Timestamps for this episode:

Linzy Bonham 00:00
Most of us get quite a far way down the road and start to experience pain before we realize, oh, there’s a skill set here that I need to fill in. I need to actually understand how money works, and I have never been taught that. So in this overlapping space between our caregiving, our conflict avoidance, and our lack of business education and financial literacy, we end up making decisions as business owners that are primarily or wholly emotional rather than grounding in any actual business numbers.

Linzy Bonham 00:33
Welcome to Money Skills for Therapists, the podcast that helps therapists and health practitioners in private practice go from money confusion and shame to calm, clarity, and confidence with their finances.

Linzy Bonham 00:43
If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by numbers or avoided looking at your business money, you’re in the right place. I’m Linzy Bonham, therapist turned money coach and creator of Money Skills for Therapists.

Linzy Bonham 00:53
Before we jump in, I want to remind you of something really important. Most of us highly skilled and competent therapists and health practitioners were never taught about money, not in grad school, not in supervision, not anywhere.

Linzy Bonham 01:05
And yet, here we are running businesses that need to take care of us while we’re busy taking care of others. It is a lot of pressure.

Linzy Bonham 01:12
So if part of you feels anxious about money, avoidant, or like a bit of a hot mess financially, I want you to know that you are not alone and I am here to help. Through my free live workshops each month, I teach practical financial skills to help you feel more grounded, calm, and confident with your private practice money.

Linzy Bonham 01:29
You can see what’s coming up and save your spot to join live or register for the replay at moneyskillsfortherapists.com/workshops. Let’s get started.

Linzy Bonham 01:37
Hello and welcome back to the podcast. Today’s episode, I’m gonna be talking about common financial mistakes that group practice owners make, and we’re gonna talk about what grounded decision-making actually means in group practice.

Linzy Bonham 01:52
Now, if you are a solo practice owner, it would be completely fair if you’re thinking, “Lindsay, this is a lot of group practice that you’ve been talking about.” And I promise we will be getting back to some more general topics or solo practice topics soon.

Linzy Bonham 02:07
But since we are opening the doors to Money Skills for Group Practice Owners this fall, and at the time this episode’s coming out, the doors will be open to Money Skills for Group Practice Owners, I wanted to speak specifically to this group practice owner piece today.

Linzy Bonham 02:20
But also know that all the same traps that apply to group practice owners apply to solo practice owners, too, just in different ways. Because the tendencies that we have that make running a group practice hard also make running a solo practice hard.

Linzy Bonham 02:35
So for solo practitioners listening, just take the words that I’m saying, tweak them a little bit, think about how they apply to the way that you are running your solo practice, and you’re still gonna get a lot of insights out of this conversation today.

Linzy Bonham 02:47
Let’s talk first about why group practice owners tend to make emotionally driven decisions in their group practice.

Linzy Bonham 02:55
And I will tell you with the folks that I work with, this, of course, is way more common than not, that the decisions that we’re making in our group practice are essentially emotional decisions.

Linzy Bonham 03:08
There’s a decision in front of you. Do I hire this person that maybe is not a total fit, but I really need to fill this position?

Linzy Bonham 03:16
Do I say yes to my clinician who’s really great and asking for more money even though money is tight? Most of the time, if we reflect back on the decisions that we’ve made as business owners, we make emotional decisions, right?

Linzy Bonham 03:30
We make the decision that feels good. We make the decision that feels right, but that is not a grounded decision. Therapists are caregivers by our nature.

Linzy Bonham 03:40
Most of us were caregivers and little, tiny baby therapists long before we ever became qualified to be therapists. That’s the role that we had in our family, or that was kind of who we came out into the world as.

Linzy Bonham 03:52
Some of us were just born as little caregivers, and that is deeply inside of us, and that does not go away once we start becoming business owners. This means that we’re highly attuned to the needs of others.

Linzy Bonham 04:03
We’re always thinking about how are they feeling, what do they need. We’re often adverse to conflict or discord. I still hate conflict.

Linzy Bonham 04:12
All these years that I’ve been trying to work on it and try to communicate clearly, I still generally want to just, like, ghost and disappear rather than have a hard conversation.

