Perry: In this episode of the Therapist experience, I’m speaking with Melvin Varghese from selling the couch and the health casters. This is the Therapist Experience, episode number 44. Welcome to the Therapist Experience. The podcast where we interview successful therapists about what it’s really like starting and growing a private practice. I’m Perry Rosenbloom, the founder of Brighter Vision, and I’m so excited to introduce our guest today Melvin Varghese from selling the couch and the health casters. Melvin, are you prepared to share your therapist experience?

Melvin: Let’s do it, Perry.

Perry: Fantastic.

Melvin: I’m so excited to have you here on the show, Melvin. I know this is something that I’ve wanted for a long time, I’ve been trying to get going and for everyone who’s listening here today, you’re used to a certain structure of the therapist experience, we’re gonna take a little bit of a different approach here and more focused on Marketing and Health Podcasting can be used to help you market your business. So, let me tell our audience, a little bit about you Melvin for those who are not familiar with you and then let’s dive into things.

Melvin: Sounds good.

Perry: Dr. Melvin Varghese is a licensed Psychologist in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He’s the founder of the Selling the couch and the health casters, the number one community for Health, Wellness and Fitness Podcasters. His podcast and blog that helps current and aspiring mental health private practitioners, learn the business and social media market lessons that are not often taught to conditions in training. Selling the couch is rated as one of the top 100 business and top 30 career podcast on ITunes. It’s heard in over 50 countries. Melvin is a mentor for goodtherapy.org and has been featured in psychology today, the America counselling association and psyche central. Melvin is starting a private practice in 2017 to help entrepreneurs master the mental game of entrepreneurship. Melvin, give a little overview of you there? Take a minute, fill in the gaps from the introduction and can you tell our audience a little bit more about you personally and about your businesses.

Melvin: Absolutely Perry. First of all, I’m grateful for our friendship that we’ve gotten to know each other so for me, I was in a group private practice for a little over 3 years. I’ve been fully licensed coming on 6 years now and I’d knew that I always wanted to go into a solo practice and when I was in the group private practice, part of why I did that was because I realized that I didn’t have any of the sort of the day to day skills of running a private practice right of being a business owner and the more that I talked to colleagues that were in the office and just folks that I knew, I realized that this was such a need. Many of struggle with learning these skills; how to be business owners and so that’s where the idea if selling the couch came from. They’re just conversations with the private practitioners about what they are doing well as well as marketing and social media experts and I think I started it because I wanted to approach it from the perspective of someone that didn’t know things and wanted to learn them. Since then , we’re coming on almost 2 years now about a hundred episodes where we’re talking about this which is crazy cause I’ve would have never imagine doing 100 episodes but …..

Perry: It’s wild.

Melvin: I remember the first couple of episodes. The first one, I was like, let me just get through the first episode and we’ll see how the rest of them go but it’s been neat. I think that one of the things that doing something crazy like a podcast, it makes you a lot braver in other areas of real life and I’m curtishly been very safe, I’m kind of a scaredy cat when it comes to risk you know, and it’s been in need, I think, not just being able to share something with colleagues all over the world but equally important how much more courageous, it’s made me personally.

Perry: That’s fantastic, Melvin. Did you not like public speaking or do you still not like public speaking?

Melvin: You know, so I did public speaking when I was growing up. You know, I would do various different things, you know, I don’t love it but I don’t hate it. I can do it, I’m naturally an introvert so I’ve always get still nervous before doing podcast interviews and things like that but, I mean, let’s just be real right, but, I think doing something like a podcast, it made it alot easier. I’ve now expanded into webinars and things like that, and a year and half ago, I would’ve never imagine doing webinars much less taking live questions or anything like that.

Perry: I think being an introvert can be a very advantageous personality traits in entrepreneurship these days because as long as you’re willing to gather that bravery and that muster to dip your toes into entrepreneurship and the do the thing you need to do to be successful, there are lots of you can build business as an introvert these day that were not possible a decade ago.

Melvin: I think that’s absolutely true, I think the online spaces introduced so many opportunities for introverts and I don’t know what the exact percentage is but I have a feeling that the majority of therapist in private practice are probably introverts.

Perry: I’d say that a fair statement there and you know, we actually had a previous episode, I believe it was with Eddie Reese, the second time, he came on and we’ll have a link to it in this week show notes where he talk about different marketing strategies and how much marketing your business whether you’re introvert or whether you’re an extrovert and I think podcasting commit either personality type. I’m sort of in the middle, in some areas introverted, in other areas I can be extroverted, I can be one-on-one somebody and I do great , put me in a room with people and I can do okay and put on good face but man, it’s eating me alive inside.

