The TeleWellness Hub Podcast

Ep 75 Mastering Work-Life Balance and Practice Growth: Joe Sanok on Time Management, Strategic Planning, and Wellness Counseling

• Martamaria Hamilton • Episode 75

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Discover the secrets to building a thriving practice and achieving work-life balance with Joe Sanok, founder of Mental Wellness Counseling and Practice of the Practice. Joe takes us through his inspiring journey from a solo practitioner to a sought-after consultant, helping countless clinicians find joy and success. Learn about his book, "Thursday is the New Friday," and how it advocates for a flexible work schedule that prioritizes both professional and personal fulfillment.

Unlock efficient time management strategies that can transform your daily routine. Hear about incidents like a school IT issue that threw parents’ schedules into chaos, and learn how to avoid the pitfalls of double-booking. Joe and I share actionable tips on batching tasks, leveraging neuroscience for productivity, and outsourcing non-essential work, all while setting short-term, measurable goals to ensure business adaptability and success.

Plan for your practice's future with our strategic growth advice, aiming for a 25% sales boost. We cover everything from optimizing clinician time to tackling operational challenges like no-shows and insurance policies. Get introduced to essential tools like Asana for project management and discover the resources offered by Practice of the Practice, including their extensive podcast library and a comprehensive 28-step checklist. This episode is packed with insights to help you grow your practice and enhance your well-being.

Website: https://practiceofthepractice.com/

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Marta Hamilton TeleWellness Hub:

Welcome, friends, to the Telewellness Hub podcast, a space where listening is not just a simple passive act, it's an act of self-care. I'm Marni Hamilton, your host, and today you are listening in to my chat with Joe Sanik. As a highly trained clinician with two master's degrees and the founder of Mental Wellness Counseling, joe Sanik, with a master's, has also established himself as a leading figure in private practice consulting through his role as founder and lead consultant at Practice of the Practice. Through this organization, joe helps fellow practitioners achieve their dreams of building successful practices that bring them true joy, and his extensive knowledge and experience have earned him a global reputation as an authority in this field. He is also the acclaimed author of Thursday is the new Friday how to work fewer hours, make more money and spend time doing what you want.

Marta Hamilton TeleWellness Hub:

In addition to being featured in talk to your publications like Harvard business review and Forbes, joe is a frequent guest on podcasts, including the highly popular Smart Passive Income Podcast, which boasts an audience of over 100,000 monthly listeners worldwide, and actually, over the last decade, joe has conducted over 1,000 interviews with some of the world's leading business leaders, scholars and innovators, establishing himself as a highly sought-after interviewer and media personality. Welcome, joe. Hey, marta, glad to be here. So this is full circle, because my first podcast interview ever as a guest was on your podcast, the Practice of the Practice, which is also a top podcast worldwide. I saw that wasn't included in your bio, but I feel like it's definitely worth mentioning. You've accomplished a lot. My first question for you is why do you do the wellness work that you do?

Joe Sanok, Practice of the Practice:

You know, I think it starts with that I didn't know what I was doing in running a practice.

Joe Sanok, Practice of the Practice:

You know, I mean, I started a counseling practice. At the time that I started it, there just weren't a lot of consultants out there and I just was curious I would meet somebody about, say, seo or about how to update your website or marketing, and it was all brand new to me. I didn't go to an MBA program or anything like that and so I'd be learning these things and I just thought other people need to hear this. And so, really early on, I just started recording it and started a podcast. You know, now that's a thousand episodes ago, but launched that, you know, just over 10 years ago.

Joe Sanok, Practice of the Practice:

And it's one of those things that, over time, I realized I really enjoy doing this work of helping people build a thriving practice they absolutely love. And so it's interesting how, when it started, it was just to help my own practice to grow that, to help my own clients to have better SEO, inbound marketing, things like that, so that the people we wanted to serve could find us. But then now we get to help thousands of therapists do that same thing, and so just I think that scalability side of it I sold my practice in 2019. And so just I think that scalability side of it you know, I sold my practice in 2019.

