What is Being Seen and how might it boost your private practice?
Paul Fugelsang talks with Annie Schuessler, therapist and host of the Therapist Clubhouse podcast, about the idea behind Being Seen on the most recent episode.
Paul mentions how the idea for Being Seen grew from the feedback he received from therapists who participate in Open Path Psychotherapy Collective, the affordable psychotherapy nonprofit organization he founded in 2012:
Paul: Many [Open Path Psychotherapy Collective] therapists over the years have said, “Hey, you’re doing such a good job of sending us low-fee clients, can you also send us full-fee clients?”
Unlike Open Path, we’re not inventing something new here, but what we thought we could do was change up the model and get a little bit more creative, and help therapists more in the process.
Annie: So it offers more support, and it looks very modern…What else is different about [Being Seen]?
Paul: Creating a modern, good-looking website was really important to us because for so many [therapists], a website is their calling card. So we wanted to give them a site that looked really good.
We also offer incentives to Being Seen therapists to join. One of those is a lifetime discount to the Zur Institute CE courses, a 20% discount. We also have an online wellness classes that are designed for clients. Classes like Anger Management and Relationship Skills and Meditation and Anxiety & Stress Reduction. They’re fun, interesting, and engaging. All of our Being Seen therapists have access to these classes and they can give a code to their clients. Additionally, we offer training videos from Psychotherapy.net: every month we offer a different video.
The larger company that does this has become saturated, especially in larger cities, and it’s easy to never have your profile be seen.
So what we’re doing with Being Seen is capping our limit of therapists by population size. This guarantees that one’s profile is going to come up in the first pages. In a big city like New York, we’re only letting a maximum of 300 therapists in. We don’t want anyone’s profile to be buried on page 20.
Listen to Paul’s full conversation with Annie about his own private practice beginnings, the creation of Open Path Psychotherapy Collective, and more about Being Seen.
Learn more about Annie Schuessler and her private practice coaching service.