Hello, hello, brave therapist! Thanks for listening to the podcast today.
This is going to be a short one, but I have something that I’m quite excited to share with you, and that is the evolution of my resource list, which has now evolved and grown up to be a proper business directory; in fact, I think the very first and only business directory for psychotherapists.
So I’m not going to make you listen to the whole episode to get the link – I’ll tell you right now, if you want to go check it out, you can go to Directory.ProductiveTherapist.com.
So one of the challenges that we all face as private practice owners is finding good service providers. In fact, this is true throughout our life, whether we’re looking for a good therapist, a virtual assistant, a general contractor, a plumber, it’s just really tough to find somebody that you can trust to solve your problem.
And for most of us, we’re looking for things like marketing specialists, insurance billers virtual assistants, web designers and all kinds of things related to those areas of our private practice.
And you and I both know this: there’s never been more information and resources available on the Internet in the digital age. We just have a flood of possibilities, everything from choosing toothpaste at the grocery store to finding a service provider.
And the challenge now really is related to decision fatigue and the extreme amount of work that it takes to evaluate and choose the best options. So I’m trying to simplify that a bit for you, my friend, my therapist colleague.
And one of the things that I love doing for some reason – I don’t know, it just brings me joy – I love collecting and sharing resources. And I’ve always preferred to promote other people in other businesses versus myself for some reason, and especially when making that connection can help a friend or a colleague.
So this has kind of taken a few forms over time. And it just began with a one page sort of resource list that was on my WordPress website. And I kind of improved it over time and made some fancy dropdown sections for each category. And then I would send that link to anybody who was looking for a CPA or whatever the service was that they were looking for.
And I made sure to only include on that resource list individuals – so freelancers or companies – that specifically provide services to therapists, because there’s tons of web designers, there’s tons of Google AdWords specialists, but I wanted to highlight folks that specifically know our industry and have worked for some time with therapists.
So that was pretty good, but I wanted to make it better. I wanted to make it more searchable and linkable, so I created a database on a platform called Notion – and this is just for my nerd friends out there! – so that created a more flexible and, like I said, searchable place for all of the information.
And that was actually a significant improvement. And we included other things like podcasts and recommended books and even added membership sites and business coaches. So I was pretty happy with that, but still just not feeling like it was exactly what I wanted it to be.
And then I came across a deal on some software on my favorite site called AppSumo.com, which if you haven’t heard of AppSumo.com, it’s a marketplace for – usually – lifetime deals on software that you can use to run your business.
Some of it is really useful for our specific industry; a lot of it’s not. But I found many, many things on there that I use on a regular basis that I paid for once, whether it was $29 or $299, and I don’t have to pay for ever again, so I love that.
But I came across this software program called Brilliant Directories, which, as you can imagine, is a platform that’s created to build all kinds of directories, from alumni directories to business directories to… I guess you can use it for just about anything you want to add a bunch of members to and cause it to be searchable and this nice platform.
So I tasked one of my assistance to help me take everything that was on the Notion database, move it over to this directory, and it adds some kind of fun things, like you can actually review, kind of like Yelp, various different service providers.
The searching capability is much better. And there’s other benefits to it. It looks like I wanted it to look: like an actual searchable, useful directory. And then you can contact those providers directly through the site.
So it’s pretty cool. I’m excited about it. We’re going to make some improvements and improve it over time.
And there’s about, I think, 142 listings on there now, which is pretty darn good. And we’ll keep adding when we find good insurance billing companies, good CPAs, etc, that serve our community, and we’ll just collect all of the best resources for therapists.
So go check it out; it’s Directory.ProductiveTherapist.com.
And definitely get in touch, shoot me a message if you know of an individual or a company that we should add to the directory so we can make it better. And I would love for you to go ahead and share that with all of your therapist, colleagues and friends.
Thanks so much for listening. Have a good one!
