phone system automatically texts them and says, sorry, we missed you. Is there, how can we help? Something like that. And then that person can text us back and my intake coordinator can kind of start the process.

Uriah Guilford
30:53 – 31:34
Whatever you can do, to get back to people as fast as possible is going to help you bring in more clients. Because the first person to respond, the first practice to respond, is likely going to get that client. And I actually think I’m a big believer that there’s like, there’s plenty of clients for every therapist. Right. And that is true. But at the same time, there’s kind of never been more competition than there is now with the various different big box therapy companies. I won’t name any names, but you know who they are. Um, so for, for the solo practice, trying to break in there and grow their, you know, $300,000 practice, like Greg helps you do, um, you’ve gotta be responding to people as quickly as possible.

Greg Goodman
31:36 – 32:15
And I just want to validate the text back, you know, in the CRM system that I’ve set up for my clients, that’s one of the things that missed call, doesn’t even matter if there’s a voicemail, if it rings once and they hang up, it sends that text. And time and time again, I hear it from my clients that, that starts conversations like that. And that would’ve been a lost call. That would’ve been a lost lead otherwise, but they immediately get that text back. And then the conversation begins and text messaging too. You know, I personally would not want to do that with my therapist, but people out there that do want that, that sort of the anonymity of the, of the texting exchange.

Uriah Guilford
32:16 – 32:44
definitely. And I also think, I mean, it’s not an opinion, really, but everybody is busy. And most people, a lot of people who are seeking therapy have some level of ambivalence about it. So they know that they need it, or they want it. But there’s part of them that’s like, maybe not today, maybe not this month. So whatever we can do to help them, like, you know, make the best decision for themselves, I think is good. So that text is just a good little prompt, like, hey, we’re here. What do you need? So I like that.

Uriah Guilford
32:44 – 33:17
Exactly. Yeah. And number four is a scripted sales process. And this might not sound like something that you want or that you need. And I’m not advocating here for creating a script that you or someone else is going to read like the folks at AT&T, you know, when you call to get help with your cell phone or something like that. But there is a lot of value in thinking about what you say and how you answer certain questions. I’ll just give an example of the question. Do you take my insurance? Right, right. So obviously, if you take that insurance, that’s an easy conversation.

Uriah Guilford
33:17 – 33:49
Yes, absolutely. We take your insurance. If you don’t take that insurance and let’s say your private pay practice, the way you answer that question is incredibly important. And you could just say, no, sorry, we don’t do that. We’ll give you a super bill. Or you could say something, there’s 10 different things you could say that are much, much better than that, right? Helping them understand the value of your services, talking about out-of-network reimbursement, those kind of things. So, creating a call script is one thing that we have all of the therapists that we work with do in the beginning before they get a virtual.

Greg Goodman
33:53 – 34:02
folks that I work with are private pay and trying to explain a super bill or saying like, well, no, but I can work with Metair or Thryser or one of these other companies. These

Uriah Guilford
34:02 – 34:02
are great

Greg Goodman
34:02 – 34:03
companies,

Uriah Guilford
34:03 – 34:03
but

Greg Goodman
34:03 – 34:11
I’m curious, what are some trainings that you get, great ways to answer it that don’t just focus on, I don’t accept your insurance, but…

Uriah Guilford
34:12 – 34:28
Yes, that’s good. I’m happy to talk about that. And also, if people want this resource, it’s 100% free. We created something that we call the Magic Call Script, which talks about our best recommendations for this, and then also the explanations behind why we recommend certain things. Okay, so I’ll just

Greg Goodman
34:28 – 34:34
say, wherever you’re watching this, I’ll make sure to put below, if it’s on Facebook, it’ll be in the comments, if it’s on my

Uriah Guilford
34:34 – 34:34
blog,

Greg Goodman
34:34 – 34:38
or it’ll be in the blog post, a way that you can download the Magic Call Script

Uriah Guilford
34:38 – 34:39
right

Greg Goodman
34:39 – 34:40
now or after this video.

Uriah Guilford
34:40 – 35:12
Yeah, ProductiveTherapist.com slash magic. Okay, so yeah, I do think it is a helpful thing to use a service like Mentia or some of the other ones that are similar, where you are the intake coordinator can in the moment say, Actually, we don’t take your insurance, but I’d be happy to check your out of network benefits and give you an idea about what your costs would be. And we started doing that. about six to eight months ago or so. And it doesn’t always change the decision or the outcome, but it’s really, it’s a nice customer service thing to do.