Melvin: It’s the same way I am.

Perry: I think with podcasting you get this nice, happy medium and it’s really great way to speak to hundreds of people, thousands of people but really, it’s a conversation one-on-one with somebody and I think this is good way to segway into how mental professionals can consider using podcasting in their private practice.

Melvin: Yeah.

Perry: It’ something that we see more and more. Brighter vision has over 100 customers now. We’re seeing probably one or two new customers a month are asking for help integrating their new podcast onto their website. The really effective means to market and it’s still relatively new way for therapist to market their private practice. So why don’t we dive into the what, the how of podcasting and figure out how it can be effective for therapist and private practice to market themselves.

Melvin: That’s sounds good. I think the best place I think to start is….. I think before I launched my podcast, I just assumed that I needed to have some crazy mic setup. I think I needed to be in a sound recording studio with giant headphones but the reality is that we’re talking and recording but only in a home office right now, I’ve got my laptop in front of me, I’ve got mic that’s plugged in right into my laptop and then I’m the white earbuds that come with an iPhone and it’s as simple as that. That’s how I’ve recorded for the past 97 episodes of my podcast so I think like the getting to started piece is a little barrier to entry.

Perry: I agree but I think it can actually be a barrier to entry as well. It’s a sort taking things from a different perspective. For those of you who don’t know that my background is in building content websites. I have a website on Glacier National Park that’s the largest resources on Glacier National Park that’s out there from an independent website. I also have a website in bicycle touring and I bought my microphone and my whole setup probably about 3-4 years ago with plans to podcast before for those and I never got off the ground. I invested all the money in a nice podcasting setup which I’m glad I have now but it took me years to get it off the ground and it wasn’t until brighter vision started running that I got it actually going. The reason for that I thought was I could not figure out all the technical things, once I had somebody helping me I got it of the ground and there’s a lot of great resources out there but, Melvin, what would you suggest to people out there who a lot of therapist are; technology is a barrier to a lot of private practices, how can you get good enough microphone price-wise 100$, 150$ and get your podcast up and running in a short amount of time, what kind of technology do you need be familiar with and do you need to have?

Melvin: I agree with you. I think there’s plenty of other aspects that we can talk about down the line and I think something like launching a question brings up a lot of fears, trust and I think that stops us. For me, like it stop me for 5 months but to go back to your original question so in terms of like mic and things, there’s a range of stuff even when you look online. The mic that I use more specifically is called audio technica, ATR2100 USB, you can find that on the Amazon, it’s about 70$ on Amazon. It’s the mic that I’ve used from the first episode, it’s the mic that I’m using for this conversation and what basically you do is, you need a laptop and so in order to record conversation, there’s a couple of different options so if you’re recording a podcast conversation where it’s just you and you’re teaching something, you’ll need some way to record that so there’s a free program called audacity which lets you record that conversation. Audacity is also a program that lets you edit any podcast episode so it’s also editing software as well but it’s free and then if you’re going to, I’d like to think of podcasting where you teach your expertise on some episodes and then on other episodes you connect with others who might be in the same town that you have a private practice in. There might be other that you want to connect and build relationships with right, so, other episodes, I recommend doing interview based episodes where you have them as your featured guest and you’re letting them talk about an area that they have expertise in and that would benefit your listeners as well so to do that we’re using Skype and if you have mac, skype doesn’t provide the ability to actually record calls right, you can just call, so you need a program called ecamm call recorder. I believe that’s about 30$ or so.

Perry: I pretty certain that’s exactly what it cost. We use the same exact thing

Melvin: If you have a windows computer, you can use a program called Pamela for windows. I’ve heard recently that it’s been a little bit unstable, so, you can also use the program called Zoom which will help you record the conversations and once you record it, you will get a file and you just take that file and put it into audacity and then you can edit as you need it. Basically, you take that file, now, we have this completed file, right and now we need to figure out how do we get it in different directories, so the big directories right now are ITunes, which has the most recent stats over 800 million users and then the other big ones are google play which is where android users hang out and there’s couple different called Stitcher radio and then sound cloud but the two I would really focus on when you’re starting out is ITunes and google play.

Perry: Good to know because this podcast isn’t even in google play. I never even knew that it existed. As a Mac user, I have ITunes and Sticher but google play, I need to get therapist experience in there.