Linzy Bonham 04:22
And many, many therapists are in that same boat because we’re so attuned to how that other person is feeling. We just want them to like us. We want everything to be okay. Then in addition to that, we’re just not trained in business.

Linzy Bonham 04:33
We generally lack the financial literacy to understand the numbers that we’re looking at in your solo practice, but especially in group practice, where group practice numbers get a lot more complicated than solo practice numbers ever were.

Linzy Bonham 04:46
So most of us don’t have the financial literacy to understand solo practice numbers, and then group practice is a whole other level of complexity. That means that we don’t know what healthy numbers can and should look like in a group practice.

Linzy Bonham 04:58
And many, many, many group practice owners who I work with essentially started their practices accidentally. They were successful therapists who were full.

Linzy Bonham 05:08
They were in demand, had more clients coming to them than they could possibly serve. And then, you know, you have that friend that you worked with at the hospital, and you’re still in touch, and they would love to pick up a few clients, so you just bring them under your wing.

Linzy Bonham 05:21
And then they have all the clients that they could have, and then you think, “Oh, it’d be nice to have somebody who also works with kids,” or, “We need to keep working on this waiting list.” And suddenly you end up with a team of people and this much higher level of complexity in your business, and you never really set out to build a group practice.

Linzy Bonham 05:36
There are folks who are exceptions to this. Sometimes we get therapists in Money Skills for Group Practice Owners who are just starting. And same is true too with Money Skills for Therapists.

Linzy Bonham 05:46
Therapists who are just starting their business, whether it’s solo or group, and they just wanna do it right the first time. And I’m always so impressed and happy for those folks, because when you build out these things with intention from the beginning, you save yourself a world of pain.

Linzy Bonham 06:02
But most of us get quite a far way down the road and start to experience pain before we realize, oh, there’s a skill set here that I need to fill in. I need to actually understand how money works, and I have never been taught that. So in this overlapping space between our caregiving, our conflict avoidance, and our lack of business education and financial literacy, we end up making decisions as business owners that are primarily or wholly emotional rather than grounding in any actual business numbers.

Linzy Bonham 06:30
Some of the emotions that drive our decisions might be guilt, right? Feeling like we just wanna be able to give more.

Linzy Bonham 06:38
We wanna give more to our clinicians who are working for us. We want to be good bosses to them. It could be fear. Fear of, if I don’t say yes to this person in front of me who’s asking for this 80/20 split, that they’re gonna leave.

Linzy Bonham 06:49
I’m gonna lose them. It can be just anxiety about the future. What if the clients stop coming? What if somebody calls about this particular need and we can’t fill that gap?

Linzy Bonham 07:00
But also on the other end of the emotional decision-making spectrum, we have emotions that are generally positive, right? Emotions like excitement and hope and mania that can sometimes drive us to make choices in our group practice that are not actually strategic, might be a little bit too soon.

Linzy Bonham 07:18
We might build our group practice really, really fast without actually having, for instance, the clients to fill people up. And so that kind of business mania, which I have definitely experienced myself, can also drive us to make financial decisions in our businesses that are not actually strategic, but we’re just so excited we just cannot stop ourselves. So I want to talk now about the three most common financial mistakes that I see group practice owners make coming from this place that we’re coming from.

Linzy Bonham 07:45
Again, this overlap of caretaking and conflict avoidance and just lack of financial literacy and financial skills. The first one, which also shows up in solo practice in a different way, is giving too much and asking for too little.

Linzy Bonham 08:00
I’m gonna pause on that because my suspicion for most people listening and for you listening right now, that is likely something that you’re doing, if not in your business, if not in your group practice, then probably in some other area of your life.

Linzy Bonham 08:15
So what this can look like in business is setting splits or wages for your team kind of at that highest level that you feel like you can give without really having anywhere to go or maybe the numbers to actually justify being able to pay your clinician that much.

Linzy Bonham 08:30
It could look like not feeling like you can say no to your team, right? Worried about losing people, so just giving, giving, giving. “Sure, you want to do that expensive training?

Linzy Bonham 08:38
Sure. You need extra supervision that I’m giving you for free? Sure.” Right? Giving, giving, giving. It could look like wanting so much to create a great environment for your team that it feels like money is no object.