Uriah Guilford
35:12 – 35:45
And I think that the best way to do empathetic sales is to educate somebody and help them understand their options. So. None of us are going to do sort of a hard pitch about why you, you need to pay $200 for my services, because insurance is terrible, whatever, whatever. We’re not, we’re just not going to do that. Right. So, you know, educating them, for example, you could tell them the the downsides of using your insurance. If you want to get into that conversation, and you feel like this is a great client for you. You could tell them about how insurance decides how many sessions that you get to have with your therapist.

Uriah Guilford
35:46 – 36:20
and your information is not actually private. So you could, you know, if, if there’s time and space to do that, you could unpack the benefits, um, the pros and cons of using insurance. But I think really what’s more powerful even than that is communicating that, you know, for, I’ll use my practice for example, right? So someone calls with a 16 year old boy and they’re depressed and they’re not wanting to go to school, right? So that person can definitely find somebody on their insurance panel that would reluctantly agree to see a teenage boy. Not that there aren’t any good providers on the panels.

Uriah Guilford
36:20 – 36:52
Of course there are, right? But we happen to have several male therapists that have been working with teenage boys for so long. They connect really well with them. In fact, they specialize in helping depressed teenage boys who are not motivated. And so really helping people understand that I’m so glad you called because this is exactly what we do. And in fact, Matthew, who has an appointment on Tuesdays at 7 p.m., this is what he specializes in. So no, no hard sell there. Just communicating the value of choosing this option. Does that make sense?

Greg Goodman
36:53 – 36:58
I’m sold on Matthew. Let’s just go. My 15 year old boy, but let’s do it.

Uriah Guilford
37:00 – 37:29
So I think that goes a long way. And someone who, let’s say a therapist who is not very confident or assertive, let’s be honest, it’s hard to sell yourself. Or at least it is for most therapists who tend to be maybe an introvert, maybe not wanting to talk about themselves a whole lot. It’s hard to sell yourself and say, you know what, I’m the best person in this county to solve your problem. You don’t want to say that, right? But you want to find a good way to communicate your experience and the value that you provide.

Uriah Guilford
37:30 – 38:02
And then, you know, just to tag on what we were talking about before, if you write this down, then you can have somebody else do it for you. And what I thought years ago was nobody can do this better than me because I’m so good at it. And when people call and they talk to me, they want to work with me. But then I started hiring clinicians and then I was the intake coordinator and people wanted to work with me. And I was like, well, no, Matthew’s great. You should really work with Matthew. So it was really helpful when I wrote down the things that I would commonly say.

Uriah Guilford
38:02 – 38:19
And then I could give that to my intake coordinator and say, here’s what I want you to do. Here’s what I want you to say, how to answer these questions. And actually I’ll tell you, Greg, I thought the numbers would go down. It’s like the conversion numbers, the number of clients, um, or calls turning into clients. They actually went up, which was surprising. Yeah.

Greg Goodman
38:20 – 38:23
Yeah. Why would you attribute that to

Uriah Guilford
38:24 – 39:03
curious? The number one thing, well, the person that I put in that role was very empathetic and relatable and friendly and helpful. So I had the right person in that role. And then number two, the person on the phone, no matter how much they liked the intake coordinator, couldn’t work with me because they weren’t a therapist. And then I could tell them my schedule’s full. If anybody calls wanting to work with me, it’s a no, right? So that helped me. Yeah. Okay. Effective follow-up process. There’s a bit to say about this, but I just want to say my recommendation is to follow up multiple times.

Uriah Guilford
39:04 – 39:30
And it depends on how full you are and how how much you need to add new clients, right? But I usually recommend following up at least three times. I find that a lot of therapists don’t want to follow up very much. They don’t want to bother people. They don’t want to annoy people. But I’ve found that if you do it in a helpful customer service oriented way, people appreciate it. So I recommend three follow ups. We happen to do one every day if we don’t get a response from that person.

Greg Goodman
39:31 – 39:46
Are you recommending, I’m just curious, what’s your secret sauce daily? Are you sending a text and a voicemail and an email every day? How are you spacing that out? What’s your sauce?

