As y’all know, I am promoting my new paperwork packets hard over the past couple of weeks. It’s because I worked hard on them for a long time. So many people have asked about paperwork packets, in particular the psychometrist training manual that I mentioned way back in another blog post. I’ve been working hard on those. They are available at thetestingpsychologist.com/paperwork.
There are three packets. There’s a clinical packet. It’s got report templates, demographic forms, and a bunch of other stuff. There’s an administrative packet. It’s got billing agreements, disclosure statements, excerpts, and a bunch of other cool things. And then there’s the psychometrist training packet that everybody seems to want. And this is pretty detailed, both [00:01:00] overview and what’s the word? Stumbling over my words today. Big picture and small picture. Let’s just say that. So macro and micro instructions and training materials on how to train your psychometrists. If you’re hiring people in your practice, that could be super helpful for you. So again, thetestingpsychologist.com/paperwork.
All right. Onto our episode.
All right, y’all, here we are The Testing Psychologist podcast episode 63. This is episode #3 in the What I Wish I Knew series. If you haven’t heard the previous two, go check them out. This is all about Things I wish I knew when I [00:02:00] started out. First one, I talked about what I wish I knew about insurance. Last one, I talked about what I wish I’d done with billing systems. Today, I’m going to be talking about delegating.
I wish I delegated a long time before I did. I’ve talked about this a lot, so I’m not going to belabor this point, but delegating is super important in your practice.
I think I’ve talked about this before and framed this in the context of, a lot of us as practice owners tend to have this belief that we can do everything better than everyone else. I harbored that belief for a long time. That’s admittedly something that I struggle with a little bit in my personal life as well feeling like if I don’t do it, then it’s not going to be done right.
And of course, I learned time and time again from my family and my friends and [00:03:00] in my business that that’s not the case at all. People are capable. You just have to, in many cases, teach them or be clear in your communication about what you’re expecting. I held onto that belief for a long time that I was the only one that could do so many of these tasks in my practice. And I wish that I had just let that go a lot sooner than I did.
There are many ways to delegate, free up some time, and level up your practice. What you do is you trade time for money. When you are not spending hours every week answering the phone, doing your books, playing with your website, doing your social media marketing, or whatever it might be, you free up that time to make money seeing clients or free up that time to [00:04:00] spend time with your family or anything else that you might want to do aside from working.
My good friend, Joe Sanok, former coach of Practice of the Practice told me that I was the highest-paid administrative assistant in the entire country, which is totally true. I don’t know of any other administrative assistants who make $100 to $150 an hour. And in some places, I know that’s way higher for a lot of you. So anything that you would pay someone else less than your hourly rate to do is worth thinking about hiring someone and delegating those things.
A few of the big ones that I have delegated at this point.
Starting small, clerical tasks around the office. I partnered with a local university to get undergraduate interns who are getting class credit and they spend 10 to 15 hours [00:05:00] a week here in our practice doing things like copying, mailing, scanning our records, checking clients in, and little tasks like that are, I would say essential, but maybe not requiring of a ton of skill. So undergraduate interns are great for that. If you find the right intern, that can even include things like blogging for your practice, doing graphics, doing marketing, or any number of things.
Another thing that I think is huge to outsource is answering the phone. Many of us are in appointments most of the day, either doing intakes, feedback, or testing sessions. And there’s so much research out there around calling people back quickly and how likely you are to book an appointment. So that is super important. You can partner with a VA service.
Gosh, it took me forever to hire, that time it was [00:06:00] a grad student who had some free time in her schedule to answer the phones and she was fantastic, but I didn’t think anybody could be fantastic until I did it. So you can check out a VA. If you’re grossing a lot per month, then you can think about an admin assistant as well, a full-time admin assistant, but either way, it’s helpful. It also forced me to write out some of my phone scripts and start to document my processes, which I will be talking about next time.
Otherwise, you can outsource your billing. I talked about that last time. I’ve talked about it many times. Outsourcing billing is super helpful. Yes, it is 5% off your top-line revenue, but for many of us, if you are not doing a good job with billing, 5% is a small fee compared to what you’re already losing from not having a billing company. So [00:07:00] outsource your billing.
And then there’s a ton of other stuff that you can outsource that I again held onto for a long time. I did our taxes for a long time myself. I maintained our website for a long time. I still maintain our website but that is because I’ve been very deliberate in thinking through it, and I know that that is something that I enjoy and I want to continue doing. So I still do that, but I did outsource some of the harder parts when we upgraded our site recently, and that was super helpful.
I went on Fiverr.com where you can find any number of freelance folks who are looking for little works, little gigs, little bits of work. It’s awesome. It’s often pretty cost-effective compared to hiring a web design company. So Fiverr.com. It was really easy.
What else? [00:08:00] In a way, and this is a big one that actually, I thought about as I was doing this episode, pursuing coaching is another way to outsource in your practice. What you’re doing is outsourcing the job of coming up with new ideas, finding the right direction, getting those resources that you may have to spend hours and hours researching on the internet, and learning from someone who has already done it.
This is the one place I think out of everything that I’ve mentioned that could be more expensive than your own time, but don’t be deterred by that. Every time that I’ve pursued coaching, it has come back many times upon itself in terms of, again, top-line revenue or time spent not working and feeling better as a professional and as a person. So that is [00:09:00] another way that you can outsource some pretty major tasks in your practice. And it can save you a ton of time.
I remember when I was pursuing coaching first with Joe Sanok, who I mentioned last time, I asked him very directly, are you going to give me anything that you, or that I could not find myself on the internet somewhere? Because that’s my mindset. I approach every single task by saying, okay, what can I Google? Then I gauge how hard it’s going to be. And then most of the time I try to do it myself or I did for a long time.
And Joe, thankfully was really honest. He said, no, you can probably find all this stuff out there. The difference though, is that I can tell you and you don’t have to search for it. So I’m going to save you a ton of time. And I thought,” That makes a lot of sense”. And it was totally true.
Just to recap. This is all about delegating. I would encourage you [00:10:00] to do it sooner than later. I wish I had done it sooner rather than later. I missed so many clients. I missed so many collected bills and I wasted a lot of time doing things probably even worse than the people that I ended up hiring. So I think delegating is super helpful.
All right. Thank you for listening. This is episode #3 in the What I Wish I Knew series. We’ve got two more coming up. The next one, like I mentioned, is all about systems and getting what’s in your head out of your head so that other people might be able to do some things for you in your practice.
If you need any sort of paperwork to help get your practice off the ground or take your practice to the next level with a psychometrist, go check out my paperwork packets. I’ve worked hard on them. I’m selling them hard too. Thank y’all [00:11:00] for listening to that. But I think they’re good. So you can go to thetestingpsychologist.com/paperwork. That’s all I’ll say about that. There’s a lot of cool stuff there. You can check it out. See if it’s right for you.
I did mention coaching in this episode, so I am going to also throw that out there. Coaching, specifically testing psychologists, is what I do. So if it seems like coaching could be helpful for you, or if you think it might be helpful but you’re not sure, go to the website, thetestingpsychologist.com/consulting. You can learn more. You can send me an email, or you can book a pre-consulting call. It’s free. I’ll talk with you about whether coaching could be good for you. If not, I will point you in the right direction and try to get you hooked up with whatever you might need in your practice elsewhere.
Thank you all. I am going to be taking off soon to go on a little vacation, but [00:12:00] there should be two more episodes in the queue. I hope y’all are enjoying and I hope to catch you next time. Bye-bye.