Marta Hamilton TeleWellness Hub:

And so now I get to support wellness providers that are growing their private practices.

Marta Hamilton TeleWellness Hub:

Yeah, you know, and I was one of those providers originally, so it's interesting the evolution of how things grow. I never imagined myself having a podcast doing tele-wellness hub I was just trying to launch my practice so it's incredible how your endeavor really has this butterfly effect, this ripple effect of touching so many lives of other wellness providers in all arenas. I know you work with people in the mental health space and outside of that as well, people trying to amplify their voice, reach more people and transform more lives ultimately. So there are probably so many people listening, perhaps who's who are interested in mental health and wellness, who maybe their providers have followed some of your tools and tips and maybe I think that's really cool to be a part of that. And you know when, when I was talking a little bit about your bio talk and right now and you sharing about helping thousands of providers and the scalability aspect outside from running a practice, doing website, helping people with SEO and writing a book, can you share a little bit about that transition? Yeah?

Joe Sanok, Practice of the Practice:

I think I noticed I was covering the same thing over and over in consulting and also in our membership communities, and there's a barrier to access there, where you know if I'm covering these same things. I wanted to have a way that if people can't spend $1,000 a month to work with me or someone from our team or you know, they can't spend a couple hundred dollars a month to be in one of our membership communities, how do they get at least the basic information while also taking these concepts that seem unique to private practice but really can help people in general business as well? So I didn't want to lose my current audience as I wrote the book. So that was, first and foremost, the people that listen to the podcast, the people that are in therapy practices and in wellness practices. I wanted them to be able to come along while also saying these aren't just unique to us, and so I actually worked with a writing coach to really sort through. You know what was it that was most unique about what I was saying? And over and over we just came back to.

Joe Sanok, Practice of the Practice:

You know I don't like working that much. I mean, I enjoy the work I do, but my life isn't defined, my ego is not defined by who I am At a party. If someone asks what I do, sure I tell them, but that's not central to who I am, even though the list of stuff you said it's great that I've been featured all those places. Ultimately, I want to help people. I want to help my family, I want to be able to live a life that I have flexibility, that if my kid gets sick, that it's not the end of the world or that I'm worrying about how many vacation days I have to count in a year. I want to be able to have that flexibility and also offer that to other people, either our consulting clients or our employees.

Joe Sanok, Practice of the Practice:

And so, as I think about the book, it was well then, how do I conceptualize that? And so we broke it up into three parts, as many nonfiction books are, and the first part is identifying what's already inside of you, your internal inclinations, then moving into slowing down, which the research has found if you slow down before you try to do really big work, you do better work. You know, our aha moments come when we're taking a shower, when we're out for a walk, it's not when we're stressed out and maxed out. And then after that, how do we absolutely kill it? And so that metaphor of the four-day work week or working less and saying how do we do that? Either practically or in saying I'm really busy, I can't quite do that, but how do I incorporate the neuroscience into how I work so I can work smarter? Those are the things that just really amped me up as I wrote the book.

Marta Hamilton TeleWellness Hub:

And that's so important with burnout being so high and with providers. Right now, it looks like 90% of private practice providers are women. A majority of them 75% have stated they're burnt out because of the many roles that they play. Like you mentioned. I don't think it's unique to women. Like you mentioned, you want to be able to be a parent and show up for your kids and be able to show up for your clients as well, to be present and really work on all the things the continuing education, the ethical and legal standards when it comes to notes and billing and all the things. But also be able to show up, like you mentioned, with intention and looking at those internal inclinations is so helpful for providers. But you're right, it's not unique, necessarily just to our field, so I love that you were able to really hit a large audience with that.

Marta Hamilton TeleWellness Hub:

When it comes to scaling, you mentioned something that I think is helpful for providers, especially because we work under the billable hour right, like we have allotted times for providers where we can even try to squeeze in. You know, taking a sip of water bio break, like our time is really really important as providers, but also for the general audience, for people who are looking at how to scale using time. How can you scale using time? Any tips and insight for us?