Linzy Bonham 08:49
It often also looks like lacking clear expectations about what your team actually needs to do to be contributing to the business, to keep the business healthy and sustainable.

Linzy Bonham 09:00
Often, you might hire somebody with the agreement that they’re going to see 12 clients a week, and they only ever see seven. And yet you haven’t actually found a way to hold them accountable to this.

Linzy Bonham 09:12
You don’t really have a mechanism to have these conversations. You really like them. They do great work. You know their whole life story, so you don’t really want to ask something of them that they maybe can’t give.

Linzy Bonham 09:22
But now you’ve built this container, and you’re creating this great environment, and you’re spending money to take care of this team member whose numbers might not actually be sustainable for what the practice needs.

Linzy Bonham 09:34
So these kinds of decisions, this giving too much, asking too little, is generally driven by guilt, by fear. But again, it can also be driven by that excitement of just wanting to create a great environment, wanting to be a great boss, but not stopping to look at the numbers to ask, “Can I actually afford this?

Linzy Bonham 09:51
Can the business actually sustain this?” The second mistake that group practice owners make is falling into scarcity thinking in their group practices. What this can look like is having really negative or limited beliefs about what’s possible in your practice. Feeling like, you know, “Who, who would ever wanna work for me?

Linzy Bonham 10:09
I can’t expand my team. Nobody else is gonna wanna work for me,” or, “I could never run an internship program. I don’t have anything to teach people.” Or just feeling like, “Mm, no, I can’t really take a risk.

Linzy Bonham 10:19
I can’t invest in this thing that’s important because what if I don’t follow through? What if, what if it’s not worth it? I’m just gonna kinda stay small.” the energetic signature, of course, of scarcity is kind of like this smallness, this tightness, right?

Linzy Bonham 10:33
This, this lack of trust in yourself, this lack of trust in the world, this not-enough narrative, right? We have that fear, like there isn’t enough.

Linzy Bonham 10:43
There’s that tightness and bracing. We have that anxiety, like something bad is going to happen. Diane and I recorded that episode recently talking about my favorite problem to help people solve in their finances, solo and group, is sitting down with a therapist who has $50,000 in their bank account that they feel like they can’t do anything with ’cause they don’t know what it’s for, and the money’s kind of just become inert and, and, you know, waking it up, right?

Linzy Bonham 11:08
But when we have this fear something bad is gonna happen, we can end up actually hoarding money and having money kind of sitting there without any kind of joy and possibility associated with it, just this kind of heaviness and fear.

Linzy Bonham 11:21
But scarcity thinking can also come from struggles with self-worth or self-trust, right? Not really understanding the value of what you’ve created. Wondering like, “Why would somebody want to work for me? Why wouldn’t somebody just want to go work for themself? What could I possibly offer?” Right?

Linzy Bonham 11:33
Not understanding the amazingness that you have created and are working hard to continue to improve for your team can lead us into a tight scarcity thinking kind of space. The third mistake that group practice owners tend to make is growing too fast.

Linzy Bonham 11:50
So what that looks like is maybe making many hires close together without actually having the clients for them, right? You, you put up a job application, you have three great candidates apply when you were really only planning to hire one, but you don’t wanna say no to those other people, ’cause what if you lose them?

Linzy Bonham 12:06
So you end up hiring three people, but then none of them have enough clients. And if we don’t set the appropriate expectations for how long it’s gonna take to fill people, your team gets frustrated.

Linzy Bonham 12:16
They start to wonder, “Am I in the right place? Can this person actually provide clients for me?” And that is again that fear of saying no, that fear of losing them that can drive us to just say yes to too many people.

Linzy Bonham 12:28
The other example of this growing too fast that I see that is probably the most painful one is taking on a lease for a large office space without actually having a clear plan on how to fill it with clinicians.

Linzy Bonham 12:39
I’ve worked with therapists who have monthly office rent of $10,000, $12,000, $15,000 in large cities because they have a suite with like 15 offices, and that can be really strategic when you have a large team or if you have a really clear plan on how you’re going to fill out that space.

