Start-Up Decisions in a Nature-Based Speech Therapy Practice: Live Coaching Call with Kate Glennon
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Laura Park Figueroa: Welcome to Therapy in the Great Outdoors, the podcast where we explore the business and practice of nature based pediatric therapy of all kinds. If you're an outdoor loving pediatric practitioner in the fields of occupational, physical, or speech therapy, social work, or mental health, this podcast will help you start and grow a successful nature based practice or program.
I am the ever honest, always 100 percent real, you'll hear it all on this podcast, Dr. Laura Park. My name is Laura Park Figueroa. I'm a pediatric OT with over 20 years of experience and I run a thriving nature based practice with profitable locations in two different states and multi six figures in revenue.
I also host the free online community at therapyinthegreatoutdoors. com to help you pursue your nature based therapy dreams too. Are you ready to take action on those dreams? Let's jump in. Thanks for being here, everybody. We are back with another episode of Therapy in the Great Outdoors. And today We're doing a live coaching call with Kate Glennon. She is the Outdoorsy SLP on Instagram. I love that Instagram handle, by the way.
It's the best. And so she's been in practice for a few months now doing nature based work. And so I want to start off, Kate, thanking you for being here, first of all. And why don't you share a little bit about like where you're at in your practice? You just got started and tell us about your practice a bit.
Kate Glennon: Awesome. Yeah. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. So I have been in practice since July 1. I was my hand was forced into this and it's what I've always wanted to do. And I'm glad that I'm here now. So I worked in private practice for 15 years for someone else. And then I taught at a nature based school.
I was teaching kindergarten through fourth grade for the past three years. So I knew I could never go back to four walls and an outpatient clinic. I just couldn't. I couldn't do it. So I am now, I'm outdoors. I'm doing all of my therapy. I would say 90 percent of my therapy outdoors and home based.
So I set myself up at parks or I'm at people's houses and we're outdoors. I'm at some schools. So I have quite the variety of what things are starting to look like. Yeah. Really fast. And my caseload is very full. And now I'm I've hit a little bit of the panic button. Now to keep things balanced and flowing.
Laura Park Figueroa: That's a good problem to have, but also it feels in the moment, I know, like super overwhelming when you grow too fast. Cause a lot of people don't think about that. They start a business and think it's going to be so hard to get clients. And then what I've heard from nature based people is that their practices fill up pretty quick.
And then they're like, What am I doing? It can get super overwhelming when it's just you. Okay, I want to dive into the coaching stuff because I have a lot of questions I want to ask because that's an interesting conundrum that you're growing really fast. And I want to go down all the rabbit holes with that topic.
But first, I want to get a little bit more background because I'm so interested that You, so you were a speech therapist and then for the last three years, were you doing speech therapy when, or were you were working as a teacher essentially in an outdoor nature based program? Yes.
Kate Glennon: I was working as a teacher.
It happened organically during COVID. We had to make a decision. Our daughter was entering kindergarten and we had to make a decision. My husband had to deploy for COVID. So I was home with two little kids. working full time remotely because our practice went completely online and it was chaos. And so we decided to enroll our daughter in this pop up nature based school because we knew she'd be outdoors, she'd be safe, and it was kindergarten.
Who cares if she played all day, right? I didn't care. It didn't matter. Yeah. And my son had gone to the same school and my daughter for their early learning. So that's also an early learning center. So I started out doing social learning lessons for the school and building their social curriculum for the school.
as a discount to get my daughter in. Oh, fun. Okay. So I just haphazardly walked past the director one day and was like, this is how school should be. This is how therapy should be. This is how it should be. She's let's talk. And then six weeks later, I was hired on to do a very different job than I ended up doing but I ended up teaching so I was literacy and math and nature based ed and I just had to dive in fully certified in my second year as a nature based teacher level one.
And that's where a lot of my background has come from. That's from the ERAFANS.
Laura Park Figueroa: Okay. Yeah. ERAFANS is one. I know there's the Academy of Forest Kindergarten Teachers in California. There's Cedarsong. There's a lot of like nature based educator trainings. Yep.
Kate Glennon: Yeah. So that's where a lot of, where I got the comfort level to just go with it.
Cause I, you can translate any clinical skill and therapy model really. to the outdoors as long as you're comfortable and confident in the outdoors. So it gave me that little confidence in the outdoors to then take kids outside and feel safe and confident doing it.
Laura Park Figueroa: So that's so great. And then, so now you're, so now your practice is speech therapy outdoors.
