5 Mistakes I Made Starting My Own Therapy Business, You Can Avoid!
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[00:00:00] Hey there. If you're a therapist and you wanna have your own therapy business one day, or you just started a therapy business and you're like, I need to learn some business skills. I'm gonna share with you the five mistakes that I made when I started my own business. That YOU can potentially avoid if you're starting out, if you're thinking about it or you're starting out and you're like a year or two into it I'll share with you some of my mistakes so you can avoid making them yourselves and hopefully get inspired or motivated and hopefully it can help you with with something as it relates to your business.
[00:00:37] My name is Hoang. I'm an occupational therapist and certified hand therapist, and I help OTs develop their clinical and business skills I've been in business at my therapy clinic for 10 years, and within those 10 years I decided to branch off and start another business where I mentor and help other therapists.
[00:00:57] And that's my online platform that you're watching [00:01:00] me from currently. I'm gonna share with you these five and six. I'm just gonna share with you what they are first, and then I will go into explaining exactly what it is. That I did so you don't have to do it. So my first biggest mistake was I believed my own hype fricking ego was so big.
[00:01:18] Like there was, I don't even know how I got through the door. And I'll share with you how that actually hurt me. Number two, spending time trying to get in network with insurance companies. Holy moly, if I could get that time back. Number three, spending too much time on branding, picking the colors and this and that.
[00:01:37] The other, the logos, it was so much time wasted. And then number four, I think number four is probably some of the biggest mistakes that I've made. And believe it or not, you'll make them over and over again every single time you level up. And that's wasting energy on limiting beliefs.
[00:01:54] And I'll dive into that a lot more in a few minutes. And then number five, waiting to buy into [00:02:00] a business course or a business coaching program. So when I started about 10 years ago everyone as an occupational, as a certified hand therapist everyone who didn't have a business right, was telling me, oh, everyone's gonna wanna, come and be treated by you Hoang.
[00:02:18] You're the best. You're amazing. There's not an, there's not a lot of s that is true. But that's not what defines your business. That's not what ultimately brings people into your doors. But before I started, what I did was I was basically listening to people who have not done what I was looking to do, right?
[00:02:48] And so they were, not of any fault of their own, they were just pumping me up. They were just pumping me up. They're like, Juan, you're the best. You are amazing. Everyone's gonna send their patients [00:03:00] to you. Your friends tell you, even though doctors, they'll say it to your face. Oh my God.
[00:03:04] Great. Amazing. Good luck. Yeah. I'll send you patients right. Actually one, one year, I'll share a story. One year I told one of the hand surgeons that I love working with, and I told him, Hey, I was gonna start. I'm gonna open my own business. And he was like, oh, why don't you just come work for me?
[00:03:21] And I was like that defeats starting my own business. And thank God I didn't take him up on that offer because he ended up moving out of state. And then I would've been left without a job. So obviously that didn't work out and actually it didn't open my own, my clinic that year. I ended up waiting a few more years before I opened that clinic.
[00:03:42] But but yeah, like. When I started, I just wasted a lot of time believing my hype. And when sometimes when your ego is so big you can't see all the things that you need to do because you're believing that hype, right? Fundamentally, you have to start something so [00:04:00] hard of starting your own business fundamen fundamentally, to start, you have to trust and believe that you're capable of doing hard things.
[00:04:09] And I am. But I felt like I. I wasted a lot of time because I was like, oh, because I'm a certified hand therapist, people are just gonna send patients to me. And that's not true. You, I don't know if you can learn that other than learning it on your own, but if you hear it, maybe it will help catch you a little bit early, like sooner than it caught me.
[00:04:33] But It's extremely humbling when you start and the way I started, some people start differently. Some people gradually grow their business on the side and then build it up. I went cold Turkey into my therapy clinic. Literally from one day to the next day I started, right? I, my last day at my job was on a Friday, and on the Monday I started with my own patients.
[00:04:57] With barely any patients, but I went cold [00:05:00] Turkey and started my therapy clinic that way. So if you can. Catch that ego and simmer siana, right? That's an SS n l skit. So number two, spending time getting into network. If I could do it over again, I would find someone and pay them to do it, because honestly, it was a huge time sink.
[00:05:22] So when I started my business, I was working at night. I was work, I was working during the day, come home, take care of the family, and then I would work at night trying to get in network and stuff like that. And you spend a lot of time doing that stuff and it distracts you from doing the real thing that you need to do which is to learn how to write and to learn how to speak.
