80 I Setting Up an Online Myofunctional Therapy Practice: The Business Diagnostic

Are you running your online myofunctional therapy practice on a foundation that can actually hold clients, or are you marketing on top of a missing base? 

Hi friend,

Most trained myofunctional therapists start in exactly the same place. They finish their training, they build a website, they set up an Instagram account, they start posting, and then months go by with no consistent clients and no clear answer for why. The problem is almost never the clinical skills. It is almost always a short list of business fundamentals that nobody covered in the training course, and most therapists do not realize they are missing them until they have spent years frustrated and quietly wondering if they made a mistake.

In this episode, Carmen walks you through the exact business diagnostic she runs with every single student inside The Profitable Myofunctional Therapist before they do anything else. Marketing, visibility, content — none of it works until the foundational pieces are in place. This is your honest self-assessment: business name, structure, EIN, payment processing, website, offer, Google Business Profile, Google Analytics, and more. You will walk away knowing exactly where your gaps are and what to work on next.

This episode is for the trained myofunctional therapist who is doing all the things and still wondering why nothing is connecting.

Grab your ☕coffee and your courage — and let's dive in!

Xo,

💙 Carmen

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Transcript

From Training To Real Business

SPEAKER_00 1:11

You've finished your training. You might even have a website, an Instagram account. Maybe you've been posting. Maybe you've been consuming a lot of content. Maybe you've been telling yourself that you just need a little more clarity before you start. But here's what I know after almost a decade of working with myelfunctional therapists. The problem rarely comes down to clinical skills. What it comes down to is business fundamentals. And most of these are not taught in any of your myofunctional therapy training courses. And a lot of you guys don't realize that they're missing until you've spent six months, a year, three years, six years frustrated and quietly wondering if this whole thing is a sham and you have just been wasting your time. If you're a burned out, bored dental hygienist who knows that you can't do this forever, or you've already taken myofunctional therapy training but feel stuck on how to actually start, grow, or simplify your business, welcome my friend. You're in the right place. I'm Carmen, a dental hygienist who once sat exactly where you are. And wanting the fastest, simplest, most organized path forward with someone holding my hand along the way. This podcast is for women who don't want more information. They want transformation. They want clarity, consistent clients, predictable income. Without building a business that takes over their life, they also want support while they do it. So if you're ready to stop spinning, start moving, and finally make sense of what comes next, grab your coffee and your courage, my friend. Let's build a business that works for your life, not one that runs it, so that you can build a life that you're genuinely bonkers about. Because that's my superpower. You finished your training. You might even have a website, an Instagram account. Maybe you've been posting. Maybe you've been consuming a lot of content. Maybe you've been telling yourself that you just need a little more clarity before you start. But here's what I know after almost a decade of working with myofunctional therapists. The problem rarely comes down to clinical skills. What it comes down to is business fundamentals. And most of these are not taught in any of your myofunctional therapy training courses. And a lot of you guys don't realize that they're missing until you've spent six months, a year, three years, six years frustrated and quietly wondering if this whole thing is a sham and you have just been wasting your time. So today I am giving you the business diagnostic. So this is actual, this is the actual assessment that I do with every um client in my profitable myofunctional therapist business coaching program. It's the first thing that we do before we do anything else. Marketing, visibility, content, none of it works until the foundational pieces are in place. So before you record another reel or create an Instagram post or an Instagram carousel, I want you to run through this list with me and get honest with yourself about where you really are. So grab something to write with.

The Business Diagnostic Framework

SPEAKER_00 5:29

Okay. So you cannot market your way out of a missing foundation. More visibility, you know, all of you guys just want clients, clients, clients. And if you have a broken system or no system at all, all you're doing is bringing people to a broken system, which causes more problems. Okay. So this is not meant to be an exercise, uh, a shame exercise, if you will. It is meant to open your eyes to the facts, okay? Data, data, data, data. This is what I'm always saying to my clients. Data tells you what you have to fix. I'm a decade into my business, it's very successful, and there are still pieces that I have to fix and improve all the time. So that's what we are looking at. So let's just get into it. I have a long list here. Um, and this, like I said, this is exactly what I go through with my clients. So I want you to just write these down and check them off, okay? So the first one, I'm not gonna spend a bunch of time here, but if you do not have clinical confidence, if you do not have clinical competency, that's where you have to start, okay? You cannot check this off. Everything else is gonna come back to this, okay? So go back to your training, go refresh your training, take a different training, whatever you need to do. Of course, I would tell you to go get in uh LMT60, learn myfunctional therapy in 60 days or less. But regardless, okay, this is non-negotiable. If you took a training class five years ago and you really do not feel comfortable or competent, you have to start here. So that's item number one. Next, business name. You gotta have a business name, okay? Um, is it available? Did you check? Okay. Did you check with your state? Did you check with the US Patent and Trademark Office to make sure that you're using a name that's available? I've had several clients who, you know, built