Joe Sanok, Practice of the Practice:

Yeah, I think one thing that I see all the time and whether it's my consulting with people that are growing practices or even solo practices in our next level practice program is people don't have the point of view Usually I don't want to make a universal statement, but usually people don't have the point of view that every minute I'm working is time that I'm stealing from my family, I'm stealing from my life, I'm stealing from my hobbies, I'm stealing from just my own wellness, and so if we had that level that you are taking from a different area of your life, that means that when you dink around and you don't so burned out that you're doing work, that you make mistakes. Like even just you know, over the last couple of days, my daughters there was this big IT thing that happened in their school system and you know so they were given school off for two days in addition to the break that we just had. Yeah, like they, who knows what was going on? Like even the principal I ran into him at the barbershop and he's just like I don't even know what's going on. It's so classified. And so I'm dealing with these kids. I've got all these podcasts going on and two different groups of people were trying to just schedule something socially and they both scheduled the same day at the same time and I told both of them that I was free during that time because nothing was in my calendar and literally within about half an hour of each other, both groups with like 10 or 15 people had confirmed that time. So it wasn't just like me and a friend. I worked poorly when I was stressed, because now I'm double booked with two groups I care deeply about and I still, at the moment of this recording, don't know who I'm going to peace out on. Am I going to split my time? We do that all the time in our business, where we're checking emails at night, we're making mistakes, we're submitting insurance claims that get rejected because we put the wrong code in.

Joe Sanok, Practice of the Practice:

If you honestly just went and watched Netflix and then woke up the next day and did stuff or whatever you do for your own downtime, you'd probably do a better job with it. So I would start with make sure, when you're working, that you are working well, that you're using the neuroscience to actually inform how to do better work during that time, that you're using the neuroscience to actually inform how to do better work during that time that you're batching your time, that you're doing sprints, that you're understanding that, hey, you could do a 45-minute session, always end on the 45 minutes because you're in that 45 to 52 minutes, and schedule your next session right after that and then do three of those and then do all your progress notes at once for those three or four sessions and then do that very efficiently. There's ways that we can structure our time to be billable, even if we're just a solo practice. Then I would also start to look at what are those areas that you should not be doing in your practice. You may enjoy it, you may like it, but that you really should be outsourcing it. So typically it's answering the phones, scheduling intakes, updating our website, writing. Typically it's answering the phone, scheduling intakes, updating our website, writing blog posts, marketing, even scheduling, networking things. Those are all things you could be spending $20 to $35 an hour to have someone go through a list of.

Joe Sanok, Practice of the Practice:

Okay, I want you to just look at all the people that don't see couples on psychology today. I want you to reach out to them on my behalf and try to get some coffee dates with me. That may take that person three hours and at $40 an 40 bucks an hour. You know that's 120 bucks an hour that you're, or 120 bucks you're paying for three hours. That's one counseling session with a mild paying insurance payment. So you just multiplied your time from one hour of counseling to pay for three hours of networking. So as we start to think about that scalability it's not always hiring clinicians that may be part of the equation but even saying what's extra draining for me, what's a not great use of my time, and how do I make sure that almost everything I'm doing is either billable or increasing the overall billing of the practice?

Marta Hamilton TeleWellness Hub:

I love that. And so when you, it's all a numbers game, right, it sounds like you're just looking at how can I maximize my time? How much time do I need, what is my time worth, to looking at that and being able to slow down, probably, so you're not so stressed out and just trying to do the day-to-day things to be able to figure that out. And that probably goes back to those internal inclinations what do I want to be spending my time doing? How do you then? What's your approach to actual goal setting and measuring that progress, especially in a successful practice?

Joe Sanok, Practice of the Practice:

Yeah, so when we work with business owners, one thing we look at is their annual plan. I hate three to five year strategic plans because who you were three years ago, marta, is way different. I knew you three years ago the way you thought three years ago, marta is way different.