Uriah Guilford
39:46 – 40:22
I think it’s really helpful to know which contact method leads to the most folks becoming clients. But generally speaking, we usually respond in the format that they contacted us with, right? So if they call us, we usually call them back. If they email us, we usually email them back with a scheduling link often. But I will say that we noticed too many people were dropping off not too long ago. And so we decided to prioritize the phone call actually. So if someone emailed, we would call them and just kind of experimenting to see what would work best.

Uriah Guilford
40:23 – 41:03
The truth is that different people of different generations prefer different contact methods. So some people would prefer never to get a phone call, understandably. And some people would think getting a therapist through text message is weird. So you kind of have to know who your sort of demographics are. For the longest time, we’ve worked with families. And so we’re primarily getting contacts from busy moms, right? So email and text works quite well. Kind of just know your clients is, I guess, a subtext of that, right? And don’t be afraid to follow up more than you think you need to, because again, people are busy and a lot of folks are ambivalent.

Uriah Guilford
41:03 – 41:15
And if you do it nicely, you know, I’m just calling, I just wanted to make sure that you found a good therapist for your 16 year old son. And if you still need help, please reach out to us, that kind of thing.

Greg Goodman
41:15 – 41:16
Yeah,

Uriah Guilford
41:16 – 41:16
it’s interesting.

Greg Goodman
41:17 – 41:54
I some some therapists I work with, the reason that they give me for not wanting to reach out multiple times, is there’s there’s this belief that I’m curious your thoughts on it, that if someone’s not responding to the original, then they’re, they’re non communicative, for whatever reason, and they’re probably not going to be a good client. Not necessarily that they won’t become a client, but there’s this concern that we’re talking about retention, right? If you have to bug someone three different times just to get them to talk to you to see if you’re a fit, what kind of client is that person gonna be?

Greg Goodman
41:54 – 42:02
Is that gonna be a long-term client or, right? I’m just curious if, you know, what your instinct is on that without diving into data and stats or anything.

Uriah Guilford
42:02 – 42:37
Yeah. That might be correlation, not causation. I don’t know if one equals the other. Yeah, I mean, certainly, you know, no therapist wants clients who are going to be inconsistent or hard to communicate with or those kinds of things. But I would chalk that up to just most people looking for a therapist are calling multiple people, emailing multiple people. And so if you’re the one or the very few therapists that respond more than once, you’re automatically going to stand out. And that comes across as caring and being competent and being available. And that’s that’s what we want.

Uriah Guilford
42:37 – 43:01
So I would I would recommend do it. Obviously, you know, when my practice got full, I stopped chasing people. I don’t think of it as chasing people, but, you know, I would respond less because I had no openings in my calendar. So it does depend on that to some degree. And, you know, we could get into talking about wait lists and those types of things. But generally speaking, I don’t think those are great because people are most motivated when they reach out to you for the first time.

Greg Goodman
43:01 – 43:01
For sure.

Uriah Guilford
43:02 – 43:46
Yes. OK, so number six is smooth onboarding process. And I could talk in depth and in detail about this. Again, the same principle applies. Make it easy. I don’t think there’s very many therapists using paper forms anymore, but a few years ago when I was looking for a therapist for my daughter, I did have to fill out like 10 PDFs and they had no EHR and I was like, this is not great. So use the tools inside of your EHR, e-forms, appointment reminders, automated emails, if you have a CRM and you’ve been working with Greg or you want to have a CRM and work with Greg, use that tool to its full purpose.

Uriah Guilford
43:47 – 44:20
And people appreciate that, right? Like anytime you’ve called a plumber or a pest control person or a realtor or any service-based professional, you know when you’re getting good service and when they’re sort of on top of things and really helping you, sort of walking you, guiding you through the process to get to that first session or that first appointment. So smooth that process. And most people, most therapists don’t go through their own process, right? Like I said before, so they don’t know like where the speed bumps are. So I would recommend that you do that.

Uriah Guilford
44:20 – 44:51
See what it’s like for a potential new client. New clients coming in are not gonna tell you, you know what, your forms are too long and you know, I don’t know what kind of feedback they might give you. They’re not gonna tell you the problems with your intake process. Somebody like me who’s a consultant will tell you. Yeah. So lots more to say about that one, but I just want to just cap it off with that. Use the tools that you have and create a delightful experience, honestly. I mean, one of our one of our core values at Productive Therapists is we aim for surprise and delight.

