30 min
August 26, 2024

Office Hours: How to Define Your Niche as a Therapist with Allison Puryear

A lot of therapists are told to “niche down” but aren’t told exactly what that means or how to do it.

And without a well-defined niche, your practice will struggle, if not sink.

Allison Puryear is a licensed clinical social worker based in North Carolina and an inspiring mentor to therapists through her transformative program, Abundance Practice Building

In this Office Hours episode with host Michael Fulwiler, Allison unpacks the significance of defining a niche in therapy, how to navigate multiple niches, and why specificity matters. 

Plus, she debunks common myths like the idea that broadening a niche attracts more clients and explains why a well-defined niche can help build trust and connection more effectively than a broad approach.

Listen to learn strategies that can help you refine your practice to attract clients who resonate with your expertise.

In the conversation, they discuss:

  • How identifying and focusing on a specific niche in a therapy practice can enhance marketing efforts and client trust.
  • The framework for defining a niche based on therapist-client effectiveness and the specific problems faced by clients.
  • The benefits and challenges of having more than one niche and transitioning between niches over time.

Connect with the guest:

Connect with Michael and Heard:

Jump into the conversation:

[00:00] Introduction to Heard Business School with guest, Allison Puryear

[01:44] Allison describes what “niche” means to her

[02:58] The importance of population for finding a niche

[05:48] Allison debunks the myth that having a broader niche is better

[08:48] Is it a niche or not segment

[12:12] Do therapists need a niche or not?

[16:46] What having a niche enables a therapist to do

[19:52] Allison shares if a niche can be too narrow or not

[22:27] She explains if you can have more than one niche or if you can change it

[24:52] Allison describes the framework to finding your niche

This episode is to be used for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, business, or tax advice. Each person should consult their own attorney, business advisor, or tax advisor with respect to matters referenced in this episode.

Guest Bio

Allison Puryear, LCSW, CEDS is a therapist with a nearly diagnosable obsession with business development. After nearly burning out at agencies, she has built successful private practices in 3 different states & has truly come to love practice building. So much so, that she created Abundance Practice Building which provides the tools that you need to create a successful private practice—one that’s healthy and provides freedom, joy, and financial stability.

Allison works together with therapists like you to create something great & avoid the burnout that leads to too many great therapists leaving the field—because let’s be real, we need therapists like you more than ever.

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Episode Transcript

Michael Fulwiler [00:00:00]:

This is Heard Business School, where we sit down with private practice owners and industry experts to learn about the business of therapy together. I'm your host, Michael Fulweiler. How do you define your niche as a therapist? Therapists are told niching down is important for getting clients, but aren't always told how to do it. In this office hours episode, I sit down with Allison Puryear, a licensed clinical social worker based in Asheville, North Carolina, who has helped thousands of therapists through her coaching and mentorship program, abundance practice building and membership abundance party. She's also the host of the Abundance Practice building podcast, which is a great resource for therapists. In our conversation, we debate whether it's pronounced niche or niche. Allison explains what a niche is, what a niche isn't, and how to define or refine your niche. We also talk about whether or not you can change your niche and if you can have more than one niche.

Michael Fulwiler [00:01:01]:

Here's my conversation with Allison Perrier. Enjoy. Allison Perrier, welcome to office hours.

Allison Puryear [00:01:09]:

Thanks so much for having me.

Michael Fulwiler [00:01:10]:

Very excited to have you on the show. In this episode of Office Hours, we're going very deep into one of my favorite topics, which is niching down.

Allison Puryear [00:01:20]:

Yeah, so you're going to cover the niching and I'm going to cover the niching.

Michael Fulwiler [00:01:25]:

That was going to be my first question, which we've messaged about on instagram. Let's just settle it right here. Is it niche or niche?

Allison Puryear [00:01:33]:

It's both. It's either. I looked it up in the dictionary and said, either one is good. It had both ways of pronouncing it. So I'll take the redneck version. You can take a pretentious version.

Michael Fulwiler [00:01:44]:

I don't know if it's an accent thing. I'm from Seattle, from the northwest, so I don't have much of an accent to me. N I c h e. It just looks like niche, but niche is acceptable. We're probably gonna say that word a lot here in the next half hour or so, so I hope folks don't get too annoyed by it. Would you define what niche means to you, just in really simple language so folks can understand 100%.