Linzy Bonham 12:57
But if you don’t, that is a massive expense to be taking on every month. It basically means at the beginning of each month, you’re starting $10,000 in the hole, and the first $10,000 that are made in the business is just covering that rent.

Linzy Bonham 13:10
And then after that is all the money that needs to be made to pay your team, pay the other bills, pay yourself, create buffers. So taking on that really big office, as much as it can be really exciting to have that vision of this incredible space you’re making, is only strategic if you’re actually gonna follow it with specific strategic action that’s going to fill out that space quickly.

Linzy Bonham 13:35
Or just making large financial investments without having the energy to follow through on them. It’s so tempting as a business owner to throw money at things because we wanna solve it, and investing in business is essential.

Linzy Bonham 13:47
I personally have the philosophy that you should not struggle to figure something out for five years that somebody else can teach you in six months. It just kind of baffles me when folks go into business and don’t read business books and don’t listen to business podcasts or take courses, ’cause there’s so many people out there who have figured out the things that we are struggling with.

Linzy Bonham 14:07
And there’s absolutely no reason that we have to toil and fumble to figure these things out all by ourselves.

Linzy Bonham 14:15
We can bring the right guides into our life, but that is only strategic if we actually have the energy to follow through on the investment.

Linzy Bonham 14:24
Signing up for a $10,000, $15,000 course doesn’t do anything for your business if you don’t actually have the space in your schedule and the bandwidth to engage and benefit from that course.

Linzy Bonham 14:36
On the flip side, when I started this business full-time, coming back from maternity leave in 2020, I invested in an $18,000 US course, which was, like, crazy at the time.

Linzy Bonham 14:48
So that’s about $24,000 Canadian for our Canadians listening. And I made that course my full-time job. So I had huge benefit from that course because I committed to showing up for it completely, and therefore I got my money’s worth, right?

Linzy Bonham 15:01
But when we invest too fast, when we just buy a bunch of courses as though that is going to solve the problem, we actually end up just kind of throwing money away. So those are those three mistakes.

Linzy Bonham 15:14
We have giving too much and asking for too little, falling into scarcity thinking, and growing too fast. I’m gonna encourage you to stop and think for a moment about which of those is showing up in your practice, whether it’s a group practice or a solo practice, ’cause these are things that we all do in business.

Linzy Bonham 15:30
Just stop and be with yourself for a moment. Which of these is the most relevant to you? And then I’m gonna talk about what grounded decision-making actually looks like.

Linzy Bonham 15:45
Okay, so let’s talk about grounded decision-making. What is grounded decision-making in group practice? We know that purely emotional decisions can drive us to make choices that can have really negative and sometimes even catastrophic impacts on the financial health of group practices.

Linzy Bonham 16:04
I’ve been offering my group practice program for three or four years now at this point, and every time we go to open the doors, I circle back and I, I look at the folks that I’ve talked to past times that the course was open to reach back to them.

Linzy Bonham 16:19
And many, many, many times I look back on the website of a group practice owner I spoke with, and I see that they went back to solo practice. That happens, and often the reason it happens is we can’t make the money work, right?

Linzy Bonham 16:32
So making emotional decisions about our finances can actually lead to our group practice ending. Not everybody should be a group practice owner.

Linzy Bonham 16:39
I feel very, very, very strongly about that. So I’m not saying in those cases that it was always a tragedy. Sometimes it was absolutely the right decision. But in many cases, folks wanted to have group practice and they loved having group practice, but they couldn’t sustain it because they could not make the money work because they were making emotional decisions rather than strategic decisions.

Linzy Bonham 16:59
So we know that emotional decision-making, risky. But on the other far end of the spectrum, making purely financial decisions is also risky.

Linzy Bonham 17:09
It has negative impacts on the people in your practice, right? We are such deeply relational humans as therapists, and I don’t want that to ever change about us, right?

Linzy Bonham 17:20
We are so good at humans, relationships, culture, and if you’re only looking at numbers and taking kind of the human elements out of it, that is also going to be very detrimental on your practice.

Linzy Bonham 17:33
So grounded decision-making is really about this beautiful overlap between numbers and values. And here’s why I talk about values rather than emotions.

