609 Transcript

Dr. Jeremy Sharp (01:17)
So I think we’ve all had this experience where we get the opportunity to take on a new service line in our practice, or maybe a new contract, a new partnership, new referral source, something like that. This has certainly happened to me. All right, a few years ago we got the opportunity to take on a contract to provide evaluations for incarcerated individuals for neurodevelopmental concerns. This sounded amazing on the surface.

we got into it. We did several of these evaluations. And unfortunately, I we it didn’t it didn’t work. It was too much. It was too much. the travel was quite a bit, we were going to neighboring counties, the workflow just didn’t quite fit. it was really hard to get testing materials into the jail, for example. safety, of course, was kind of an issue. so

I bring all this up because it sounded like a really good idea. I mean, it’s still, it’s probably still a pretty good idea. it just ended up costing a lot more time and energy than it looked like it would on paper. And I think that that is often true of any new thing that we add to our practice. So today I’m gonna dig into how to evaluate a new service line to figure out if it is truly worth it. Right? Let’s go.

Dr. Jeremy Sharp (02:49)
So today I’m going to talk about saying yes and specifically how to decide whether to say yes when an opportunity shows up at your door. This comes up often. Both in my membership and in consulting. Patterns are pretty consistent, so I blended a few examples together to create this episode. Sometimes it means this is out outreach that works better than you expected. Okay. So like let’s say you reach out to

A handful of referral sources, thinking that a couple of them will write back, but then all of a sudden all of them do. And then one of them says, Hey, could you also do X for us? Or can we set up a program? Or can you come to our site? And this is actually not even a service that you offer yet, but you’re, you know, knee deep already into a potential partnership. sometimes this might be a side service that seems like a natural fit for your practice. Okay. You’ve got like empty space in your

Offices in the evenings where you’ve got families who keep asking for a certain service and you think, hey, we could just add coaching or med management or OT or a speech therapist or some kind of academic sport. Sometimes it’s about rounding out your evaluations, right? You think about bringing in another discipline or adding a new age group because you know the evaluations would be more complete.

Here’s the thing though, every one of those is a good problem, right? I mean, these are good problems. Opportunity is always a decision I would rather make than not have to make. But every one of them could also quietly eat a year of your life and maybe a lot of your savings if you are not careful. So I’ve got five questions. I would run any of these through before you say yes to any of them. And, you know, hopefully they’re pretty simple. I hope that they will save you a lot of pain.

This process. All right. So question number one is probably the most basic one and it is often the one that we skip the most. So who is actually going to do this work? If you’re a solo practitioner, that’s obvious. It’s you. If you are a group practice owner, this takes a little more thought. is the default that you’re going to do the work or that somebody else is going to do the work? And if it’s someone else, I want you to actually like write down a name of the person who’s going to do this.

Okay. And if you can’t think of someone else and you’re t you end up about to write down your own name, you probably need to sit with that for a second because for most of the people I talk to, especially the folks who are getting these offers in the first place, the calendar is already full. All right. That’s usually why the offers are coming in. So if the answer to that question to who is going to do the work is me, you’re not adding a service. You’re just adding hours to a week that doesn’t

don’t have any extra hours in it.

Now, sometimes the right person turns up before you’re ready, right? somebody you trust maybe says, Hey, if you ever do this, I’d like to be a part of it, or you have someone on your staff who’s like been waiting for this opportunity. that can change the question, certainly. it’s not like can I do this anymore, but can they do this and can I supervise it? That’s a much better question in my mind. But it’s still a question because supervising a new service, especially at the beginning, takes real time.

And you want to be honest with yourself about that as well. So the action step here is just write down the name of that person who’s doing the work before you go forward with anything else, before you look at pricing, before you build a web page. If you can’t write down a name of someone who’s gonna do the work, that probably tells you a lot.

Alright, question number two follows right from that. if your week is already full, every yes is a no to something that you’re already doing. We’ve heard this before, right? It’s just the math of time. There are there’s no secret extra day hiding somewhere. Okay. I think this is where a lot of us get stuck because the new thing is exciting, and old things are just the old things, they’re just familiar. They don’t feel

Like a choice anymore. They just kind of feel like the job. I mean, we all want novelty, of course, but they are still choices. Okay. So if you say yes to say, I don’t know, brief evaluations at a private school every week. The question is like, what other work is not getting done that day? is that your report writing time? Is that, you know, are you displacing like a higher value service or something that you enjoy more?

are you pushing, gonna be pushing into the evening because you’re gonna have extra report writing time? So the action step here is to name the specific thing that you would stop doing when you take on a new service. It’s kind of like that idea, you know. Some people subscribe to the idea that if you get a new piece of clothing, you have to take one away, you have to give something away so that your closet stays kind of net neutral. Same thing here. if you

Want to take on something new, you need to identify exactly what’s going to stop happening, what you’re gonna stop doing. Not like I will find time for this, but you know, an actual named thing from your calendar. And if you cannot name a thing, then the honest answer, at least for right now, is probably that the service is a not yet. You know, this is not yet the time for this.

The third question is does the math work out after the hidden costs? So this, you know, we can really get in the weeds on this. So you know, if you’ve ever consulted with me, you probably know what this might look like. But the visible part of any

new service is the fee, right? It’s a thing that you see first, usually the thing that makes the idea feel exciting. Hopefully, anyway, hopefully you’re gonna make money from it. You think, we did 20 of these.

