176 Turn January Calls Into Booked Clients

January and September can feel like a wave. The calls increase. The emails stack up. And for a moment, it feels like momentum.

But calls are not the goal. Kept first sessions are the goal.

In this episode, I walk you through how to turn inquiries into actual booked clients without pressure tactics, without sales scripts that feel inauthentic, and without overcompromising your boundaries. Most therapists were never trained in sales. What we were trained in is structure, clarity, and expectation setting. And that is exactly what increases your show rate.

We talk about the four KPIs that actually matter in private practice and why the fourth one, first appointments kept, is where your income stabilizes. I show you how a simple consultation script reframes therapy as a three session process instead of a one session miracle. That shift alone reduces no shows and mismatched expectations.

We also unpack friction in your intake system. Slow responses, too many contact methods, unclear policies, and bending your calendar to “just get them in” all create drop off. When anxiety goes up, cognition goes down. Your job is not to overwhelm a potential client with information. Your job is to guide a decision with structure.

In this episode, we discuss:

• The four private practice KPIs and why first sessions kept matter most
• How a consultation script reduces no shows without sales tactics
• Where friction in your intake system quietly costs you bookings
• Why protecting your calendar increases retention and prevents burnout

If your January surge feels chaotic instead of profitable, this episode will help you tighten one system this week. Not everything. Just one thing. Structure builds consistency. Consistency builds income.

Want to learn more? Check out this month's free resource from Kate Walker Training.

If you are ready to clean up your policies, consultation process, and intake structure in a CE-level training, join us inside the Step It Up Membership.

Get your step by step guide to private practice. Because you are too important to lose to not knowing the rules, going broke, burning out, and giving up. #counselorsdontquit. 