Linzy Bonham 17:45
Values are a really helpful place to anchor your decisions to. But unlike emotions, values are much more durable, right? Our emotions can come and go.

Linzy Bonham 17:56
One day I’m feeling frustrated that somebody’s asked me something. I wanna send them an email to say, “Forget about it. Go away.” I’m in frustration. The next morning, I might wake up feeling guilty.

Linzy Bonham 18:05
You know? E-emotions kind of change like the winds, whereas values are something that we can anchor ourselves to for years at a time, if not decades at a time.

Linzy Bonham 18:15
Our values often will change over the course of our lives or the course of our business, but they are a much more solid, much more durable place to anchor our decision-making to than any one emotion that’s happening at any one moment.

Linzy Bonham 18:27
And we know, too, that usually there’s multiple emotions happening at any moment. So values then can become this grounding, clarifying force for making decisions in our businesses. So I’d encourage you to think about your own values right now.

Linzy Bonham 18:40
You know, you can always pull up a values sheet. Brené Brown, in her work has this big, long list of values. To be curious about what are your values now?

Linzy Bonham 18:48
And think about your top three. Humans, we always wanna do more. I don’t know if it’s just the nature of our time, or if that’s just an inherently human thing that, you know, we want to list our top 10 values.

Linzy Bonham 19:00
But we can’t actually be authentically living out 10 values at a time. You can’t have 10 priorities at once. So I encourage you to think about what are your top three values.

Linzy Bonham 19:09
It could be accessibility, it could be balance, it could be about community, compassion, boundaries. It might be faith.

Linzy Bonham 19:19
It could be about growth, impact. It could be about justice, joy, leadership, profitability, service, well-being.

Linzy Bonham 19:28
Think about what are the top three values that guide your practice, whether it’s solo or group. What are the things that you can anchor to that have meaning, that are deeply meaningful for you, that can be like your compass when you’re having to make a hard decision. When you have those values to anchor to and then clear access to your numbers, now we have that basis for making really grounded financial decisions. Depending on the existing systems you have in place in your business and your level of financial literacy at this time and your access to your numbers, ’cause I know sometimes our numbers are basically being held captive by our bookkeepers or accountants.

Linzy Bonham 20:05
You can work with your numbers at three levels to access that other part. You have your values in one hand. Now, accessing your numbers, you can do that at a few different levels.

Linzy Bonham 20:15
The first level of being with your numbers is just having clarity on where you are now. Actually being with your numbers, opening up your bank account on a weekly basis, seeing what the financial situation is in this moment.

Linzy Bonham 20:28
Being connected with the flow of money in your business. Is money flowing the way that it’s supposed to? Did less money hit the bank this week than it usually does? Why is that?

Linzy Bonham 20:36
What’s going on? Being with your bank statements when they come out, looking at the money that’s owed to you. Are there clients who haven’t paid yet?

Linzy Bonham 20:44
Are there insurance companies who owe you $10,000? And looking at your financial statements, if you get those from your accountant or your bookkeeper, right? What was your profit and loss for last month?

Linzy Bonham 20:54
On your balance sheet, what is happening in terms of the money that’s owed for taxes at this moment? That is about grounding in where you are now, and that’s the first level of really being with your numbers.

Linzy Bonham 21:05
The next level with being with your numbers is clarity on where you wanna go. What are you actually building? Right?

Linzy Bonham 21:12
Our default in capitalist society is more. More and more and more and more and more, right? We always think that… I shouldn’t say we always, but it’s so persuasive to think that at the next level, everything’s gonna be great.

Linzy Bonham 21:29
It’s when we have those two more therapists that everything’s gonna be awesome, or if we just had more clients coming in the door, or if we were just bringing in more money per session, more and more and more and more and more. But it’s so important for you to stop and think about: What is the practice you actually wanna build?

Linzy Bonham 21:43
How big do you want your practice to be? What is the team size that you want to lead? Do you want a really big team? Do you wanna have multiple locations, and it’s not important for you to know your team members individually ’cause your value is impact, and you wanna make the biggest impact that you can?