Allison Puryear [00:02:12]:

So I want you to think about niche or niche as your client's problem as they understand it right now. So, like, the potential client, the person coming in, for instance, I have a lot of people who are like, oh, I work with developmental trauma, but there's, like, nobody out there that's not a therapist saying, I just really want some help with my developmental trauma. In fact, most of them might not even be identifying it as trauma. They recognize it as anxiety and a very specific type of anxiety. So your niche would be the type of anxiety that they're experiencing, what they tell their friends in their language, not our psychobabble version, and maybe not even the way we would talk to a referral partner about it. So when we're talking about marketing and niching, that's the kind of niche I'm talking about.

Michael Fulwiler [00:02:58]:

I love that. I've heard it described as a specific problem that you solve for a specific population. Do you think the population part is important as well, or is the problem that you're solving what you really should be focused on as you're thinking about this?

Allison Puryear [00:03:15]:

That's a great question. I think it depends on your niche, on the problem itself. So, for instance, if you work with people with ADHD who are falling behind in life, that's their experiences. I'm just always behind. Everybody else has it get together. You can do that across the lifespan. You don't have to say, like, I work with college students exclusively, unless that's who you really love to work with. But there are certain niches that are going to be better served to have that demographic info in there.

Allison Puryear [00:03:41]:

For instance, I have a student who works with anxious gay men, and that helps hone anxiety, which is arguably not a niche, but it helps hone that down with the demographic to make it more specific. And his folks aren't people who are anxious about being gay. They just happen to be gay. And so he's very careful in his description and his messaging, in the fact that they're anxious about the workplace or they're anxious about their relationships with their parents or their partner or whomever. But it's not about being gay that they're coming to therapy.

Michael Fulwiler [00:04:16]:

That makes sense.

Allison Puryear [00:04:16]:

The messaging gets in there, too.

Michael Fulwiler [00:04:17]:

Sure. What is not a niche? So we've defined what a niche is. What is a niche?

Allison Puryear [00:04:23]:

Not my favorite. Not niche that people talk about is women in transition. Again, there's like no woman. I have been a woman in transition so many times in my life. I'm one now, but I'm not like, gosh, being a woman in transition is so hard right now. Right. I'm like, this specific problem is so hard right now. So people will try it.

Allison Puryear [00:04:43]:

They really like women going through stuff, but they don't want to commit to one kind of stuff to go through. An empty nester is one kind of woman in transition, but so is a woman who is in her first job out of college or somebody who's going through divorce or dating for the first time. These are all very different transitions that nobody is going to be like, well, yeah, I'm going on my first date. I feel like a late bloomer. And this person's woman in transition niche is totally talking about me. Right. We want them to feel so seen as soon as they can identify what your niche is, which ideally is within three to 5 seconds of landing on your webpage. That's my favorite non niche.

Allison Puryear [00:05:22]:

LGBTQIA is another non niche. That's a demographic. That's not a problem. And if you think that's a problem, then please don't work with folks or LGBTQIA instead. What are they struggling with? Are they actually struggling with marginalization? In which case, yeah, let's talk about being marginalized within the LGBTQIA community, rather than just a blanket, like, I work with queer folks. There's nothing wrong with that. What's the problem?

Michael Fulwiler [00:05:48]:

So people who think about the demographic, they're missing a component, right? I think that's such an interesting point. And I also understand why people do go broad, because it feels like it would be easier to get clients if you have a broader niche, right? Because there are so many women who are in transition. So wouldn't it be easier to get clients if my niche was broader? Can you help to debunk that?

Allison Puryear [00:06:17]:

Yeah, I mean, that feels very true because that just feels like math. Like, there are more people struggling. But the thing, I mean, with any sort of business, but particularly with counseling, is we feel very special and different when we're looking for a therapist and we need to see ourselves represented in their copy or their images or whatever in order to feel like they know what they're doing. So I'll give a personal example. When I had my first daughter in Seattle eleven years ago, I went through postpartum depression, and I knew I had postpartum depression because I'm a therapist. But I was never trained in PPD and had no idea what to do about it. So I luckily had, like, a leg up on, like, this is what's wrong. My midwives had, you know, during my six week appointment, and all those things they had assessed, I had PPD, and they needed me to get some support beyond them.

