Exactly Where to Start With Passive Income as a Therapist (And Why You're Already Closer Than You Think)

There is a visual schedule sitting in your downloads folder right now. A social story from three months ago. A parent handout you typed from scratch because nothing that existed felt like the right fit. A home program template you've made seventeen versions of. And I want you to know — that is a business. That is already a business. You just haven't looked at it that way yet. Because income beyond the one-to-one doesn't have to be this massive overwhelming mountain you build from scratch. It's already here. And today we're going to find it together.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• Why so many therapists are already sitting on sellable resources and don't even realise it
• The three income streams available to every therapist business — direct work, expertise, and journey — and why knowing where you're starting from changes everything
• Why financial diversification isn't just a nice business strategy — it's how we stop scrambling when clients cancel, when we're sick, when the landscape shifts
• The resource audit to do this week — how to open your folders, sort what you find, and start seeing your existing work completely differently
• Why curiosity (not judgment) is the whole point of this exercise — and how to stay out of shame while you do it
• What I want you to spend the week ideating on before next episode

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to the Freedom Therapist Podcast. Your safe space to learn and unlearn all the things about scaling your business without losing yourself in the process. I'm your host, May of Pucklapovich, a previously vented mental health occupational therapist and business owner who found her way to fall back in love with business and life all over again. Because success doesn't have to come at the cost of your freedom. You're going to get so much chat, a lot of energy, and of course, a little bit of chaos because it comes with the territory. I can't wait. Hello, hello, and welcome back to another episode of the Freedom Therapist Podcast. I hope you've had the most beautiful week. We have had such a busy couple of weeks lately, and something that we've been talking about so often inside the Freedom Therapist Club, and something that I've been talking about with other practitioners in my network is this idea of creating income beyond the one-to-one. And I think that it is feels like such a big topic sometimes. It feels like such a big mountain or big journey that we have to do in our practice. And what I really wanted to go through today is that we can actually start this process. We can start to create that passive income. We can start to create that income that works when you're not in the room, that income beyond the one-to-one. We can start small and you can literally start now. And I would actually almost guarantee that you already have things to sell or ideas to sell inside your Google Drive, inside your Canva folder, inside wherever you store all your client resources, wherever that chaos lives in your desktop, because I'm willing to bet that there is a visual schedule, there is a daily routine chart, there is a social story, there is something that you've made. There's probably several that you've made in the last few months, maybe a parent handout that you've typed out because you couldn't find one that fit well enough, a home program, whatever it is, something that you use a lot in your work and with your clients. And often it just sits there. All of this knowledge, all of this expertise, all of this stuff, it just sits there. It sits there in our folders, it waits, and you know, maybe we tweak it for other people, but we're not really doing anything with it. And literally we are sitting on money that could be made in our practice. We are sitting on resources that could be used to support more people. We're sitting on accessibility that could bring into our business by having lower cost offers and against like our one-to-one sessions and all of those things. And so today I really want to start that process with you. I want you to start thinking about these resources and these things that you already create and start thinking about them in the world of digital products. And I know because I've spoken to so many of you at the moment, there's so many things in the landscape of the therapy space that we potentially can't control right now. But there's so many things that we are sitting on that can start to really protect your income, protect your financial stability, protect your financial security, and start to build towards financial freedom as well. I really think that as therapists, we need to be talking about financial freedom so much more than what we are, because what often happens is we seek so many one-to-one clients, but when we're sick, when we go on leave, when clients cancel and it's not within that cancellation policy, we're then scrambling to try and fill those gaps, to try and make that income so that we can pay our teams, pay ourselves, look after our families, provide for our families. Whereas if we start to think about this in a really sensible and also exciting way about diversifying our income as well, I would almost guarantee that you are sitting on things in your business that you could literally turn into an offer, into a product, into something that you could sell that does not belong, that does not require you to be in the room. So the way that I like to think of this, I like to split this into a couple of ways. And the way that I like to look at diversifying our income, we have our direct client work. That's our one-to-one work. That's the work that it requires us to be in the room. That's the work where we are sitting there with the client and we are trading that time for money. That work is so important in your business. And that is literally the bread of butter, bread and butter of so many of our businesses. It's the work that we love doing, the work that lights us up. And this is not to say that we stop doing that work. You know, maybe one day you might want to, that's totally okay too. But a lot of the time, like a lot of people run their businesses with products and things like that alongside that direct work. So our first income stream is our direct work income stream. Then we go into income stream two. Now, our second income stream is your expertise. This is everything you know, this is everything that you've learned from your experience, from your training, the way you talk about things, the way that you shift perspectives, all of those things, all of that knowledge that you have in your work, that expertise can literally be packaged up into digital offers, products, pre-recorded webinars, workshops, all of that stuff. It's so accessible because you have all of this amazing knowledge that you draw on every single day in your direct work. How can we start looking at this as a stream of income? And so if we start to think about it in this way, I