Joe Sanok, Practice of the Practice:

I knew you three years ago. Oh yeah, the way you thought three years ago. Like if we had decided what you're doing today based on who Marta was three years ago, you would think too small, and so to me it's important to do like six to 12 months, and so what that looks like typically is looking at two, maybe three key performance indicators, and so oftentimes that's around sales or how much money is coming into the practice, and so oftentimes that's around sales or how much money is coming into the practice. Time is usually one of them. And then sometimes we have an extra kind of goal, like we want to launch an e-course or we want to launch something that's a little more scalable beyond the practice. Maybe we're hiring people in. So then we have what are those measures for each of those goals? So those KPIs, key performance indicators. Now we want to look at what projects need to happen quarter by quarter. So if you're, say, planning at the end of the year, you're looking for quarters one through four of next year, say you want to boost sales, you want to grow by 25%, one project might be optimizing your own time as one of the primary clinicians. It might be that we also look at are there ancillary services that we could offer, either through your time or through someone else? It may be that you look at hiring in a couple clinicians into the practice. It may be that you look at some income that you're doing presentations for local businesses through their HR department, and so we want to usually establish three or four projects that are going to support that.

Joe Sanok, Practice of the Practice:

Now, the important thing is, these aren't all your own projects typically. So it may be that part of boosting your sales is to look at your no-show rate. Say, you're at 20% no-show and you're not collecting on that. Well then, we need to have a project around just the operations of collecting when someone no-shows and looking at do all the insurances allow us to do that? If you're billing insurance, there are some insurances that don't allow you to collect for no-shows, so do we want to be on those insurances? So that might be, you know, quarter one we're going to evaluate all the insurances and decide which ones are not allowing us to bill, and this might be an executive assistant you have. Do that project. You know.

Joe Sanok, Practice of the Practice:

Step two of quarter two might be that they then contact you know each of those insurances that don't allow you to collect, to find out what's the process for moving off of those insurances and moving into out-of-network types of benefits. It might be that we in quarter two send a letter to all of our clients saying moving forward, we're collecting for no-shows because right now we're at 20% no-show and we're not collecting, so we're going to start collecting on that and then maybe we also have part of that project, be that that executive assistant is looking at you know what are the best practices to reduce no-shows. Like you give them that project, let them take it on, let them research it, watch YouTube videos. They may then come up with ideas like okay, if we just had a dedicated phone that was for texting people to remind them of their sessions, or to use different platforms to text people to remind them, or can we set that up through our EHR? There may be just little things that in the onboarding if you check, do you want text updates and then they automatically get a reminder. Maybe you reduce your no-shows by 15%. So that would be an example of a project that then supports making more money. And then we might also look at okay, what's our out-of-network fee? Is that in line with where we should be. Maybe we need to raise it by 25%, so those projects then support the bigger KPI, and now we have, quarter by quarter, what we need to be working on, and we can then say I'm not going to think about all the other things until I get to that quarter.

Joe Sanok, Practice of the Practice:

And so, for example, in practice to practice, one thing that we recognize one of our KPIs is around operations, and the number we gave it was our COO, sam, so she was getting sucked into five to 10 meetings a week. Our KPI is that she is in only one meeting a week. That's not necessary, like there's just some fire she needs to put out, and that any new project takes one meeting to launch the new project, that we bring the team together, we have the conversation and then we say when do we need to meet to look at the progress of this? So very functional meetings. So part of that KPI, then, is we need a better communication system. We're using Trello for a long time.

Joe Sanok, Practice of the Practice:

And then her quarter one was research the heck out of project management systems. So we ended up landing on Asana. There's lots of other ones out there. So then her next step in that project was that sam learns asana and then she teaches two key people on the team how to use asana, pokes holes in it so that me and other team members aren't learning it and like I don't get this and they can't answer questions, like they need to master it before they teach us. So then by the end of quarter one, you know we're all on board with this.