[00:05:43] So you're, When you develop your clinic, you have to develop your voice. Like how are you gonna speak to people? How are you going to tell stories about what you do and how you do it and how you do well, right? To essentially attract people to come to you. That's [00:06:00] marketing one-on-one. And I wish I spent more time focus on marketing than I did trying to get in network with insurance companies.
[00:06:10] So if you have the capacity which a lot of us do, 'cause it's not like we don't have. Good paying jobs, we have good paying jobs. It just maybe requires a certain amount of sacrifice, of limiting your spending in order to afford someone to be able to get you into network. So yeah, I would do that totally different.
[00:06:30] Now, nowadays I pay someone to do all my credentialing. When I have new staff, when I have to renegotiate my contracts, it's not a space that I want to spend my time in. But again, Take it with a grain of salt because I run two companies. I run my therapy clinic and then I run my online program.
[00:06:49] So I'm literally running two companies. So I've chosen to do these things and not do my contracts. So you have to look at yourself and say, what do you [00:07:00] have time and capacity for? I felt like at the beginning spending a lot of my time doing my own contracts, yes, it saved me money, but what it did was it also made me lose money because when you don't market and you don't bring customers to come into your clinic, you're essentially losing money.
[00:07:19] Every, everywhere you spend your time, it's either to save money or to make money. Which one do you wanna do? Okay. Number three, spending too much time on branding. And like really looking at the wrong people, right? So a lot of times we think about branding. We think about Nike, we think about Tiffany, we think about, Louis Vuitton.
[00:07:39] We think about these big major brands that, that have become known for a really long time. And so they have a color scheme. They have a logo, they have, they become known, but they spend millions of dollars a year creating their brand. They're been around for decades, right? You're coming out you.[00:08:00]
[00:08:00] You wanna be clear and concise. You wanna be clear and concise about your, the name of your company, the tagline, the things that you do and spend more time thinking about who you want to serve. Who do you want to help initially? Versus, what color is my business card? I wish I had kept it really simple in terms of a color scheme.
[00:08:24] So I'll show you my, let me see my. Hands-on therapy services, right? We've since rebranded and changed that quote unquote logo, but I just wanted to pick something that was pretty, that would make me stand out. It has a lot of colors, but the problem with picking something that has a lot of colors is that's hard to print.
[00:08:50] It makes it expensive to print. It's not. Simple. So my name is really Long Hands-On Therapy Services. I didn't think about the acronym hot, [00:09:00] so I became hot as an Asian woman. Hot hands on. Oh my God, the jokes were nonstop. So yeah, you you can think about your title and think about like how clear you wanna be.
[00:09:11] I personally, my name is Hoang Tran. It's already hard to pronounce, hard to spell, so I decided not to use it as a name of my company Also in terms of, potentially selling it one day. I didn't necessarily want my name there either, so I just chose. That name, but you can pick something that's just really clear and concise and, limited in colors and complexity 'cause it makes printing easier.
[00:09:39] And so sometimes when you start out, if you just have your name, shit, you just have your name and black and white. One color just makes it easier. So when you change it later, it's even easier than that. So yeah, I thought it was about me standing out and me being different from other people.
[00:09:56] But the branding isn't what's gonna make you stand out and be [00:10:00] different from other people. It's gonna be how you build your business, how you speak, how you market to people, how you attract customers all of those other things versus the color and the logo. So yeah, I think that made it harder for me by picking something that had so many colors.
[00:10:20] Yeah. People oh, I recognize that logo, dude, they could have rec recognized me by my name alone. I. For a really long time, I said I was the only Asian certified hand therapist in Miami, and I was, and so my sister-in-law became a certified hand therapist as well. So I have stopped saying that.
[00:10:38] But yeah, so I, I wouldn't spend as much time and energy because the thing is, you're gonna have limited time. And energy when you're starting your own business that you need to know where do you put it? Where do you put your time and energy? And had I known, I would not have wasted so much precious time and energy on branding.
[00:10:57] 'cause branding takes time to build [00:11:00] because branding is about reputation. And I've been in, when I started my business, I've been a therapist for 10 years. I had already, as to a certain extent, developed my real, my my reputation with certain surgeons. And then when you develop it for your own therapy clinic, you develop it for yourself, right?