Linzy Bonham 21:57
Or is your value more around connection, and you want your team to stay small enough that you can actually know everybody on the team? That you have more of kind of a quality assurance relationship with knowing that everybody’s practicing in a certain way.

Linzy Bonham 22:10
How much do you wanna be paid to lead your group practice? Are you content to be paid 60 or 70K a year ’cause that works for your life? Do you need to make 200K a year ’cause you live in downtown San Francisco?

Linzy Bonham 22:22
Right? What is the compensation that’s actually worth all the work that you are doing to run this business? What kind of jobs do you wanna be creating for other therapists?

Linzy Bonham 22:31
Are you looking for more of a training center model of a group practice where interns are coming in, they’re getting their licensure with you, and then maybe they’re leaving after a year or two?

Linzy Bonham 22:41
Or do you wanna have more of a team of seasoned clinicians? Do you want folks to be full-time? Do you wanna give them benefits? Are you okay with having a team of part-timers?

Linzy Bonham 22:50
And then also, what type of job do you want for yourself, right? Where are you going? Do you want to be the clinical supervisor for everybody there? Do you eventually want to move just into more of a CEO role?

Linzy Bonham 23:01
Do you love doing the marketing? Do you want to keep seeing clients? Do you not? Having that clarity on where you want to go gives you a path to actually follow. Otherwise, the default is more, and more does not lead to happiness or satisfaction.

Linzy Bonham 23:14
More just leads to more everything. More money, but also maybe more expenses and maybe more stress and more conflict, right?

Linzy Bonham 23:22
So it’s very important to understand where you are actually going. And then, then a third level of being with your numbers, after you have the clarity on where you are, clarity on where you need to go, the third level is clarity on the financial workings of your machine.

Linzy Bonham 23:37
Group practice is very much like a machine. There’s all these different tiny decisions that you’ve made that fit together to give you certain financial results.

Linzy Bonham 23:47
Once you’ve built it, it’s really important to understand your machine, to understand, okay, if we make this tweak in our business, if we change everybody’s fee by $10, this is the financial result.

Linzy Bonham 23:58
If we bring on two more full-time team members, this is the financial result. If we bring on a part-time administrator to help with intakes, this is the financial result.

Linzy Bonham 24:08
That’s a modeling level of being with your group practice. This is the team tool that we have inside Money Skills for Group Practice Owners. This is our Cadillac tool ’cause it allows you to really see how these things fit together, and that is the level of financial clarity that allows you to play, to be curious, and also to not make crucial mistakes.

Linzy Bonham 24:31
A business coach who I worked with at the very beginning of, going full-time into this work that I’m doing now, I remember her saying, “Business leadership is not about always making good decisions. It’s about not making bad decisions.”

Linzy Bonham 24:44
‘Cause one really bad decision can be catastrophic for our business, right? You change everybody’s splits in your group practice to try to, like, be a better boss and be more fair, and there isn’t enough money to pay the rent.

Linzy Bonham 24:58
Like, your ship is starting to sink, and everybody is on it. So sometimes those decisions that we make to try to be a really good boss actually end up being the thing that sinks us.

Linzy Bonham 25:09
So this is where being able to model out those decisions before you make them allows you to understand the full financial impact and make strategic choices rather than choices that you will deeply regret later.

Linzy Bonham 25:21
So going forward, how do you apply this? I encourage you, whether you’re in solo practice or group practice, if you’re in solo practice and you’ve stuck with us so far, I’m really happy because so much of this applies to solo practice.

Linzy Bonham 25:32
I know I’ve been talking about team. You can just remove team and sub in client because a lot of times the decisions that we struggle with in solo practice that are about relationships play out on the client level.

Linzy Bonham 25:42
When we’re in group practice, those same struggles play out on the team level. When you’re facing financial decisions in your practice going forward, I encourage you to press pause. There’s a great consultant that I’m, um, working with right now, attending her, her programs and read her book.

Linzy Bonham 25:58
Her name is Julie Skolnick. She works with 2e people, so people who are twice exceptional, gifted, and some sort of learning disability, which my son falls into that category, so does my husband and many people I know.

Linzy Bonham 26:10
And she has this, this thing that she says to her parents where she’s like: I’m giving you the gift of the pause button. In parenting, so often things feel urgent, and we feel like we need to respond right in that moment, but you don’t actually have to.