Transcript

You Are The Bottleneck

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You are a bottleneck in your own business. Totally normal. This is where everybody starts. Everybody becomes a bottleneck in their own business as they grow. That's why they call it growing pains. Welcome to the MST, building practices in the work in small. It's March, and if you missed this training back in January when Step It Up members got it live, don't worry, it's not too late. You can still use this strategy for every call you're getting right now. We're talking about turning inquiries into actual booked clients, not through pressure or urgency tactics, but by understanding what makes people move from interested to scheduled and what causes them to disappear. This applies whether you're filling your therapy practice, building a supervision caseload, or both. Now, let's get to work. Let's talk about how we have a slammed part of the year in January and September. It's like we have folks where it's new year, new you, and then we have September where, you know, it's like when that first note home comes from school. And it's not just for us or we who see kids, right? It's the whole family sometimes gets into an uproar. So if you're a couple counselor, you may see your couples pick up. If you see just adults, you may even see that type of clientele pick up. But we see it in January, not just because people are, oh gosh, you know what? I've always wanted to try therapy. You have people who are just holding it together by their fingernails over the holidays and they are ready to get in in January. So we're gonna talk about how to make sure that those aren't just sort of empty contacts or first sessions that don't show up. So we have a little bit of an outline. If you can see me, you can see my screen. I'm not gonna do like a PowerPoint where I'm gonna make this all super official. Super official, not superficial. It won't be superficial, but it won't be super official as well. So as a reminder, if you're brand new to this membership, I talk about KPIs. KPI stands for key performance indicator. And the only KPIs that matter for us are the number of calls, texts, emails, whatever you choose to do, the number of actual connections. So that is the opposite of phone tag, the number of booked first appointments. And this is what September and January are kind of famous for, right? People are going to book that first appointment. But really, number four is where the money is. Number four are the made first appointments where people are actually going to show up. And this is where, unfortunately for us, we are not trained as salespeople. This is often because of a mismatched expectation. We overpromise, under deliver, or perhaps we didn't quite explain how the thing worked and people were expecting a thing and we didn't deliver the thing. So it's exciting, especially if you're brand new, if you're early in your career and you're like, oh my gosh, I'm getting all these calls. I've got to do all the things to make sure that I don't lose anybody. So unless you go to a seminar on sales, you probably wouldn't know what your average car salesman knows, which is how to make sure we match our delivery with our potential clients' expectations. So last month we talked about how to build an opt-in. We talked about sticky marketing versus shiny marketing. So we've got the opt-in. We are sending out the newsletters. Don't worry if this doesn't mean anything to you. Those trainings will go up and you can look at those in your free time. But this is where the rubber hits the road. We've got people calling. So the main problems that you're gonna see, and what I've seen, and what y'all report to me and I see when I stalk all of the social media threads, we have slow responses. Our responses are unclear. There's something called friction, which is a sales term, which just means there are too many steps, too many things that involve us, or we're inconsistent in our policies and our responses. And if you work in a mid to small town, you know that if you're good and you all are good, your neighbors and friends, I mean, I'm sorry, not yours, but the neighbors and the friends of the clients you're seeing, they're gonna spread the word. Everybody loves to help someone. And if someone comes to your client and says, Oh my gosh, my marriage, I just don't know what to do, your client is gonna want to throw out your name. And so if you have inconsistent policies, that's gonna ruin, ruin a relationship and it's gonna ruin that fourth KPI if we don't get that fixed. So you don't have to, but definitely if I say, you know, pull out your calendar or pull out your system, if you don't have it, it's fine. But I want you to mentally think, oh my gosh, Kate asked for my system and I don't have a system because then we know that there's a gap there, right? And that's where this membership comes in, because your job is then to, we got to get that system built. So you are not the problem. Most of us, all of us, when we come out of grad school, we start our practice or wherever you are in your career, it's just us, right? We are just like the law firm, and we're just one and we are the only ones answering the phone, sweeping the floors, cleaning the toilets, and doing the books. Everybody starts there. But January and September, this is where you can really make a difference because your system of one, my system of one, it's not built for volume. So I want you to open, remember, this can be open, your first contact system. So if it is your phone consultation script, and you're thinking right now, oh my gosh, I don't have a phone consultation script. Well, yes, you do. If you're a step it up member, you have a phone consultation script. It is in your one start here menu and it's under marketing and it says in the title, phone consultation, or it might say 10-minute consultation script. This is going to address consistency. This is going to keep you on the rails so that if somebody throws you a question, like I don't know, out of left field, that will be in the portion of your spiel that says, okay, hey, do you have any questions for me? It won't be at the very beginning. When you pick up the phone or the email or the texting, you say, Well, first of all, what questions do you have? No, we're not going to start with that. We're going to start with something that will keep you on track. So when I say phone, and those of you who've heard me talk about this before, I'll do phone and air quotes, because I know a lot of you like to do text and email. So look at your phone consultation script, your email, your text consultation script. In a nutshell, what I recommend that you do is to say, hey, I'm so glad you contacted me. Let me start off by explaining how I like to work. Session one looks like this, session two looks