Melvin: You’re not alone cause google play came around 4 months ago is when they started to accept applications so I’m still anew but yeah, I can definitely show you if you just google connecting podcast on google play , submitting a podcast on google play, you’ll get to a link where you can do that. So, essentially you have this file but one of the most common mistakes is the folks think that they have upload this file into each of these directories every time that takes a ton of time instead what you should do is you should get a hosting server, several different ones out there, the ones I use called Libsyn and what it basically do is every one of your new episodes you put it into Libsyn and then Libsyn would communicate with all of the major directories, every time you release an episode.

Perry: We actually use Libsyn as well. It’s a great hosting service. Melvin, there’s a ton on information you just gave there. Do you have any resource on your site to sort of walk people through this or are you familiar with great resources if people are listening and just like , Oh my god , this is overwhelming, I need something to read digest on my own.

Melvin: Yes, absolutely. So I have a full podcasting tutorial. It’s at sellingthecouch.com/podcastingtutuorial and it’s got videos, it’s got step-by-step instructions on how to take a podcast from your first recording to actually submitting it to these directories.

Perry: We’ll put a link to that in this week’s show notes at brightervision.com/session44. I want to dive into how therapist can use a podcast more for growing their private practice but before we do, I just want to touch on the technical things one more time. You mentioned that you can use audacity to edit your podcast you also can outsource that fairly easily, here at brighter vision, we outsource the transcription and the audio editing through Upwork.com. It’s a great way to find a lot of freelancers and so we have 2 persons on Eastern Europe. One person who transcribes all our episodes and somebody else who mixes them for us and in total each episode ends costing anywhere from like 40$-50$ to produce, so you know certainly you can do that yourself but I’m so intimidated by audio technology that I did want to go anywhere near that, so, if anybody is interested in launching a podcast and wants to know about the freelancers that we use here at brighter vision, I’m happy to refer them. They’re fantastic and have worked really well for us.

Melvin: Yeah, I think that you’re really bringing up a good point, so I did the exact opposite of what you did. I tried to do everything from editing to recording for the first 13 episodes. It was not very fun because I didn’t have a background in audio either and I just I don’t know, it felt overwhelming and I just at some point, I think you realized this way quicker than I did. I just realized that all I did is working in my business and not on my business when I’m editing.

Perry: That’s something that’s hard to come to terms with, the idea that you should be outsource certain areas of your business to experts who can do it for you and do it better than you and do it cheaper than you would do it and so swinging back around to entrepreneurship, I mean sellingthecouch was your first business. You’re about to start a private practice in a few months here. You’re going into it with all of the lessons that you’ve learnt from selling the couch as a business owner plus all the lessons of the 100 episodes that you’ve interviewed people with on how to grow a private practice. You have an understanding of and you’ve already come to terms with , okay, there are things that I need to outsource that is going to allow me to grow my business faster and more effectively and also more enjoyable, so whether it’s entrepreneur and private practice, whether it’s recording a podcast and having an expert mix it for you, whether it’s having an expert website designer, whether it’s a freelance contractor who’s going to build you a custom site or brighter vison that will build you a custom site at a fraction of a cost; shameless plug there, but you want to hire experts in certain areas as an entrepreneur that will make your life easier and make it easier for you to grow your business so you can work on your business not in your business. That’s a very important differentiation that you brought up really well there.

Melvin: I think one think I learned is this whole business thing is that majority of us we start small business because we want more freedom. We want to spend more time with our family and especially, I think one of the most common things that happens to small business owners is that they have these great ides then they get into the Grind of it and then they quickly overwhelmed. I forgot who taught me this but one of the things I do is that I always do is I look at the tasks that I have as a business owner and I group them into 3 areas, I’m either going automate that task, I’m going to delegate that task or I’m going to batch that task, batch meaning that I would set aside a block of time 2-3 hrs and it’s like I do that task like over and over so examples would be planning out future podcast episodes.

Perry: How do you determine which ones are you going to batch, which you’re going to do yourselves or which ones are you going to outsource. Do you certain parameters that you keep in mind?

Melvin: Yeah, with a lot of experimenting. I think part of it is…when I look at a task, initially when I do it, I’m trying to figure out is there a quicker way to do this or can I automate this because what I’ve learned this time is that our time is our most valuable asset and it’s a thing that we can’t get back, right.

Perry: Absolutely.