like to look at these as the different ways that you can bring in income in your business, the different opportunities for income streams. So we've got income stream one is your direct client work, income stream two is potentially your expertise, and income stream three is your journey. These are the clients who want to go on that journey with you, who want to be in your world for a long time. It might be like a three-month membership or a six-month membership or an ongoing membership, and they have access to some direct time with you, but also your expertise. Now, this is really supportive for clients because it also means that they can access you in time that works for them. It doesn't rely on you being available, and it also doesn't rely on you being in the room one-to-one. So when I start to think about diversifying our income in our businesses as a therapist, as all of these things, these are the three streams I come back to: your direct, your experience, and your journey income streams. I think this is a really great place to start because when we start to think about it from this perspective, we can start to jump into that really expansive mindset and think, okay, what have I got in my business? Where does my business income stream sit under all of these? And if you were to look at your business right now and you were to look at all the work you're doing, is all of your work sitting under direct client work? Do you maybe have some where you're drawing on your experiences and income stream? Do you have some that are coming on the journey with you? The only way that we can truly start to diversify our income is to know where we're sitting right now. And so many of us are probably only providing direct service as our income stream. And that is absolutely okay. The amount of clients I work with who are only doing direct stream when they first come into my world, like so many of us start from that position because when we are providing a really great direct service, that's when we start to see the gaps that potentially our experience could fill or our journey could fill. Now, what I would love for you to do this week, now that we've gone through what these income streams could look like, I want you to open your Google Drive, open your desktop, open the chaos wherever you store all your resources, all of those things, all of those handouts, those worksheets that we talked about at the start. I want you to open those folders and I want you to have a look at them. I want you to go through them and I want you to sort them into that's direct work, that's my experience, that could be part of a journey. And I want you to start thinking about it from this mindset, from this framework, because this is going to allow you to start to look at your work in a different way. Then as you go through these resources, I want you to maybe think about the top two or three that you really love because we always want to start with a couple that we're going to test. But I want you to think about maybe the top two or three that you really love, that you love providing people with, that you love diving into, and start to think about it from this perspective. Literally just ideate on it. Spend the week thinking about what it could look like, spend the week thinking about how you could deliver it, what parts of it make it really connect with your clients, what do your clients give you feedback on? This is where we're going to start to get really deep on how we can diversify your income streams in your business. Because I would almost guarantee that you have things that are probably already ready to go. Something that someone else could pick up right now and use without you explaining, like your quick win worksheets, there's minimal work for you to get these out into the world. Then there's going to be things that need a quick tidy, there's going to be some raw material. But I want you to start to think about what kind of person uses this, what kind of clients would use this? Do I need to be in the room to deliver this? Because when we can start to ask these questions, when we can be really curious, not judgmental, not thinking that we're behind, not shaming ourselves for not having these out in the world. Yes, I know how we all think sometimes, but when we can actually just be really curious and go, hmm, that could be really cool in that format. That's when your most expansive ideation is going to happen. And once you sit with that for a little bit, then we get to do some really fun stuff. We get to actually think about where we go to next. And next week, that is exactly what I'm going to talk about. We're going to talk about like what these resources could potentially look like as products, what they could look like as a mini course, what they could look like as a workshop, and the different ways that we need to start thinking about these in order to make them a really sustainable, really successful, really beneficial. We actually want these things to be high quality to help our clients stream of income in your business. I think this is such an important conversation for therapists to be having at all stages in our business, at all stages, because we need to be thinking about protecting our own financial security, protecting our own financial stability and freedom, and thinking about ways that our business can continue to expand and work without us being in the room, without that glass ceiling of X amount of hours, X amount of time, X amount of energy. We need to start thinking about this way because it gets to be really exciting. And this is where you get to build a business that actually gets to have that diversified income that you get to be paid and rest at the same time. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. You can make a really big impact and still earn really well as a therapist as well. I would love to hear your thoughts on this episode because I think this is such a big topic in the therapy space. I know we can have so many different opinions on this one too, but I would love to hear your thoughts. If you if you have anything to share on this, please DM me at Miapoco at M-I-A-P-O-K-O. I love hearing all your responses. And honestly, if you got anything from this episode, if you have listened to any of our episodes and you enjoy these episodes, it would mean so, so much to me if you could just leave us a review on the Spotify app, on Apple Podcast app, on wherever you listen. It actually just means so much. It helps this podcast to grow so incredibly much. And I love producing this content for you guys. I love this community. Leaving us a review would be so, so special. And if you really enjoyed it and you feel called to share it on your social media, on your stories, or anywhere else, honestly, from the bottom of my heart, it literally means the absolute world. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for listening. And I'm so excited for next week where we are going to dive into this even more because it's so so good and it gets to be so exciting.