This price, that is great money. But underneath the fee, there’s a whole pile of stuff that doesn’t show up until you are actually doing it. if it’s off site, it’s going to be travel, it’s going to be buying measures you don’t own yet. could be admin time for scheduling and paperwork and fitting intakes into a slightly different process, maybe a new workflow, could be super. And

If someone from another discipline is contributing or you have to hire folks, then it’s figuring out like how to coordinate with those folks, what the scheduling is gonna look like, all those kinds of things.

One way that I’ve seen people handle the money side in the beginning is to pay whoever is leading this new service, right? Instead of a fixed salary until revenue actually exists. I think that’s a pretty common way to pilot something without betting the whole practice. But like I said, I’m gonna try not to get in the weeds here. The action step that I would say is something that I do a lot, which is to play it all the way through on paper. Like walk through it like you’re the client.

Then, like you’re the admin, then like you’re the clinician writing the report. And every time you hit a spot where you would go, Hmm, I’m not sure how that would work, write it down. Sometimes you can solve those friction points, and sometimes the list gets long enough that the answer then becomes pretty obvious that it is not a great choice. And, you know, I of course like to focus on the financial aspects here, like all the things you might need to buy or invest in.

to make this thing happen, but there are other friction points too, of course, like I said, scheduling, logistics, travel, so forth.

Dr. Jeremy Sharp (10:06)
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Dr. Jeremy Sharp (12:16)
Right, so question number four. I’m actually like kind of proud of myself for saving this all the way for the fourth question, because I actually think it’s maybe the most important. it might sound a little soft, but I think it’s super important. The question is do you like this work? Do you actually like the work of the new service? I think plenty of us enjoy a population in small doses and wouldn’t want a whole caseload of that population.

so you might like love the occasional preschooler or the occasional forensic case or the occasional school consult. That’s great. But that is very different from building a service where that is what fills a day or two a week for the foreseeable future. I talked about this back on episode 589, which is the one on joy and alignment as business metrics. And I still think that’s true. You know, enjoyment is a legitimate business criterion, it is not frivolous.

because the services that you don’t like are the ones that you put off, you’ll end up avoiding them. The ones that you put off, the ones that turn into backlogs and burnout. So for an action step, before you look at any numbers, just rate honestly one to ten how much you would like doing this every week, as best you can ballpark. Now I know it’s gonna be tough until you actually get in it and kind of understand the ins and outs, but do you actually enjoy it? Give it a rating, one to ten. And then look at the money, because if you do it in the other order,

The money is probably gonna talk you in a number that you don’t really believe, or an enjoyment level that isn’t legitimate.

All right. question number five. A lot of these opportunities come with a deadline attached, or at least something that feels like a deadline. So maybe you you know have to get new office space, your lease is expiring. maybe you are under a deadline to update your website. maybe one of your clinicians

Has a certain deadline to add to their caseload. There’s a candidate who you might hire, but that’s for this new service, but it’s time limited and you don’t want to miss them. I think, at least in my experience, a lot of these deadlines are softer than they feel. So a new web page can always be added to a website later. If there’s a partner or person who really wants to work with you,

they will usually be able to wait a few weeks while you figure it out. And if the only way that something works is if you decide like right this moment, I I mean, that’s just good information. That’s just good information. Now, granted, you are getting my bias, of course, that I mean, I do not like to make decisions quickly. I like to investigate all the different facets of a decision, do my research, do my modeling, all those things. So, you know, that’s

bleeding over a little bit here, but I think it’s pretty rare that there are situations that are like truly urgent. And just good to notice if you feel yourself pressured to make a decision like that. All right. So if you’re if your situation passes those first four questions and you still want to do it, I would say not to like hard launch it, but try to pilot it a little bit. Okay. Give it a time-limited nature, like maybe

90 days. 90 days seems good. Maybe six months if it’s going to take a little while to get off the ground. try to decide upfront what success looks like, both emotionally and financially and logistically. So give it like

a specific number of trial cases or number of hours or a dollar amount that you would have to hit, like whatever matters to you, but try to define that stuff at the beginning before you get into it and get invested or

you know, get down like a sunk cost situation where you’ve invested so much into it that then you’re afraid to pull out. Because, you know, then you can hopefully objectively evaluate the thing and decide whether to keep it going.

Alright, so here is your homework. I want you to take one yes that’s on your plate right now, or one that’s been tempting you, and run all five questions out loud. Who does the work? Is it you? What comes off your plate, even if you just have to supervise someone else? Does the math still work after all the hidden costs? Would you actually like to do it every week, week in and week out? And is this a real deadline, or can you buy some more time?

You can do this on a walk, you could do do it in the car with a colleague. Do it out loud though or write it down, ’cause I think it’ll be interesting to like hear quote unquote yourself answer some of these some of these questions.

So quick recap here. Before you say yes, write down who’s gonna do the work. Name the specific thing that comes off your plate, play the whole thing through on paper, list the hidden costs, rate how much of it you’d actually like to do before you look at the money. And if the clock feels urgent, check whether it really is. And if you do decide to go ahead, map out a pilot versus a hard, hard launch, right?

So these are the kinds of decisions and discussions that you know we end up having in consulting meetings and in the membership community, which is called craft. Somebody brings an opportunity, the rest of the folks help play it out all the way through. I love bringing things to life, making it real, seeing what pops up. So if that sounds helpful, enrollment’s gonna be opening in January, and we’d love to have you be a part of the group. The testingpsychologist.com.

slash join craft. Can get some info there and see if it’s a good fit. All right, y’all, thanks for being here. As always, go run those five questions on something this week and come back next time.

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