Linzy Bonham 26:23
And the same goes for when we’re making decisions in our business. You get to pause. Somebody asks you a question, you don’t have to answer them on the spot.

Linzy Bonham 26:32
You get to pause, and then you get to ask yourself, “Okay, now that I’m faced with this particular financial decision, my best team member is asking for a raise.

Linzy Bonham 26:44
What emotions am I experiencing right now? What’s coming up? Is there a common financial mistake that I’m potentially about to make?” Maybe it’s giving too much and asking for too little.

Linzy Bonham 26:54
Maybe it’s scarcity thinking. Maybe it’s growing too fast. Or is there another common mistake that you tend to make that you’re tempted to play out, a pattern you’re tempted to repeat in this situation?

Linzy Bonham 27:04
And then ask yourself, “What are the values that matter most that can guide you with this decision?” Coming back to those values that shape your group practice or your solo practice.

Linzy Bonham 27:15
And then finally, what do the numbers actually say? If I take this particular course of action, could the business sustain it? Is that a strategic decision?

Linzy Bonham 27:23
Would the decision actually sink us? Would what feels good now because I’m pleasing somebody and avoiding conflict actually result in us taking our practice in the long term? Can my business actually sustainably support the decision that I wanna make?

Linzy Bonham 27:34
And if not, what are other possible decisions here that the business can sustain, right? But again, we’re tapping into our values first and then our numbers.

Linzy Bonham 27:44
I picture it like a little, you know, Venn diagram. If you picture the, the wise mind graphic from DBT, you know, where we have like our, intellect, our, our mind, and our emotions, and we, we’re right in that little sweet spot in the middle of overlap.

Linzy Bonham 27:59
You know, we’re looking at our values and our, numbers, and we’re seeing what is the decision in the middle that really meets both of these, right? That checks all the boxes.

Linzy Bonham 28:10
You get to pause. You get to think it through. You never have to answer a financial question on the spot. You can always say, “Give me a week to sit with that, and I’ll come back to you.” Or if you’re working with me in Money Skills for Group Practice Owners, you can say, “I’m taking this course right now, and she told me I’m not allowed to make any big financial decisions till I get to the point of understanding all my numbers, so I’ll get back to you in two months.

Linzy Bonham 28:29
I really value you. I appreciate you. Let me come back to you when I know what the business can afford in meeting your needs and also making sure the business is sustainable.”

Linzy Bonham 28:44
So, if you’re interested in any of this, if this is resonating with you, I do also want to encourage you to check out Money Skills for Group Practice Owners. You can find it now on our website.

Linzy Bonham 28:55
It’s always on our website on moneyskillsfortherapists.com. Under Programs, you’ll see Money Skills for Group Practice Owners. Our doors are open now till the very beginning of October, and we’re starting our cohort.

Linzy Bonham 29:07
We are running a cohort of Money Skills for Group Practice Owners every fall and every spring going forward. We’re just making stuff nice and easy and predictable. We’re a grown-up business now.

Linzy Bonham 29:15
And this course is all about helping you to ground in yourself, your values, really understand your numbers, and build out the system and skills to make strategic decisions in your group practice.

Linzy Bonham 29:27
So rather than feeling overworked, underpaid, resentful, you feel calm and empowered and grounded. You’re welcome to book a discovery call to chat with me about the program to see if it makes sense for you now or in the future.

Linzy Bonham 29:40
But definitely check out that program if you’re a group practice owner and anything I’ve talked about today resonates with you, ’cause, um, that’s a really awesome program.

Linzy Bonham 29:48
Diane and I are really proud of what we do in that program, and we just want great group practice owners who love what they do to be able to keep doing it. We also have our free WhatsApp community that you’re welcome to join.

Linzy Bonham 29:58
Just email us at hello@moneynutsandbolts.com if you want to be able to chat about today’s podcast episode, hear about some private calls that we do in that community that have been really, really fun.

Linzy Bonham 30:08
And thank you so much for listening today. I really appreciate all of you, and I hope there’s something nice here that you were able to take away with you into your practice.