[00:11:20] So spend time doing that, building your reputation versus your versus the colors and stuff like that. Of your brand. Number four was wasted energy, unlimited beliefs. One I'll share a very specific limiting belief and one of the limiting beliefs that I really faced very early on, and I think you're probably facing is two, is how much to charge.
[00:11:45] I spoke to a therapist when I first started 'cause I just wasn't really sure. And I see a lot of people doing this is that sometimes to ground yourself, you look at other people and say, what are they charging? So that maybe I [00:12:00] can copy and do the same the issue. With a lot of that is when you copy other people, if they have a limiting belief on what they charge, you will then copy their limiting belief.
[00:12:13] And that's essentially what I did. I asked a an acquaintance at that time, she had her own therapy clinic and I just saw her as wow, you have this therapy clinic, you're so amazing. How much do you charge? So I can charge? What you charge and what I didn't realize was when she told me what she charged, I knew in my gut, I was like, that is not a good number.
[00:12:38] That is not a good number because at that price point I didn't, I couldn't see financial growth and I couldn't see company growth. 'cause you need money. You need revenue in order to grow a company, to be able to hire and build out your space and that kind of stuff. And I was just like, wow, if you charge that much how many patients do I need to [00:13:00] see to have any kind of growth?
[00:13:01] I. Right. But what I did was I ended up copying her limiting belief and I actually was like, I'm not gonna charge that much. I'm gonna charge a little bit more. I literally charged $10 more than what she was charging. And from that she was like, oh, that's too much. And so what happened was I absorbed her limiting belief and it took me a long time to break that limiting belief.
[00:13:24] So I would just caution you that you have to be careful. With copying what other people are doing, because if you're co, if you're copying something and they have a limiting belief around it and there's a lot of limiting beliefs around money you essentially could be copying their limited beliefs around money as well.
[00:13:47] And that can really hinder you starting your business, you growing your business. Right when I was trying to start my business and I was talking to people who didn't have, again, [00:14:00] it goes back to number one, right? Talking to the wrong people sometimes. They couldn't see it for themselves, so they were like, oh I'm sure you could do it, but I could never do it, oh, and I, and so because you're speaking to the wrong people, sometimes their limiting beliefs gets imprinted into your brain. And you might think that you as an occupational therapist alone, can't open a thriving, successful business. And those voices just can be more frequent, louder, multiplied by multiple people, which makes it.
[00:14:39] It amplifies it in your brain versus someone who is successful, someone who can tell you, hey, if you're an occupational therapist, you could totally open your own business and be completely ot. You don't have to add other services if you don't want to, and you might want to. So if you're talking to people who have an expansive belief [00:15:00] of anything is possible and the question isn't, can you or can't you?
[00:15:05] If their question is more, how do we do this? That's the person you wanna talk to, you wanna talk to people with who have like expansive beliefs versus ones that have limiting beliefs. Right now, even in the expansive belief is a, they might ask you certain questions that are hard, make you think about the how.
[00:15:24] How do I do this if I wanna, how do I do this? They might question you in terms of, okay, they're not questioning, they're gonna challenge you to. Think about what a successful model could look like versus a not so successful model. There's a lot of different business models in which you can pick from, but you ultimately need to pick from them.
[00:15:45] But if you're talking to someone who has a limiting belief on what that model should be versus someone who has an expansive belief that imprints into your BA brain. So one of the things that I did very early on in starting my own business was that That I [00:16:00] was spending time with people with limited beliefs.
[00:16:02] And so what was happening was they were, I was somehow attracting people coming to me and wanting me to expand their belief. But in that sense, I was also attracting people to a very limited beliefs, and no one was expanding my belief. So there's a difference and you gotta pick and choose.
[00:16:21] You have to be very intentional. When you start a business, you have to, you become more and more intentional about where your energy, where your time goes. And that leads me to number five. Like I waited way too long to buy into a business program, a business coaching program. I just didn't even know those things really existed.
[00:16:45] And part of it was 'cause I. Again, I think I was so stuck in a limiting belief in a, I've gotta save my money. I've got to not spend any because I don't have any money. And on, in all honesty, [00:17:00] as a therapist, we can always work. I. I can always work. And when you have that thinking of I can always work, I can always help somebody expand your thinking, so it helps you like, Hey, look for the programs that could help you.