Kate Glennon: Yeah. Yep. I do tutoring as well. I tutor for reading but and some like early on math, but it's all really language based, so it's, it really fits into the language but my tutoring's outdoors too. We work on our vowel teams and all of those things and our letter sounds in the dirt with the stick, not with a pen and pencil, yep. I love it. It's really
Laura Park Figueroa: cool. Yeah. That's so great. Okay. So that kind of gives me a background of like your business and how you're set up. I'm wondering, so the first question I'm liking to ask people lately, when we enter into these kind of like first coaching call we've ever done kind of thing, right?
I should frame for everyone. This is not a paid thing. I just asked for people to come on the podcast. If you want to do one of these episodes with me, where you get free coaching, then just reach out to me either through the therapy and the great outdoors community or on Instagram. I'm at Laura Park Fig.
Like I love to do these. These are not a sales pitch. This is not like Kate and I are working together or anything like that. It's just to like literally help people in their nature based practice. So I don't know what. Kate's going to ask, we don't really know where this is going to go but the point here is to get Kate some help on a sticky problem right now in her business.
It sounds like that might be that you're growing too fast. So my first question though, before we dive in to that issue is if you think forward, like six months to a year in your business what would be like your dream outcome for six months to a year, not 10 years from now, but six months to a year from now, what would be like your ideal?
Kate Glennon: I'd love to hire someone to manage the back end of things the systems, maybe eventually billing and being able to take insurance. That's not the part of business that I love. So those are the things that tend to be stressful and go to the wayside because I don't like them. I don't find joy in it.
I'm not this type A person. I've I really flow with the creative end of business and being able to be outside and create and do those things. That is the end of business that I love and the work that I love. So I think being able six months to a year, be able to do that, or this is the other big sticky problem.
They these kind of go together with the growth is I don't have an office. I work out of my home. My home is tiny. I have three children. I have a dog. I have a husband. Do I get in the way? Yeah. And we do this, we have a small house and it's do we, is. Do I get an office?
But I don't ever want, I don't ever want my kids to come to an office. I don't want to see people in office, but do I need an office space to work and leave work at work type of thing? So there's just so much like crossover. And I think finding the boundaries and owning a business and maintaining work life balance when business.
tends to be your life. Yeah. A little bit tricky. And I feel like that's like where in six months to a year, what does that look like? And we're about to hit into winter. So it's I there's a couple of days where I'm outside nine hours and it's working now, but the temperatures in New Hampshire are dropping.
Yeah. And how do I stay warm for nine hours? outside back to back. So yeah,
Laura Park Figueroa: We didn't say where you were located. And that's a very important thing to think about in nature based practice is like the logistics of nature based practice. Everybody thinks of nature based work as it's 70 degrees and sunny out and we're in the mountains and there's trees everywhere, like beach or whatever.
It's yeah, not always. Like it's. Sometimes pretty challenging. And New Hampshire is not a mild winter. It is, it gets cold there for long periods of time.
Kate Glennon: It's more the cold than the snow, like the snow I'm fine with, but when, yeah, when it's not snowing, it's bitterly cold. And we had that last winter.
We didn't have a lot of snow. We just had a lot of cold. So it makes it not as fun to be outside in the cold when there's no snow.
Laura Park Figueroa: That's a good point. Yeah.
Kate Glennon: And, how do I find the balance to keep myself comfortable and the kids comfortable and engaged in that cold weather?
Laura Park Figueroa: Yeah, we may have to do another episode together on brainstorming cold weather because this will be my first winter in Wisconsin providing outdoor OT services.
So yeah, I came from California where it's we get a winter, but it's like mild. It's like below is 40, it's and some rain, okay, so you're overwhelmed. You've touched on that. You're overwhelmed. You've touched on that. You don't like doing the back end things of the business.
So what do you think? I guess I want to open up some space here for you to share with me what do you think? What do you really want to focus on this call? What do you think the main problem is right now that is overwhelming you?
Kate Glennon: I think it's the growth and the space. Do I need dedicated space work that and the boundaries to growth, right?
The more I grow, the more back end work I have, the more, evals I take, the more writing I have, that sort
Laura Park Figueroa: of thing. Okay. So my, my, the first place my brain goes for the space issue is, how are the finances in your business? Do you have money to afford a space? Yeah,
Kate Glennon: it's, I just, it doesn't feel comfortable quite yet.
It just doesn't quite feel comfortable because I really have just next week will hit my like 22 clients, which was like my goal. And I'm all private pay at this point. So I will have just hit that brink and I feel like I need to coast at what that feels like for a bit for my financially say.
Okay, I'm ready to do this. Yeah. Not having the overhead right now is really nice.
Laura Park Figueroa: So yeah. Yeah. I really do think that, I think that you hit the nail on the head with that. I really think that something I would caution you against this early in your practice is taking on expenses that you absolutely don't need.