like this, and session three looks like this. So we can both decide if we're a good fit after those first three sessions, and along the way, you're going to get some coping tools and some resources that can help. So you see what I'm doing there. Even if it this isn't an email, I'm helping the client understand what they're getting. I'm not going to come from a standpoint of like, see, you know, counseling is this mysterious kind of woo-woo thing. And it's a, you know, that's all down to, you know, did the relationship. And I mean, the stuff that we know. But I can easily tell a potential client at the first session, I'm going to ask you a lot of questions. You might even get frustrated with me because you're not going to be able to dive into your story yet. But at the end of that session, I can give you some homework. So by the second session, we can course correct based on your input. And so by the third session, we can both decide if we're a good fit. And you've got some resources along the way. So I'm setting their expectation that it's not going to be a home run at that first session. It's not going to be me just, you know, solving all their problems in that first session. And it was interesting because I read an article last month in uh the counseling magazine about colleges starting to do this brand new thing called one session therapy. And I'm like, oh my gosh, that is not brand new. People have doing that for been doing that for forever, right? It's solution-focused therapy. It's the Milan system from those for those of you who are marriaging family systems folks, right? This idea that at this first session, I'm going to learn about you. I'm going to give you some things to try so that the next time you come in, you can. All right. And it's easy to say if you have a script, if you have it in front of you. So that's that's part of the method behind the madness for having the script. We're matching expectations. We're not overpromising and under-delivering. That first session, when they arrive, that KPI number four, when they show up to that first session, they're not coming with notes so that they can tell you about the history of their problem. They're expecting you to ask questions. And the other thing is, this is, and I'll talk about this more at a on our other coaching session at the end of the month. It helps your clients start to think, brand new clients anyway, in terms of three sessions instead of terms of one session. Now I'm not talking about pre-selling 10 sessions and putting it in a package and discounting it 10%. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about a theoretically sound idea that I cannot do my best work in one session. I can do my best work in three. I can do my best work in four. So it's theoretically sound and I'm setting the expectation with my potential client. Hey, I'm expecting to go there four times. So kind of like that no surprises act, right? I'm not going to be surprised when my brand new therapist says to come back next week. The other thing would be the website contact form. I hate these. I hate them with a passion. And if you've got one, by golly, you better be checking it. And it better be HIPAA compliant. So the the contact form is another avenue to avenue to you. So if you have a website contact form, then I'm I'm going to take a deep breath and we'll go with that. But do you also have a phone number? Do you also list your email? No, don't do that. Because again, that system of you is not built for volume. That system of you needs one avenue to you. And as you grow, if you want to have three avenues, great, then you can hire out. But we're going to start off with one. Those of you who are doing email autoresponders, I don't know if you can do this with text. I've never heard of a texting program that has an autoresponder. But I absolutely love email autoresponders and get a good one. Don't just do this from, you know, your Mac mail. Otherwise, it sets up this loop from hell where it's like the autoresponse and then another email and then another autoresponse. It's so you have to make sure you do this correctly. But this is a wonderful way, if email is your go-to, to let potential clients know I will get back to you by end of day. This is the time that I return phone calls. I will call you one time. I will email you one time. And then I'm moving on to the next person on the list. We call that shifting the angst in parenting training, right? It's the idea that I'm going to tell you my availability. I need you to make sure you're available at that same time. That's the same principle of having a scheduling widget on your website that only gives away 10-minute consultations. It's this idea that, okay, I'm going to set aside 10 minutes of my time. You need to make sure you're available, potential client. So if you don't have these, then you're still relying on you. And that's what we call a bottleneck. You are a bottleneck in your own business. Again, totally normal. This is where everybody starts. Everybody becomes a bottleneck in their own business as they grow. That's why they call it growing pains, right? So we're trying to get you out of the way. This is a step-by-step checklist that walks you through the entire onboarding process from initial contact to first paid session. And it includes the exact strategies to protect yourself from supervisee shoppers. You know, the people who schedule consultations, ask for documents, maybe even sign a contract or state paperwork, and then ghost you because they went with someone else. The guide includes screening questions, red flags to watch for, email templates, and a reference release form you can use right away. It also covers a new thing boards are looking really closely at about documenting dollar value in work exchange supervision arrangements. Grab it at KateWalkertraining.com/slash bonus. Whether you're supervising now or thinking about it for later, this will save you time and frustration. So asking yourself, where does someone have to wait? Where do they have to think too hard? Right. One of the things I explained if you watch the training replay on the 10-minute consultation, first time clients are calling you in an anxious state. I mean, unless you're the 10th therapist that they've talked to, they are going to talk to a stranger about something that they cannot cope with anymore. Remember, they're coming to you after coping for months or maybe years with this issue and they've had it to hear. And we know when anxiety goes up, cognition goes down, the ability to process information. So you don't have to do this, but if you are going to record yourself talking and explaining and going through your spiel, you know, just imagine it's on the phone. The average client, if they're anxious, is probably only going to collect about eight seconds