Allison Puryear [00:07:05]:

And so they gave me three different names. And two of those three names, when I looked at their websites, mentioned it in a long list of other things that they treat. So they're like, oh, I work with anxiety and depression and perinatal mood disorders and bipolar disorder and all of them. And there was one person whose entire website was about perinatal mood disorders, and I immediately felt relief. And that's what we want people to feel when they find us. We want them to feel relief. I was like, thank God, because I'm not convinced these other people are any more skilled than I am, because I can write that in a list, too. But this person, everything was geared towards my struggle.

Allison Puryear [00:07:44]:

She was saying the things on her website that I wasn't saying out loud to anyone, and that had me feel like, okay, I'll be in good hands if I go with her. I didn't care if she took my insurance or not. I was willing to make whatever sacrifices because I was in hell. And so there's just a lot more relief. There's a lot more trust that you build almost immediately with a potential client. When you have a well defined niche that doesn't encompass everybody that you could work with.

Michael Fulwiler [00:08:10]:

When you try to market to everyone, you don't really market to anyone. Right. That's the idea that you're speaking to when you're so broad, it's not going to speak to anyone directly, so they're not going to feel seen. Like you said, I love that idea of that you felt relief. Why do you think that you felt relief?

Allison Puryear [00:08:30]:

I think I just felt like this person actually knows what they're doing. And I didn't have that sense with the other people. And they may have been incredible. They might have been even better than the therapist I ended up seeing, but that was not coming across on their website at all. And I needed relief. I needed to be in a different headspace as soon as possible.

Michael Fulwiler [00:08:48]:

We're gonna do a quick segment here called niche or not. I wanna throw something out. I want you to tell me if it's a niche or not. And if nothing, how you would work with a therapist to help them to define their niche. So the first one, women, not a niche.

Allison Puryear [00:09:07]:

That's a demographic. Let's get more specific about what she's going through. Great.

Michael Fulwiler [00:09:11]:

What would be a more specific niche? If you work with women?

Allison Puryear [00:09:15]:

It could be women unhappy in relationships. It could be, I mentioned earlier, late bloomer women going into the dating world for the first time. It could be perimenopausal women who are angry at everyone around and don't know why. It could be all sorts of things. Yeah.

Michael Fulwiler [00:09:32]:

Next one, adult family relationships.

Allison Puryear [00:09:35]:

No, because I don't even know what that means, and I'm a therapist. Right, right. So we want it to be in their language. I might say, like in our therapist nomenclature, we might be talking about like, family of origin issues, right? Our clients aren't talking about family of origin issues. They're talking about my mom was a narcissist or my dad wasn't around or whatever. So I get really specific about what those relationships look like. And sometimes it's like, I work with women whose dads weren't around and they find themselves in relationships with men just like him over and over and over. So that might be a niche, repeating the patterns of your mother, repeating, you know, these kinds of things.

Allison Puryear [00:10:11]:

So getting really specific about what they feel like. I keep banging my head against the same problem over and over.

Michael Fulwiler [00:10:17]:

Anxiety?

Allison Puryear [00:10:18]:

Probably not. You gotta add like a demographic or a specific experience of anxiety. So like specializing in panic disorder, for instance, you might not say, I specialize in panic disorder because not everybody that is coming to you knows what that is. But you can say, I work with people who have these moments of sheer panic. They're sweating, they've thought they're having heart attacks. This happens over and over and they don't know why. They even went to the emergency room a few times just to be told it was just anxiety. That's who I work with or I work with.

Allison Puryear [00:10:46]:

Kids showing signs of anxiety. Sometimes just a demographic can make that more specific because the adults who are looking for their kids can recognize this is anxiety, but they might not. They don't know the internal experience. So it might be, I work with kids struggling with anxiety who are acting out or who are shutting down those kinds of things.

Michael Fulwiler [00:11:04]:

Couples dealing with infidelity.

Allison Puryear [00:11:07]:

Yeah, there's a niche.

Michael Fulwiler [00:11:09]:

We got one in there. Yeah. Great. Last one. CBT.