Melvin: I’m always trying to think about when I’m doing these tasks is there away to do it quicker or is there someone else that can do it better than me. That was hard lesson for me to learn that delegation part because for me and I mean, I’ll be completely honest, I sometimes have this mindset of oh, I can learn it and I can eventually do it and I can do it on my own. It’s hard for me to let go of the need or admit to myself that someone else could probably do this better or I’m too scared like, it’s brings up money kind of fears for me, like, oh my gosh, if i spend this money to delegate this task, will I get it back, right and I think overtime what I’ve slowly realized and I still struggle with this but delegating task is probably one of the best decisions you can make as a private practice owner and as a business owner. There’s this really good book, side changing called the E-myth revisited: why most businesses fail and what to instead, and in this book. one of the primary ideas is that a lot of small businesses fail because they are started by folks that expertise in a certain skill so for private practitioners , right there, experts in a certain thing but because they’re started by people that have this specific skill, they just learn to work in their business but they never develop those skills to take a step back and say, are there stuff that I could outsource or there’s stuff that I could do in one chunk a time that would free up time.

Perry: I think, the problem with that is for one actually recognizing it and then two, as entrepreneurs we seem to have the mentality that, ‘no one can do it as well as I can’, and it’s just not true in a lot of cases, people can do it as well as you can but you need to provide them with guidance and implement systems and process used to help. So, for example, there are certain tasks in our company, where our entire sales process is mapped out and very deliberate in every single step of the way. Our entire first draft process, we have a very deliberate process and very specific steps are taken every single time a website is built as a first draft and that allows to keep a high level of quality and to maintain that high level of quality for every single one of our customers. in a really great book for therapist to read about this if you’re really interested in taking to the leap to be to working on your business and not being in your business, in addition to the E-myth revisited which is a great book; another that I really love that completely how I approached my business is why making money is killing your business. It’s completely changed my life and how I approached my business and approached brighter vision and really allowed us to make brighter vision what it is today. So, lots of great information here today but I want to hop back into the podcast side of things though. Let’s chat about why podcasting and how podcasting can be such an effective tool for marketing a private practice.

Melvin: Yeah, sound good, so I’ve actually got 5 kind of things that I can break down. So, the first thing is podcast are evergreen. Evergreen basically means that once release a podcast episode. It stay for weeks, months, years down the line so thinking strategically as a business owner, right, so if you have a podcast episode, where you’re sharing that you have expertise in as private practitioner and then at the end of that episode, you say, for more information about this topic, more resources and then insert your private practice website right, that’s free advertising for your private practice website on all of these major directories. As I mentioned before, ITunes has 800 million users, there’s actually more android users than iTunes users so, and these aren’t just hundreds or thousands of people that are even listening. These are 100 of thousand and soon millions which I’ll share some stats here in little bit. The first main point is to think about podcast as evergreen ads for your business. The second one is and I alluded to this is that these baked directories like ITunes , they are over 800 million users and I read something that they are now over 50 million searches per month on ITunes. So, in other words, people that are on ITunes, right, they are using iTunes like they use Google, they are searching for all sorts of different things so what that that practically means is that you can rank for all sorts of different keywords so that your private practice gets found whether that couples, conflict, pre-martial counseling, depression anxiety, whatever it is, there’s a bunch of different key words that you can rank for. I mean, I’m always a fan of trying to figure out where folks are hanging and millions of users and that’s not like a small number, right.

Perry: No, certainly not. I do have question about that though, so over 800 million users. The sort of larger drawback that I can see for podcasting for a private practice is that only very small segment of those 800 million users that can become clients of yours. Is podcasting the right vehicle for marketing for all practices and if not , how do you determine you business or improve on your business structure to make sure that podcasting can be an effective marketing strategy for you and generate a positive return on your investment.

Melvin: Yeah, that’s a great question, I think makes sense for business for a private practitioner ,not usually when you’re starting out in private practice because Perry as you and I know podcasting takes times and it takes a lot of investment and things like that but I think if you’re at point in your private practice journey where you want to scale your business in some sort of way So, maybe you want to branch out into speaking or you’re thinking about writing a book or you’re thinking about developing a e-course, something like that I think podcasting makes a lot of sense because those type of things that are more like psycho- education material , right, those can be purchased by anyone. The other thing is that I actually use to struggle with this too, if am going to try to get local clients why am I creating this podcast that’s listened everywhere. I don’t know, like one thing I’ve realized is that the world is truly becoming more flat, right, in terms of communication. You just never know who knows who in certain areas, right and you just never know who’s listening to your podcast and then that refers to a family member or something like that in the state that you’re in. This is kind of a slight example, so, a few month ago, I had a mom that emailed me, she lived with her 2 kids in the middle if Alaska somewhere and she sent me a picture of her and her 2 kiddos and they were on this hike together and she was like this is how I listened to your podcast. It’s like crazy. I’m in Philadelphia. She’s in Alaska and we’re connecting.