Uriah Guilford
44:51 – 45:06
So we try to create experiences, both for our internal team and also for the therapists that we serve that are, yeah, surprising and delightful. And how often does that happen? Not very often. And when you have an amazing experience with a service provider, what do you do?

Speaker 3
45:07 – 45:08
You go,

Uriah Guilford
45:09 – 45:27
you tell their family, maybe you write a review. So there’s definitely a lot of room, especially in the age of sort of better help in these kind of like commoditized therapy services to stand out and be personal and be human and do nice things for people. It sounds like that’s not a novel

Greg Goodman
45:27 – 45:28
concept.

Uriah Guilford
45:28 – 45:55
I know what a novel concept be a human and care. Yeah. So that goes a long, long way. And then the last one, I’ll just end with this one, regular evaluation process. Sometimes we create systems in our businesses and we just kind of set them and forget them. Don’t go back and review them. And you want to do this on a weekly or at least a monthly basis. You want to look at your numbers. You want to look at how many clients reached out. You want to look at how many people or potential clients reached out.

Uriah Guilford
45:55 – 46:22
How many of those became clients? Are the numbers good? Could they be better? Could some of these tips that we talked about today lead more callers and folks clicking on your website to become clients? In our situation, when we pair people with a virtual assistant, that’s part of our process where we give them regular metrics and we make ourselves available to discuss that and find ways to do this better and to help people more quickly.

Greg Goodman
46:24 – 46:24
Awesome.

Uriah Guilford
46:25 – 46:25
Yeah.

Greg Goodman
46:27 – 46:31
That’s great. Do we want me to leave the slide up for anything else?

Uriah Guilford
46:32 – 46:33
No, we can take it down. Sure.

Greg Goodman
46:34 – 46:42
Yeah, well, I really appreciate the tips and the overview. And I’ve actually downloaded the magic

Uriah Guilford
46:42 – 46:43
call script. Oh, excellent.

Greg Goodman
46:44 – 46:46
Actually, that’s how I found you.

Uriah Guilford
46:47 – 46:47
No,

Greg Goodman
46:47 – 47:02
I found you. And this is a great thing, too, for anyone watching who’s looking for, obviously, I’d love to work with anybody watching this. But there’s a lot of wonderful people helping therapists out there. And one of the things that Uriah offers at Productive Therapist is directory.productivetherapist.com.

Uriah Guilford
47:03 – 47:04
Is that right? It’s just a full

Greg Goodman
47:04 – 47:25
directory of tons and tons of wonderful people who offer services for mental health professionals, from marketing to copywriting to SEO. I’m fully aware. I’ve been doing this for 18 years, and there’s a lot of other people out there doing it too. And there’s someone out there for everyone, regardless of what you’re looking for. And the directory is a great place for people to start looking for stuff too.

Uriah Guilford
47:26 – 47:26
I

Greg Goodman
47:26 – 47:29
think that’s how I originally found out about your services was

Uriah Guilford
47:29 – 47:30
through the

Greg Goodman
47:30 – 47:42
directory. But I’d love to also just offer you, if there’s anything else you’d like to share about working with productive therapists, some next steps, if you want to share any of that, please do before we say adieu.

Uriah Guilford
47:43 – 48:08
Absolutely. Yeah. All of our resources are at productive therapist.com. So that’s where you can find, we’ve got a podcast that I think is amazing. I wrote a book that you can check out and we’ve got a few courses that can get you started in addition to that magic call script, which, um, is, is a free download for you. So yeah, we’d just love to support more therapists that I love what we do and, um, trying to prevent therapist burnout and help help folks get more done so they can have more fun.

Greg Goodman
48:10 – 48:10
Rhyme too.

Uriah Guilford
48:11 – 48:11
Yes.

Greg Goodman
48:13 – 48:48
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Uriah. I appreciate your time and sharing your knowledge and of course, everything you’re doing for preventing burnout. And, you know, I know you and I talked about it the other day that just the shared mission of just making the world a better place, right? And when, when therapists are more resourced to, to serve clients, instead of spending all that time doing admin and having clients not become clients, right. That’s the goal is the ripple effect, more people, more help, more lasting impact and improving our collective mental health one person at a time.

Uriah Guilford
48:49 – 48:50
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Greg Goodman
48:51 – 48:59
Thank you so much. I’m going to say goodbye now. And if you have any questions, feel free to contact Uriah directly and have a beautiful rest of your day.