Counselor’s Hours – a Look at the Duties of a Private Practitioner
When you run a private practice, your duties and responsibilities are doubled.
For success, you have to figure out how to provide your unique brand of mental healthcare AND run a streamlined, effective business.
But how do private practitioners divvy up their time between their provider role and their administrative one?
Let’s take a look!
Everyone needs a unique hour allotment to best fit their business.
Someone with a veteran customer base can spend fewer hours marketing. A therapist close to retirement doesn’t have to worry about professional development (unless they want to).
You get the idea. What works best for someone else isn’t what’s best for you.
We will frame this in three different groups of tasks that fill out an average private practitioner’s schedule.
Tasks besides actively providing care – Administrative
Tasks that go with actively providing care – Support and Development
And actively providing care – Care and Service
Let’s go through them in reverse order.
Care and Service
These are the hours in which you’re actively providing care. This does include any specific preparation you do for clients, like preparing for sessions, along with the actual time spent in session.
Your caseload will influence how much time you spend here.
With a caseload of 25 clients a week, one hour per session, you’re looking at 25 hours actively providing care, not including preparation.
If you take on another 30 minutes per client, that’s right at 37.5 hours per week.
But then you have the following two groups to consider, too.
Support and Development
These are the hours you’re investing into your professional development, giving you more tools and experience to better support the growth of your practice.
Professional development can be a part of your weekly or monthly routine, but it doesn’t have to be.
An example of consistent development would be volunteering once a week at an in-person clinic or even holding your own weekly workshop.
Every week you’re putting in a few hours into your professional development.
On the other hand, you can get most of your professional development hours for the year in a relatively short period of time if you want.
Short but intensive classes and courses allow you to get a lot of hours over just a few weeks instead of the whole year.
Administrative
These tend to be the hours that most providers dread the most/like the least.
This is when you have to take off your therapist hat and put on your administrative manager hat.
Some of us just do not enjoy that sort of work, have no experience with it, and aren’t interested in working on it.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of tasks that are impossible to ignore without your practice suffering.
Billing – billing consists of a bunch of fun things like invoicing, spreadsheet management, and the awkward moment of asking for money from clients before you work with them
Insurance – insurance is not the easiest thing to understand and work with in the world, but you need to make sure your clients have the right insurance so you can get proper compensation
Social Media – to grow your online presence, you have to engage with people on social media consistently
New Clients – also known as marketing, this is sending emails, running ads, writing blog posts, and more
Scheduling – as you get more and more clients, you need to have a more rigid and well-planned schedule
Business Insurances – not only do you have to make sure your clients have the right insurance for you and your practice, but you also need to make sure your business is properly insured for both your location and your client’s (if you do any remote work)
So, how many hours for all this?
The first time you do it, with all the setup work and a lack of experience? A lot. Probably more than the time you spend actually providing care.
The millionth time? Well, experience only goes so far; some tasks just take time. So this will still be around 10 to 15 hours a week, just to maintain things.
Administrative tasks can be a significant barrier preventing therapists from starting a private practice.
Imagine what sort of practice you could build if you didn’t have to start from scratch and had things like billing, caseload, and invoicing handled for you!
Well, it doesn’t have to be just a thought – our free white paper, Facing Uncertainty with Flexibility, is a great place to start!