Perry: Another thing along those lines, similarly, even if you’re not developing an e-course or wanting to write a book. By being a podcaster, you’re providing additional value to your potential clients so people who find your site through Facebook or through word of mouth, go ahead and see a podcast episode on your site. What they’re going to be able to do is listen to it, view as more as an expert on the subject and the likelihood of them actually contacting you goes up substantially so you’re going to see higher conversion rate of people actually reaching out to you, which would be part of my opinion on that at least.

Melvin: Yeah, I know, I think that’s absolutely true. I think I used to think this way, sometimes i still do. I think that whenever folks are searching for me that as soon as they find the first piece of content, that’s going to like motivate them to make that call, you know, with the reality is, I think, when folks are exposed to different mediums whether that’s blog post or audio, like a podcast. It helps build that know, like and trust factor which is what leads to that call eventually.

Perry: Yeah and People do business with persons that they know, like and trust. It’s business 101 right there. We got number 1 and number 2; what’s number 3?

Melvin: Number 3 is that these are really recent stats but now there are 57 million podcast listeners per month in just the United states , so, to put that in context that’s about 21% of the entire US has listened to a podcast , here in the last month.

Perry: Holy Cow.

Melvin: It’s crazy how much it’s grown, so to give some more context, 13% of the US uses Spotify in a given month and 21% uses Twitter, so basically, the amount of people listening to podcasts is now equal to the amount of people using Twitter per month.

Perry: That’s remarkable.

Melvin: Yeah, it crazy, and it’s only going to increase which is actually my fourth point which says about 2.3 billion smart phones now throughout the world. I read this stat, reserved this recent article at tech crunch. They said by 2020, that’s going to increase by 6.1 billion so, in other words, about 70% of world will have access to a smart phone and that’s important because 64% of podcasts are now listened to on smart phones .

Perry: Is there any mention on that what the bandwidth speed will be for those additional 4 billion because if it’s in an area that not getting a fast enough internet connection, there probably won’t be a way to listen to a podcast.

Melvin: Yeah, so, I haven’t seen anything in terms of bandwidth speed, that’s a great question.

Perry: I’m sure it will go up as well, technology keeps getting better and the ability for people to stay connected through the world just keep going up as well so, its remarkable stats, Alright and number 5.

Melvin: Number 5 is what we alluded to. Podcasting is a great medium if you’re at that point where you want to scale your practice and we were talking about this earlier is that one of the biggest like realization that I’ve had as a business owner is that there’s other ways to create income besides trading time to create income , like that blew my mind because I think for us , those clinicians, I was always taught , I see a client I get paid , I don’t see a client I don’t get paid, right and to break that sort of paradigm, You would see this stuff online whether or not this stuff is possible and then it starts happening to you and you’re like oh, is this real?

Perry: I know the feeling exactly, I remember with my first businesses, with these websites when the first month it paid my portion of the rent with my now wife, then girlfriend and then the next month it paid our entire rent. It just went up from there, Fantastic, Melvin. Actually, before we hop into our lightning round here, I want to talk about topics, how do you determine the right topics for your podcasts?

Melvin: Like, topic meaning like the overall podcast or within each episode?

Perry: For the overall podcasts.

Melvin: I think there’s couple of things, one is think about your private practice, think the populations that you tend to serve and make a list of those and then create a second column and then think about the topic that you feel particularly feel passionate about because podcasting is definitely a long term game. You want to make sure that you’re creating content around stuff that you’re passionate about because especially in audio format that will come through very clearly.

Perry: Yes.

Melvin: So, I don’t know, different examples would be like, I know colleagues that has….I know right now that has created a podcast called parenting in the rain, she’s a parenting expert, she’s `a played therapist down in Florida. She also does consulting for schools and she basically teaches parenting skills and also interview experts from authors to other major bloggers to all sorts of experts in the world of parenting. She’s using that podcast as a way to build authority, create her own platform, and increase consulting services, increase client to private practice. I mean, I know another podcast, for example, it’s called woman in voice and it’s all about the lives of women and some of the things that they struggle with whether you know, all sorts of things body image, self-esteem and so these are kind of topic based around those and then using that as a way to build authority as clinicians but also within the therapy room if there is a certain time you’re talking about a topic with a client and you can say , hey, listen, I just did a podcast episode on this and maybe listening to would give a different sort of perspective or context to things.