of information. And that's if you are lucky. Right. And those of you who are couple counselors, you guys know this, right? I explain to couples all the time. When you're in an anxious state, you can maybe grab three to four seconds and really process what the other person is trying to explain to you. So that's what we're stepping back from. We're not going to overexplain everything. We're simply going to give them a framework to make a decision. So where are you answering questions instead of guiding decisions? Right. If they say, well, you know, my neighbor Jan only pays$40. Why is that? Oh gosh, now you're explaining again, right? So understanding that leading with, do you have any questions for me? That's going to take you everywhere. Then you're going to be the one who's anxious. Your ability to guide, your ability to give them that framework is going to go down because you don't have the script in front of you. So again, yeah. So if you're having to explain why you cost X amount of dollars or you don't take X insurance, right? Have that part of your scripts or your template for your email at the very beginning. All right. Now open, I'll go like this, your calendar. This is the tempting part, especially for brand new practitioners. You look at your week and you think, oh my gosh, okay, I've got 20 openings Monday through Friday. And I can schedule somebody Monday morning, Wednesday afternoon, and Friday afternoon. And then you get somebody on the phone brand new, and they say, gosh, you know, I can only come in Saturday morning. And you know, you're like, oh, oh, oh, okay, I can do it this one time. So think about which slots are protected. They're holy. I don't care if it's your kid's soccer game or you're going to church or you're just sipping coffee with a cat on your lap. That is your time. And so if you're over-compromising and over-promising, yeah, it's going to lead to you becoming resentful and burnout. But this session, this coaching is about making money and booking clients. The idea is if you do a one-off session just to get somebody in the door, how likely is it that they're going to even make that appointment? How likely is it that they're going to keep coming at that time? Right. So you end up seeing them at 9 a.m. on Saturday. Well, after a while, they want to sit at home with their cat and drink coffee too. Right. So please remember, anytime you're compromising for you, you're probably causing your potential client to overcompromise as well. So the January traps, squeezing in just one more client, especially if it's at a time you wouldn't normally do that. Offering exceptions before the intake. And I'm going to talk about money again. This is offering sliding fee scales, waiv's, which you should never do, somehow making a compromise during that intake just to get somebody through the door. And that's not going to work out. You can't be it can you can't be consistent with that. It was funny. I had a business coach years and years and years and years ago, and they tried to explain it like airplane seats. And you, if you travel, you know not every seat costs the same, right? If you want to sit up close, that's going to be 75 bucks. If you want to sit in the middle, well, that's going to be 20 bucks. Ones at the back of the plane, you know, those are$10. So if you structure your practice that way, the idea is consistency, right? Say, you know what, these five o'clock slots on Wednesdays, those are prime time. Those I save for my adolescents. I can give that to you, and this is the cost. Well, but my neighbor Jan pays$40. Well, yeah, she comes in at, you know, nine o'clock on Tuesdays, right? And I'm making this up, by the way. You do you. But the idea is to be consistent. If you do a sliding fee scale, use federal poverty standards. Federal poverty standards help you understand what poverty looks like for a family of one, a family of two, a family of five, a family of six, so that you're not just winging it. If somebody says, oh my gosh, you're so expensive, I can't pay that. You can help them understand, okay, well, if you we do offer sliding fee scales at the first session, you need to bring me this information. And then we can look at the chart and see where that falls. Well, can't you tell me on the phone? Not without looking at your income. Breathe, breathe, breathe. It's just like silence during a counseling session, right? You just let that hang because you're explaining where your boundary is instead of over-promising and then regretting it later. So for this week, I just want you to fix one thing. Just like in December, when we built that opt-in, I said, do not touch the opt-in in December. Fix it in January when everybody can take a breath, when all the kids have gone home or whatever, wherever they go, and you have time to dive back in your business. So January, fix one thing. Rewrite, rewrite your auto response. If you use email, figure out how to do a quality autoresponse. If you want to check out the world of website widgets, which I love and I talk about all the time, I love full slate. Full slate has a HIPAA compliant version that has a great widget where you can do 10-minute consultations. As I said, I don't know what texting autoresponders are, but dive into that too. Remove one step from your booking. So whatever that looks like, right, we're removing you as the bottleneck. Adjust your calendar availability. A good rule of thumb is if you already have a client on Tuesday at one, then offer the next client Tuesday at noon or two. And then if they can't make that, offer the next one next to a client you already have. Okay. Keep your clients close together for you. Update one policy sentence. So if that is your rate, if that is your cancellation no show policy, if that is your sliding fee scale policy, rewrite one policy. And oh, by the way, we're having a webinar on Thursday. We're gonna go through policies, intake paperwork, including the new BHEC verbiage. And so you can get all of that cleaned up as well. Thanks for listening. If you haven't grabbed this month's free bonus yet, head to KateWalkertraining.com/slash bonus and get the supervision interview guide. It's the exact process I've used to qualify serious supervisees and avoid wasting time on shoppers. And if you're already supervising and want ongoing support with situations like this, plus templates, live coaching, expert webinars, and CE credits, check out the Step It Up membership at KateWalkertraining.com slash step it up. I'll see you next week. If you love today's episode, be sure to leave a five-star review. It helps other badass therapists find the show and build practices that thrive. Big thanks to Ridgely Walker for our original fun facts and podcast intro, and to Carl Diamella for editing this episode and making us sound amazing. See you next week.