Allison Puryear [00:11:13]:

No. So, and here's. I see this all the time. Right? I see this with especially EMDR and IFs and CBT therapists and DBT therapists. All the letters. This sense of, like, my niche is this modality that I have worked very hard to be great at, that is in demand that people are looking for. Yes. And I am in pain.

Allison Puryear [00:11:36]:

I am looking for a therapist. I don't care how the sausage gets made. I just want to feel confident that what we do in session is going to help me. Some people are specifically looking for your modality and that's great. Put it on services page. Talk about it somewhere on your web page. But don't make that the majority of what you talk about. Talk about how ifs is so, like, helpful on another page for the niche instead of trying to keep it so heady because most of our clients are stressed out they don't need something overly heady.

Allison Puryear [00:12:09]:

They need to understand quickly and easily what we're talking about.

Michael Fulwiler [00:12:12]:

Yeah. CBT is the modality that you specialize in. CBT is good for clients who are struggling with XYZ. Focus in on those problems, and then that's who your niche is. Do therapists need to have a niche? What about therapists who want to be generalists?

Allison Puryear [00:12:32]:

Yeah. You do not have to have a niche. You also don't have to have a webpage. You also don't have to do your taxes. Like, everything is a choice, right?

Michael Fulwiler [00:12:40]:

I recommend that you do your taxes.

Allison Puryear [00:12:42]:

I mean, I'd recommend it too, but I'd also recommend a niche. So it's really just a matter of, like, what are the consequences of that choice? I will say 60% of my practice, on average is my niche and the other 40% isn't. And this is historical going back to 2005 when I started. So it's not that you only see one presenting concern all day long. I think all of us would probably burn out or get bored or feel like we were just a cog in a machine if that's how it went. But because I specialize, my niche is eating disorders, I end up getting a lot of people who don't have eating disorders but have perfectionism or struggle with anxiety. They have a lot of overlap in the venn diagram of eating disorders and their experience. They just don't happen to have the food body stuff.

Allison Puryear [00:13:27]:

So I love working with those folks, too, you know? So having this, like, you don't have to accept everybody that calls you are responsible for having amazing referrals to give to people when you are no longer taking people within your niche or your full or whatever. But I. You don't have to take on only your niche, and I would recommend not for most of us.

Michael Fulwiler [00:13:51]:

Do you need to have lived experience with the niche that you worked with. I've heard it described as your niche should be or can be a version of you. Do you agree with that?

Allison Puryear [00:14:05]:

I would say of my students, about 80 to probably 85% to 95% of our people, their niche is a younger version of them or an earlier version of them, but I don't think it's necessary. I've also had women work with angry, alcoholic men, you know, and that's their niche. So it's who you do your best work with. For many of us, because we've had the lived experience, that's a good fit for many of us because we've had the lived experience, it's not. I cannot work with perinatal mood disorders. I couldn't. Like, it still hits my heart a little too much. And I can work with eating disorders, even though that's something I struggled with when I was younger.

Allison Puryear [00:14:42]:

So it's just a matter of, like, how healed are you? How sensitive does it still feel? And are you in a place where you're going to project your experience onto every client that you see? Because that's not going to be good. How can you separate out what you lived through from your training and from the lived experience of others? So I think it's like, if you can. Amazing. That's great. If you're interested in something totally different that you've not had experience in. Like, I have some students who work with kids but don't have kids or work with couples and are divorced or never married, and all of that is great and wonderful as long as you're doing great work and you're getting results with your clients.

Michael Fulwiler [00:15:20]:

That was going to be my next question. You answered it. Sorry about that. No. I've seen arguments online between therapists that you shouldn't work with couples if you're single, or you can't work with kids if you don't have kids, because you don't really understand what that's like. And what I'm hearing you say is, that's not true.

Allison Puryear [00:15:40]:

Yeah, it's not true. Sometimes it's good for you to not know what it's like. Right? I've worked with kids before I had kids. I don't know that I was the best kid therapist because I'm just not a kid therapist in my soul. But I know I did really good work with many kids. And I think if so, one of my early, early jobs, I worked at a child advocacy center and rape crisis center. And so I was working exclusively with kids who'd been sexually abused. I could not have done that job with my own kids.