Confidence First Then Legal Setup

SPEAKER_00 7:35

all of their brand, built their logo, built everything about their business, and then found out that the name was not available. So you got to check that. Business structure. Okay, yes, legally you can operate as a sole proprietor. I'm not giving you tax or legal advice, um, but there is a benefit or more protection if you have um, say, like a structure like an LLC, you, but you want to check into that. Most of us do have LLCs because there are some protective mechanisms there, but you have to operate them correctly, meaning you you have to separate, you know, business and personal. Okay. So business structure. Next is your tax ID. You got to have this. Doesn't take very long, 10 minutes. Go to um irs.gov and you can get it. Next, a dedicated business checking account. This is important. So one of the things that I teach my students or my coaching clients is I teach them how to use the profit first system. So actually, they have five checking accounts. But if you want to start with one or if you want to get the book, Profit First, and read it, you'll understand why you need so many checking accounts. But the most important, my friend, is at least you have to have one business account. Okay. I keep meeting several of you guys who are just commingling it with your personal money. And that is no way. That's not, that's not being a leader of your company. That's not thinking like a CEO. Got to have a checking account. Uh, next, payment processing. So this is gonna be something like Stripe. Again, it doesn't take you very long. You have to have your tax ID number, you have to have your bank account information. But this payment processor is going to be the middleman between Susie Q putting in her credit card and the money ending up in your bank. That third-party processor, typically a Stripe, um, they they charge a fee. So obviously it's not free for them to do it. Um, and it varies. So you'll you'll want to uh check into that. I think it's 2.9% plus maybe like 30 cents per transaction. Again, it varies also if it's an international transaction, all of that kind of stuff, but you gotta have it. It is necessary. So put that on your list. Business email address. And I don't mean from your Gmail from 2009, okay? I don't mean something that says Suzy Q loves knitting, okay? We need a business professional email tied to your domain. You need insurance, okay. Um, many of you guys, especially if you're seeing if you have a practice and you have a physical location and you don't have business insurance, that's a concern because you probably need to have a general liability policy also. So you want to talk to your insurance person. Um, next website. So this is a biggie, and it is really important that A, you have one, B, you be building one if you don't. And one of the biggest things is that it needs to clearly explain who you help and what you do. Okay. If somebody lands on your website cold and they can't figure it out in five seconds of if is this person for me, then they're gonna bounce and you don't want that. Next, logo and brand identity. This does not have to be fancy, but you do need something that is consistent.

Money Systems Email And Insurance

SPEAKER_00 12:20

Your logo, your colors, your fonts, how do you want people to feel? Like there's a whole lot of brand psychology, color psychology, all of that kind of stuff. You can go dig into it, but you need to have it, okay? And have it somewhere, like just have a folder that says brand assets. And and that way you'll know exactly what your six-digit hex code is or whatever for your brand colors, okay? Uh, and also on a note of brand colors, we're not 10, okay, like a dark, a light, maybe again, you can

Website Brand Scheduling And Client Files

SPEAKER_00 12:56

go research, you can find a complete uh palette, if you will, of colors, but you don't want you're not going to just be working with a dozen different colors. Okay. Next, scheduling software. So how does somebody get on your calendar? Yes, it's gonna cost you money, and that's okay. There's there is there is money to be spent when you're setting up a business that you're gonna run in the future. Okay, so you're setting things up now for the company you want in the future. Client, this is the same for client management system. So where are your client files, um, intake forms, notes, all of that kind of stuff? How are you setting that up? Again, you want to be setting that up now for the client that's coming down the pike. I have students who are in my PMT coaching program and have been in business for years, and we're setting this stuff up now. Okay, they were just kind of barely scooting by, having, you know, by by the skin of their teeth. Now we are setting up their systems so that when all those customers start coming in, they have standard operating procedures. They know exactly um what the process looks like, they know exactly where their forms are, they're very organized. Okay, so that's your client management system. If you don't have that, gotta work on that. Legal forms. So this is a biggie. Did you know that if you do not have the right legal forms on your website, that Google's not even gonna index you? So things like your privacy policy, um, your website policy, all of that kind of stuff needs to be on your website. All right, next. Do you know your ideal customer? You hear me banging on this drum all the time, and I'm not gonna stop. Do you know who you are talking to? Not just anybody with a person, a pulse, not just anybody who needs myo, one specific person. This is so big because once you know who that person is, then you can create your irresistible offer. So this is very important. I don't want to just know your prices, I want to know your unique myofunctional experience, what makes you different? Okay, a clear description of what's included in your therapy, everything. How are you delivering it? What's that client fulfillment look like? Are you recording the sessions? Are you sending them an email? Do they get homework? Um, do they get