Perry: What about when you’re creating your podcast and thinking of your topic. Do you feel that therapist should create a topic that and create a theme that extends only to their geographical location or should they be thinking about the entire country or the entire world?

Melvin: Yeah, I always say even though your private practice maybe local you should always think global because again, we just never know who could be listening and we just never know down the line about how your private practice and your career could expand, right then and I love having at least giving myself that flexibility until I do need to narrow down.

Perry: Absolutely, great points there Melvin. Any other thing that you want to chat about that you think would be really helpful for our listeners before we move into our brighter insights round.

Melvin: No, I think we covered a range of stuff, again, I put together a tutorial and it breaks things down, I try to just to put in a way that’s easy to understand and again, you can find that at sellingthecouch.com/podcastingtutuorial.

Perry: Great and we will definitely have a link to that and all these amazing resources that you’ve shared with our audience at this week show notes brightervision.com/session44. Alright Melvin, time to move into the final part of our interview. The part that we like to refer to as brighter insights and what I love about this part is that we get to distilled down your experience and advice. Its little sound bites and quick answers that our audience can use to inspire and motivate them in growing their practice. Are you ready?

Melvin: Let’s do it.

Perry: What or whom inspired you to become a mental health professional?

Melvin: I think it’s my parents for sure. My dad actually has Master’s degree in psychology He is an attorney but he went and got a Master’s degree in psychology, I’ve always just been fascinated by people. I’m a child of immigrants and when we move from India to the U.S, I was just always interested in how folks made that transition from one culture to another.

Perry: A Master’s degree in psychology plus an attorney, that’s quite a combination there. They go hand-in-hand there. What do you to clear your head and get a fresh start in your day?

Melvin: I have a very regimented morning routine, so as much as possible, usually it is six days a week but sometimes seven. I get up at 4:45 in the morning, I do a morning routine for an hour that includes exercise, drinking 32 ounces of lemon water, doing mindfulness routine and then watching a Ted talk.

Perry: What are some tools you’ve used to leverage the power of technology in your businesses so technology is no longer a hurdle but instead an assets for you.

Melvin: One of the tools that I use is Meet Edgar, which is a social media management tool. It helps me share my message across social media without me always having to be present to share those

Perry: Absolutely and we use Meet Edgar as well, it’s a great tool there. What’s a quote that you hold near and dear, something that’s help formulate your perspective on life or has motivated and provided guidance for you.

Melvin: The quote that I like is follow your dreams or spend the rest of your life working for someone who did.

Perry: That’s a really good one. I don’t think that I want to put it on our office wall though but that’s a great quote.

Melvin: For solo practice.

Perry: If you could recommend one book to our audience, what would that book be?

Melvin: I love E-Myth: Revisited but I also like this book called Blue Ocean strategy, which is all about creating products and services in new market places as opposed to competing in existing ones.

Perry: Blue Ocean strategy, never heard of that, going to a conference this weekend so maybe I’ll buy it for the plane.

Melvin: Yeah, It’s a good one.

Perry: Alright Melvin, last question here. If you move to a new city tomorrow, you don’t know anybody there and all that you had was your computer and 100$ to start a new private practice. What is it that you would do on your very first day?

Melvin: I ask colleagues, a very similar question and the thing that’s always come up is I reach out to colleagues that are in private practice in the town that you’re starting out in. See them as colleagues, not as competition and invite them over for lunch or coffee.

Perry: Love it. Well, Melvin, where can our audience find you to connect and learn more about you?

Melvin: Yeah, absolutely, you can fine me at sellingthecouch.com and then my private practice website is melvinvarghese.com.

Perry: Fantastic. Well Melvin, thank you so much for being so generous with your time, your expertise and your knowledge. We appreciate all the great advice that you provided and the therapist experience that you have shared.

Melvin: Thank you so much for having me, Perry. I enjoyed serving your audience.

Perry: Thanks, I’m sure there’s a lot of value here so everybody, you can go back and look at the show notes this week brightervision.com/session44 and of course, thank you so much for tuning in today. If you have a question for us you can email it to us at [email protected] and if you’re ready to work more on businesses as opposed to in; let us build you your website, brighter vision is the worldwide leader in custom therapist website design. For less than 2$ a day, we’ll build you a website that’s as unique as your practice, provide you with unlimited tech support and do the SEO for you so people can find you online. To learn more, you can email us at [email protected] or head on over to our websites and drop us a line through one of our contact forms. That does it for today, thanks again for listening and we’ll see you next week.