[00:17:14] I didn't even think to look for the programs that could help me because I was again, in my limited thinking. And it wasn't until I was two years into opening my own business where I was straight struggling and I was like, if this is what it is to have your own business I don't know if I want this.
[00:17:35] This is terrible. You, I couldn't go on vacation. I couldn't spend time with my kids. I was really frustrated with what I needed to do. You have this, you're in this limbo where I don't know what I don't know, but that limiting belief limited me from buying into a course.
[00:17:55] It limited me from getting a business coach, like to [00:18:00] the point where I didn't even look for them. So I hope that's one of my biggest mistakes, that if you could avoid, just start consuming the, like what we have available now to us, what we have available now to us compared to 10 years ago is a hundred times over.
[00:18:20] So I got started with a book I didn't even know to look for a fucking book, right? I was going and going to these the, I was looking on YouTube, I was looking on Google, but I was looking for like business plans These very academic business plan. A lot of people tell you go to score.net or.com or whatever, and everyone's you gotta have a business plan, draw your business plan.
[00:18:47] You need a business plan. You need a plan, right? But you don't have to have a critical business plan because a true business plan is created so that you can borrow money. [00:19:00] I was not ever intending to borrow money to make my business successful, so I wasted time looking at all these, like reading all these things and like how to drop a business plan and your financial forecast.
[00:19:14] Like it was completely over my head and the one thing I really needed to focus on was marketing. And I wasn't doing any of that because again, I asked, people who I didn't, who, had every intention of being helpful, but was also very limiting, was like, just market yourself to doctors.
[00:19:37] And doctors will send patients to you to a certain extent. They trickle in here and there, but they, incredibly hard to give you the bulk of your business. And and then you have to be careful if they do give you the bulk of their business. I was not someone who was willing to do that with strings attached.
[00:19:58] I was, not willing [00:20:00] to do that with putting my business in jeopardy. I. I was also not getting in network. And so doctors sometimes who can give you the bulk of their business are in network. And so that you have to be willing to be either in network or work in ways that only take an a certain amount.
[00:20:19] But even then, that was really challenging. Yeah, I put my focus in a lot of different places that I just didn't know. I think nowadays, fast forward 10 years, there's a lot more information. There's a lot more information readily available to you if you're willing to consume it, if you're willing to look for it, if you're willing to consume it, if you're willing to do something that's different than what has been done in the past.
[00:20:43] 'cause, as a ot, as a C H D, Yeah, I was told, just market to doctors and they'll send you patients, and I did not find that to be true. I. If it works for you, great. Then you have other problems that you have to [00:21:00] one, one solution creates another problem, right? So if all your eggs are in one basket, what do you need to do risk your business, right?
[00:21:07] If you're in bed with a surgeon that's sending you the bulk of your business, that wasn't my case. I wanted to build a completely independent business that was successful, profitable And that I could hire a team around. And that built over time. But I didn't get started with any kind of business coaching programs, books until two years into it when I was truly suffering.
[00:21:30] So you can avoid all that suffering and just start reading some great business books. You can consume some content online. Really consider buying into a business program. A business coaching program, as long as you learn something from it, it's never a mistake. I've spent thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars since then buying into various different programs to learn and to really improve my skills.
[00:21:56] And the. The sooner you do it, [00:22:00] the faster you learn. The question is like how fast or how slow you want to go. If you wanna try to figure out everything on your own, you're just, you might be going a lot slower and burning a lot of, hours, right? But if you buy into a program or.
[00:22:14] Get into a course or a coaching program, you can speed up your learning process. That's the whole point of programs like I run a mentorship program for OTs that wanna inc improve their clinical skills. And that can fast track someone's clinical skills, so you don't have to waste a lot of time.
[00:22:34] And so will be true for, my business coaching program. It's gonna help you fast track and share with you everything that I've learned help you challenge your thinking to help you make decisions that will fast track your business so you don't get stuck too long, wasted time is lost money yeah, those were my five mistakes, and I hope by sharing with you some of my mistakes and some of the things that I've done in my business can really [00:23:00] help you to propel your business, whether you're starting or when you wanna start one, or if you're a couple years into a you, you we're stuck like me and seeing someone just like you Doing the things that you wanna do.
[00:23:14] So I hope that helps you, and if videos and stories like this help you, then no matter where you are viewing this, if you're watching this on the YouTube channel or listening to a podcast and follow for more. My name is Hoang Tran and I hope to see and talk to you soon. Thank you. Bye.