Legal Policies Ideal Client And Offer

SPEAKER_00 15:31

detailed explanation of the exercises? What does that look like? What sets you apart? Who are you selling it to? And what is that offer? Okay. Once you know all of that, then and only then, my friend, can you think about marketing? I know so many of you guys go jump out there and put something on Instagram and you're um and you're not even consistent with it. So that in and of itself is bad for the algorithm or bad for you to grow because consistency is a real key piece. But if you don't know any of this stuff, if you don't know who, you don't know the value of your package, then how can you market it? Okay. So once you have that figured out, you can do a marketing plan, you can set up your social media accounts, Google Business Profile. This is a biggie on your list. This is a big visibility thing. And most of you guys do not have it set up or do not have it set up correctly. So put a double or a triple star next to that. This one as well, Google Analytics. This has to be installed on your website. If you are not using this, you are flying blind on who is finding you, how, where they're coming from. Just today, I went to my Google Analytics and was able to get information exactly on how many people land on my uh on the calendar page for my getting unstuck calls and how many people are booking. So those that data would not be available to me if I did not have Google Analytics. You have to, A, you have to have it, it has to be installed, and you have to know how to use it. And then last, I think it's important when you do your business diagnostic to know exactly where you are. So many of you guys haven't really had a lot of business, or maybe it's been inconsistent, and you don't know how many clients that you have served to date, and you don't know gross revenue to date. So those are really important.

Visibility Tools Google Profile Analytics

SPEAKER_00 17:37

So, what do you do with this information? So, you if you have written this down and mark off what you have, what you've got done, and then you can identify the gaps. This tells you what you should be working on. Like I was just saying, if you do not know who your who is and you do not know what your irresistible offer is, then posting on Instagram doesn't make a lot of sense, okay? That's the biggest thing. And the most common mistake is that you guys are skipping the foundation and you are trying to go straight to visibility, straight to marketing. And that's why you feel like you're just doing everything, doing everything, doing everything and getting nowhere. The other thing is, is if you're doing things that are just out of order, for example, one of my students recently, um, we had talked about her website, but we hadn't gone over, we still haven't gone over a complete website analysis. But when her and I did her getting on stuck call, I told her some things that I had found in my research. So she had hired somebody to fix her website, which is really great, but she got ahead of herself

Fix The Gaps In The Right Order

SPEAKER_00 18:48

because we haven't even worked on her who and her offer, her pricing. So it's really important that everything be congruent and your message be the same. When somebody lands on your website, that person, that one person that you're talking to, they need to see it and feel it that you are talking directly to them. So you have to know what that is before you can be putting it on the website, right? So that's a lot. But the good thing is, is it tells you exactly where to look. So you don't have to just stay stuck. It that the business diagnostic just kind of gives you that little push so that you know what to do, what is the next step to take when it comes to your business. So every single thing on that list, I have to tell you the business setup, the offer, the marketing, the visibility, sales systems, um, the operations, the metrics. These are all things that we build inside of the profitable myofunctional therapist. So we don't do it all at once. We do it, that would be overwhelming. So I do it in a kind of a step-by-step thing, one at a time, so that we are building your real operating business one piece at a time. Okay. So if you go through this diagnostic and you see that you have a ton of stuff that's missing, then take you've got two options really. Take that information and just go start checking it off. Do the work. Or you can, if you want help with that, then absolutely I am your gal to help with that. The first place that you should start with is booking your unstuck call because sometimes that free 45-minute session gets you just a little bit more wind in your sails and it gets you just a little bit further down the road. Obviously, you can also join me inside the Profitable Myofunctional Therapist. So, either way, I just laid out the diagnostic for you so you can see in plain black and white exactly what you need to work on next. So, my friend, that is all I have for you today. Take the information from that diagnostic and use it to take massive action. I have given you week number one from the Profitable Myofunctional Therapist, and it has a ton of value. Now do the work. Like I said, if you want more help with this, I'm your gal. You know where to find me. Now, in the meantime, go build

Get Support Unstuck Call And Community

SPEAKER_00 21:20

a life you are bonkers about, and I will be back soon and we will talk about all the fun things starting, growing, and simplifying your myofunctional therapy business. I'll see you then. I hope you loved today's episode, friend. I pray that it lifted you up, motivated you, and taught you something. If so, would you stop right now and go to Apple Podcasts and leave us a review? And lastly, make sure you've joined the profitable myofunctional therapist Facebook community. Links to all the goodies can be found wherever you're listening to this podcast. That's it for now. Cheering you on, my friend, and we'll chat soon.