Allison Puryear [00:16:06]:

I couldn't have. I saw people have kids and have to quit because it just hit too close to home. And so it was good that there were those of us who weren't as triggered by it and didn't start to see the world as a very dangerous place for the people we loved.

Michael Fulwiler [00:16:20]:

That makes sense. I've never thought about it until this moment, believe it or not, but I imagine when you're working with a younger version of yourself, there's some projection or transference that can happen.

Allison Puryear [00:16:33]:

Yeah. You have to be super on top of it. And that's why I'm not gonna say you have to be totally healed because there are people who never totally heal and do amazing work, but you have to be pretty darn healed, whatever that looks like for you to be able to not get yourself so involved in it.

Michael Fulwiler [00:16:46]:

We've talked about this a little bit, but can you expand on why having a niche is helpful? You know, what does it enable you to do as a therapist?

Allison Puryear [00:16:56]:

Absolutely. So it helps people find you, for one, because you get known in your community or amongst your referral sources as the person that's great with this presenting concern. So it helps you get referrals. It helps you balance your caseload. Instead of just seeing like everybody's coming in and you have no idea what they're struggling with, you can kind of gauge in those first phone calls, okay, this is niche. This is not niche. What balance do I want of that? It's really good for preventing burnout because I am not good at seeing people with schizophrenia, for instance. And I'm not set up as a private practitioner to do that.

Allison Puryear [00:17:27]:

That I'm not great with kids, I'm not great with teens. I know who I do good work with and so I'm able to be selective about who I bring in so that they're getting the best care possible. And I'm able to refer out those people that I know I kind of suck at. And that's effective for preventing my own burnout because I don't want to feel ineffective. It's like our job is too important to feel ineffective. It also is really good for like helping people that don't know how to find care. When you have really niched, you're so much easier to find when you're marketing that niche. I should say part of our job as private practice therapists is to make it easy for people to find us because otherwise they're going to the therapist who won't say no, even though they're not good at that presenting concern.

Allison Puryear [00:18:09]:

The number of clients with eating disorders I have seen who have been through multiple therapists that had no training in eating disorders and just thought, well, I'm a good therapist that can handle it and then stepped in it because there's all sorts of traps that you don't know about with eating disorders unless you're trained and experienced. It breaks my heart that they spent time and money and I know those therapists didn't feel great after those sessions. So if you make it easy for people to find you, which niching is the very first step of, then you're able to really create that relief that I felt when I found that therapist faster, that's another thing. Like, you're talking about having a wide net, casting a wide net feeling like the smart thing to do, but you get full. The smaller your niche, the faster you get full. I have a student right now who works with mormon folks with scrupulosity, so religious OCD, and she's like, bam, bam, bam. Like so many people are calling her because her niche is so defined and so small. So people feel very seen very quickly.

Allison Puryear [00:19:12]:

When you're super niched, the way that.

Michael Fulwiler [00:19:15]:

I describe it is that the more narrow your audience is, the broader your audience gets, or the larger your audience gets, because the more specific you are, the more people that you're going to appeal to, which is this counterintuitive idea of in business, we talk about your total addressable market and, well, my addressable market, if I'm really niche, is going to be really small. So it's going to be harder to get clients, and I think we need to get out of that mindset and actually flip it on its head that actually, no, the more narrow and specific you are, the more people you're going to appeal to.

Allison Puryear [00:19:53]:

Yes, absolutely.

Michael Fulwiler [00:19:55]:

With that said, can your niche be too narrow?

Allison Puryear [00:19:58]:

I don't think so. I think it can be poorly located. So if you live in a town of 400 people and you've got a super specific niche and you're only doing in person and there's no one for 100 miles around, like, maybe not. You might need to do online therapy or you might need to move or something. I don't know. But I have seen, only seen that the smaller your niche, the faster you build and the more willing people are to pay out of pocket as well. I do think a niche is necessary for private pay therapists.

Michael Fulwiler [00:20:29]:

If you want clients, I also imagine it has to do with what your goals are. If you're trying to fill your caseload, 2025 clients max. That's all that you need. There's got to be 20 to 25 people out there in your niche. Now, if you have a group practice with 50 therapists, right, that's at a different scale. So maybe you need to broaden out a little bit. I'm curious, have you worked with therapists who have gone through that process of. I started as a solo practice.