Joe Sanok, Practice of the Practice:

We're all using asana. That's how we communicate. You know we're all on board with this. We're all using Asana. That's how we communicate. Now you know she has to then, early on, do some teaching, even to me to say stop texting me, stop sending me a WhatsApp, do it in Asana. It's like okay, like I'm not supposed to do that except for in Asana. So when we start to create these systems and very clear measures, it then limits the amount that we need to work on because we know, okay, quarter one we have, I have these four projects. I'm working on everything else. I need to be doing therapy wise. My executive assistant is doing these things. We're going to check in every week, every other week, see where they're at, where they're stuck, and then we're going to move forward on it.

Marta Hamilton TeleWellness Hub:

Hmm, yeah, you know, so much of what you described to to me sounded like you're confronting challenges with curiosity, right, like instead of just, I think, so often just human nature. We can get distraught, we can feel guilt, we can feel unsettled or we even just feel discouraged, like, okay, I can't. Like. You mentioned the insurance. You know I can't bill insurance when there's a no-show and just kind of give up, but I love that you're confronting it, a challenge, with curiosity. I'm curious, you know, I keep going back to the internal inclination because I love that.

Marta Hamilton TeleWellness Hub:

I love the motivations behind you know what it helps you propel forward, because I recently had a colleague talk about you know, passions. Passions can go up and down, they wane they, they change their. Your passion, it depends on the day, so many things, but your true motivation on why you do something, that is what really kind of sustains and propels you forward. Um, what do you see are the biggest blocks and challenges for people to identify? You know what am I? Is this a block for me? Um, kind of like you know, instead of me, instead of facing these challenges with curiosity, I'm meeting X, y and Z feeling or thought or belief system. What are some of those that you've identified when working with people.

Joe Sanok, Practice of the Practice:

Yeah, I'm glad you bring it back to the internal clinicians, because when we were doing the research for the book and looking at it, we found that there's really only three things that top leaders do on a regular basis, and for a lot of them it comes naturally. And that's why we've created this assessment that goes along with that chapter in the book to say, like, where are you at in regards to these internal inclinations? And the reason is it's not pass fail, it's not like if you don't have one of them that you're not a good leader. It just means, okay, that doesn't come natural for me and I need to work on that. And so, just big picture, the three internal inclinations are curiosity, an outsider approach and the ability to move on it. And so with curiosity for example, people that are top leaders, they don't have this pass fail mindset Say, you run a Google ad campaign and you don't get the outcomes that you want Someone that has a pass fail mindset can be like man, I just dropped two grand on that and I wasted that money. I could have used that on a family vacation, whereas someone that has moved into curiosity to say OK, what did we learn from this? We learned what people don't want. We learned that these landing pages really aren't converting. People click. They get stuck there. We need to improve that. Let's do another round of some A-B testing for it.

Joe Sanok, Practice of the Practice:

You know the ability to move on it. You know people that overthink things and are paralyzed by perfection. That doesn't help you. You know in grad school when you're working on your thesis or you're working on your dissertation, yeah, you want that to be perfect. You don't want to stand in front of your committee and defend it and have them tear it to pieces. You want to feel really strong about it.

Joe Sanok, Practice of the Practice:

But most of the time in business we can adjust. We can put out a minimum viable product, get feedback and move quickly on it instead of overthinking it. And that outsider perspective we know that statistically, outsiders have more influence than insiders. You even think about maybe when you're younger and didn't have your own business and you got a new job. Oftentimes that new person is able to question things in a way that those that are already there can't question it.

Joe Sanok, Practice of the Practice:

I remember I started working at a community college and they were still like handwriting every progress note in the counseling department and then filing those notes by the day that the person came in, not even by their last name. So if I wanted to find out where they were, I'd have to, like, look at a handwritten calendar, when did Jane Smith come? And they're like well, she came in May. Okay, pull that one, it was just bonkers. And so these three internal inclinations, if we can just figure out where we at and then say I'm going to work on that first, it then sets us up to be able to slow down, well, and then to absolutely kill it.

Marta Hamilton TeleWellness Hub:

Yeah, I love that you know. When it comes to then, a practical approach or orientation for creating that perfect practice, this is more for providers, because ultimately, when providers have that ultimate perfect practice, I mean it's just allows everyone to thrive, right. It's just so much fulfillment in their work and so many lives touched. Maximized opportunities for appointments and trainings to enhance the client experience. What are some practical approaches for creating the perfect practice that you can describe? We already know like okay, it looks like looking at your motivations, taking the assessment that you have, slowing down any other tips that you can provide?