Michael Fulwiler [00:21:02]:

I was like, very niche and specialized. Now I've grown my practice, I've hired other therapists. Should I stay niche and specialized? Should I broaden out? How does that typically work?

Allison Puryear [00:21:13]:

Yeah. What I see is if your group has the same niche that you did. They get full faster. But that doesn't mean it's what you have to do. Because I also work with group practices where they're like, well, this person does something totally different and hired them because they're great at it. And so it's just making sure that each niche is represented on the webpage, which doesn't work as well for a solo practice. Like, I wouldn't say you can have four niches, Michael, in your practice, your own solo practice, because then it just gets muddled and people don't know what you actually help with. It becomes listy.

Allison Puryear [00:21:45]:

But if you're a group practice, as long as you very clearly define each of those niches and that is like, assigned to a person on staff, then it feels like, okay, well, they have their eating disorder person, they have their bipolar person, they have their addiction person. So it feels like many solo practices under the umbrella of a group practice.

Michael Fulwiler [00:22:05]:

Yeah, it seems like once you get to that stage, you can go in either direction. You can continue to specialize and just be like the group that specializes in eating disorders in your area, or you can think about it as we're going to hire someone who works with kids or someone who works with couples and really have kind of fill in those gaps in your services.

Allison Puryear [00:22:26]:

Yeah, yeah.

Michael Fulwiler [00:22:27]:

Can you have more than one niche? Do you have to just pick one?

Allison Puryear [00:22:31]:

It gets tricky when you try adding one and when people are like, die hard. Like, I can't choose often. I say just choose one for now and see how it goes. Like, because there are a lot of people that just have a hard time committing period in their life. And that's where a lot of people get tripped up with their niche is just patterns that show up elsewhere, too. It's not just here. And so for some people, I'm like, choose one for the next six months to a year and reassess later. You'll still get, ideally, like, 40% of your caseload will be maybe the other or a mix of things.

Allison Puryear [00:23:02]:

But if people are diehard, like I have, these two are so near and dear to my heart. I'm like, can you combine them? Can it be perinatal mood disorder with an eating disorder, which actually does overlap a lot historically? Can it be overwhelmed moms with ADHD? Like, can you combine the two seemingly disparate niches and make it into one? And that's your niche? How would you feel about that? Or is there enough of an overlap? Sometimes it's like one is the younger version and the other niche is the older version and how it just kind of morphs over time, in which case you can address it as a phase of life issue. And the people who are older and see it, they see their younger selves in some of your copy. And the people who are in the younger version see the older version are like, I don't want that. I better hop on this because I don't want to morph into that. There are ways to do it, but it is a lot cleaner and it is a lot easier to market if you just choose one niche and stick with it.

Michael Fulwiler [00:24:04]:

You alluded to this, but can you change your niche? Like, you decide, I don't want to focus on this anymore. Are you able to do that or should you really just stick with it?

Allison Puryear [00:24:15]:

Oh, change, change if you want to. I would give it some time. I wouldn't change every six months. But I want you to be happy in your practice. If you're like, I cannot continue to work with incest survivors. I just can't keep doing it. It's so heavy and it's so hard. I would really love to work with stressed out people pleasers who may have some of this background, but it's not what they're coming in for.

Allison Puryear [00:24:39]:

So we can get to it with some of them and some of them, it doesn't apply. Then morph. I wouldn't say like, don't fire all your clients. Keep going with them until it's time for them to graduate from therapy and just fill your practice with the new niche.

Michael Fulwiler [00:24:52]:

Is there a framework that you use when you're helping therapists to define your niche? You've mentioned a demographic, a problem, like, how do you help therapists that you work with who are struggling to define their niche for their practice?

Allison Puryear [00:25:13]:

I will say for anybody listening, when you're not driving or working out or doing your dishes, grab a piece of paper and just come back to look at the time and come back to this part, because writing it down is going to do ten times more for you than just thinking your answer. And I find we have a niche course. And I'm like, if you write it down, you'll have a niche by the end of this course. And inevitably, the people who don't have a niche when I'm like, send me your worksheets, I'll see if I can help you out. And they're like, well, I just thought through my answers and I'm like, go through it again. Write it down. If you're still stuck, send me your worksheets. It'll help.

Allison Puryear [00:25:42]:

And they're like, I'm good. Once they write it down, they're good. There are several different ways. One way is to think about the clients that you have worked with in the past, that you have been most effective with, that you had energy after you worked with them. Because this is what I want everybody's whole practice to be right. I want them to get off work at the end of the day and be like, woohoo, what's next? Not like, okay, I gotta go to the grocery store. So think about the people that you finished your sessions with. Energy.

Allison Puryear [00:26:08]:

Think about all of them. Write down why they came in, write down characteristics about them, demographics. Write it all down and see what kind of like salad of a person you can combine. You're going to find some overlap probably in the things that you're most effective with. I also really love to do this thing where you think about the clients you do not like working with. It's kind of like dating. Sometimes we learn what we like by being clear what didn't work and what we didn't like. So with love, write down all the clients that you did not feel effective with, that you did not enjoy, that you saw them on your schedule and side instead of feeling like, oh yeah, I get to see them today.

Allison Puryear [00:26:47]:

And write that down and see like, are there themes and how they present or what they've been through in their lives? And part of our job in marketing and in niching is to be, is to include the people that we do great work with and exclude the people that we don't because we don't want to attract those people. Therapists get real weird with feeling like, exclusionary. But if you don't do great work with people or you don't feel good after your work with people, I don't want you to spend your time seeing them because they're somebody else's favorite. Send them to those therapists, find out who they are, and that way the client is getting much better care. You're not huffing and puffing. And the other therapist is like, oh, thanks for the referral. My favorite. So those are two places to start.

Allison Puryear [00:27:29]:

There are so many different ways to go through it, but those are two places that I have people start. Yeah. So rather than overwhelming people, I'll stop there.

Michael Fulwiler [00:27:38]:

I'm so glad that you brought that up. I think identifying who you don't work with or who you don't want to work with can be just as powerful as who you do work with. Right. And those are the people you refer out. Like you said, you're not going to ignore those people when they reach out to you. Still try to help them find a therapist. And that comes back to when someone does reach out to you for therapy who is nothing in your niche, who are you going to think of? Who is going to be top of mind to refer to? If you have a therapist, friend or colleague and you're not really sure who they work with because they don't have a defined niche, you're probably not going to send them any referrals.

Allison Puryear [00:28:23]:

Right? Exactly.

Michael Fulwiler [00:28:25]:

You mentioned you have a course. Could you talk a little bit about that and how you do help therapists to define their niche?

Allison Puryear [00:28:33]:

Absolutely. So we have a know your niche course. It's only $29, which I think it's so important. That's part of why it's priced in an affordable way. It's like so many therapists skip the niche part because they want to get to marketing, which then the marketing doesn't work because they're not niched. So if you just do this and then tack on whatever marketing you are excited about doing to begin with, the know your niche course is a really great place to start. And we can, I guess, can we link to it or I.

Michael Fulwiler [00:28:58]:

Absolutely. Yeah. We'll drop that. We'll drop it in the show notes so people can do that. It's such a great resource. Well, Alison, this has been incredible. I know we went fast, covered a lot. Hopefully people are able to.

Michael Fulwiler [00:29:15]:

This was great. Anything that you want to leave folks with as we wrap this up, I.

Allison Puryear [00:29:20]:

Think in general, when you think about your practice, whether you're in it or you're just dreaming about it, I want you to know that you can have what you want. I want you to work the hours you want to work. I want you to see the clients you want to work with. I want you to set the fee that works for you. I want, like, I want you to know you can have what you want and you don't have to make a bunch of concessions just because you're new to private practice.

Michael Fulwiler [00:29:39]:

Love that. Thank you so much, Allison.

Allison Puryear [00:29:42]:

Absolutely. Thank you.

Michael Fulwiler [00:29:44]:

Thanks for listening to this episode of Heard Business School brought to you by Heard, the financial back office. For therapists, visit the Heard Resource Hub at joinheard.com to support you in your journey as a private practice owner. And don't forget to subscribe on YouTube, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you in the next class.

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