Joe Sanok, Practice of the Practice:

Yeah, and it's most simple. There's only two things you need to worry about. One is how do people find you? And two is what happens next? Like, if you just simplify it to that almost everything in a practice falls in one of those categories. How do people find you? And two is what happens next? Like if you just simplify it to that almost everything in a practice falls in one of those categories. How do people find you? They went on tele-wellness hub and they searched and they found your name on there and said, well, I think I could work with that person. They Googled something. They asked on Facebook does anyone know a good child therapist? You know they texted their friends. How do they find you?

Joe Sanok, Practice of the Practice:

So that's the marketing, that's the branding, that's the just public facing things that you do of general awareness that you exist. And then what happens next? That's the clinical track of they come in for an intake or they call your front desk or they drop an email, or maybe you have an online calendar. You have operations there, you have the clinical work you do and hopefully you have some sort of surveying. Maybe it's a text message after the third session hey, we just want to check in to see how your clinical experience is going. Then what happens when people are done with counseling so that they want to refer to you? Do we have any sort of quality assurance? Do we check in on that side too?

Joe Sanok, Practice of the Practice:

So if we just simplify it to that and say what can I do right now? What's one thing that I can do in the side of how do people find me? Okay, there's some awareness building. Maybe it's networking, maybe it's this month You're going to just focus on that. What's one thing you can do in regards to people coming in.

Joe Sanok, Practice of the Practice:

Maybe you evaluate the intake process. How do they reach out, and then what happens? And then we just start to work on those things and say what are the best practices? We don't need to do it all at once. You can say this month I'm going to work on just networking and people knowing that I exist in that way, and then this month I'm going to work on what happens. Next I'm going to implement a survey after session three and maybe start super simple where it's like very confidential, but you just use a Google form so there's no identifying information in there, so you don't need to worry about all the business associates agreements. You look for that low hanging fruit. So keeping it simple, because there are a million things you can do to grow your practice, but really we just want to look at those two sides of the coin.

Marta Hamilton TeleWellness Hub:

I love keeping it simple. I think it's so easy to overcomplicate things and it's wonderful to have access to information, but it can be very overwhelming, right? Because we can get overwhelmed by our own Google searches and the multiple things that show up and the things that we are shown on different media platforms. So I love that you're keeping it simple and I am a true testament. I feel like I wouldn't do this interview justice. I found Joe many years ago, after my twins were born, and I just had this dream of how could I use my time differently and still be a therapist so I can be at home with my kids. And I Googled and I found Joe and I love that you break it down and keep it simple for people to really find a roadmap to find success. So I love that that you share with everyone. How can people connect with you? What's the best way?

Joe Sanok, Practice of the Practice:

Yeah, so practiceofthepracticecom. We have a ton of resources. We do a bunch of behind the scenes things like website design, social media management. We have one-on-one consulting and membership communities, so poke around on the website. The podcast is Practice of the Practice, super easy to find. We have over a thousand episodes there, so there's bound to be a few things that you'll enjoy. I'd say one of the best things that can be helpful is we have a 28-step checklist for people just getting started, or if you want to audit your practice to say, hey, did I do everything right? Sometimes you know you do your best at the beginning and you miss a couple things, and so the best way to download that is over at practiceofthepracticecom forward, slash, new and then you can just go through that checklist to make sure that you got everything right. You'll get some emails also walking you through those steps to just audit your practice and think through the best way to continue to grow.

Marta Hamilton TeleWellness Hub:

Awesome. I'd love to include that checklist actually in the show notes so we'll make sure to include all that information for people so people can find you and just really learn and grow. It's been amazing to watch all that you have done too over the years to help providers and beyond right With your book, with your guest episodes on other podcasts like the Smart Passive Income podcast. So really appreciate all the work that you do and thank you for being a part of our wellness journey.