And I totally I felt all the emotions when you were talking about the, I had three kids, a dog, a small house, a husband, because that literally was my life in California. Exactly the same. Three kids, a dog, we had a guide dog that we were training, and my husband, and we lived in a thousand square feet.
Okay, now It's, New Hampshire's a little colder for a lot of the year than California. We could still be outside a lot. But I know the stressor of trying to work in like a chaotic environment and it makes you bonkers. It makes you totally bonkers. I guess my question would be, are there, is there some sort of, do any solutions come to mind?
In your mind, if I ask you the question of, are there ways you could work in public spaces and just block time for yourself to have uninterrupted time to work, but maybe outside the home?
Kate Glennon: I think you probably nailed it there. I find myself, I just find myself Going to do those things and then I'm having a coffee and a bagel sandwich and not so much work, but you're right I think a lot of it comes down to I need to be stronger about time blocking and Holding to this is the time I said I was going to do this.
This is when I need to do That's not a strength of mine So I think that is a big piece of it, where the public spaces I can utilize to get the work done. I think it gets a little tricky when it's there's a lot of paper. I try to keep most things digital to keep it clean. But there are moments, I just did a screening at a private school and I screened 52 students.
And I did it all out on paper. Because I just needed to have that documented. Totally. It was just easier. But it's as I'm writing these, I'm like carrying around these. Packs of paper, yeah. So in those moments, it's not ideal. It's not terrible, but like a time blocking I think is probably a really good tool for me to put into
Laura Park Figueroa: place.
Yeah. Something where you just knew that you could have that uninterrupted two hours of time. Maybe at a public library and you bring your own drink or something, where you have like your special, because I know how it is. I really do know how it is to have something. I do that a lot. I like pair something I like with something I don't want to do.
So I'll buy my special kombucha and then I will dive into working on the workers compensation. Stupid stuff that I have to do for the business, or tax stuff or whatever it is that you're just like, there's this mental block of I do not want to work on this. And so you'll find every excuse.
To do anything else in the business besides. Look at the workers comp stuff. So pairing, I think what you're doing when you go get the coffee and the bagel sandwich is like you're doing something fun, right? So you can pair that with doing the work as long as you do the work. But I think there are ways right now where if your business is so young and you just now are to where you're hitting your goal of the number of clients you want and what you want to pay yourself the fastest path to not being able to pay yourself is taking on extra expenses that you don't 100 percent need.
So let's maybe play with the idea of finding places you could work outside the house that are Once or twice a week, maybe, where you knew it's focus time that you'll get. And maybe then you have a list or something or a, on your phone, if you're using Trello or some other project management app, or even your notes app, just like stuff to do during focused work times.
You have your list of things that you have to do during those times, because that way you can work on the fun stuff with chaos at home and, stuff that you want to do. But then using that focus time to get some of the not so fun things done. Let's talk a little bit about hiring.
So you, you said you want to hire someone to run the kind of like admin side of the business. Tell me more about that. Tell me what you think they would do. Tell me how many hours you think they would work. Have you thought about this yet? And if you haven't, it's okay, we can brainstorm together and talk about it.
Kate Glennon: A little bit. I think my goal would be is that if I can take those things off my plate, I can then focus on The other things besides direct therapy that are going to create revenue for my company and my business and creating those ideas and those thoughts. So my goal would be, it's giving me free time to take on necessarily direct clients, but it's giving me free time to focus on how is the business going to grow?
Do I want it to grow? Am I going to stay a solo clinician or do I take on, another nature based SLP? I don't know. I don't have that answer quite yet because again, it is still so fresh, but I envision this person being able to do, the scheduling, sending the intakes, sending the privacy policy, just, yes, I have an electronic medical records system, but again, it's one of those things where it's I've limped along in it.
I've set it mostly up, but it's not fully set up. So just being able to handle all those things and have the trust in that person to know where it is things are going and see my vision. But also I don't have to, they have my schedule, they can schedule kids for me and I can remain on the outside of that.
To an extent, I wouldn't, it's not, I would just throw my hands up to my business, but I think it would then again, I'm, when I'm talking about building the company and having more income, I think that frees up my time to be able to do that and then keep the balance of my family balance.
Cause that's really important. My kids were at school with me this whole time. So my daughter was kindergarten through third grade with me and my son was at kindergarten and then we have a 10 month old. So I'm used to being with them all day. So it's important to me to have that balance when they're home from school and things to do that.
And I feel like this person can allow more of that balance and less of work infiltrating into family lifetimes. Yeah. Yeah. That always feels great. And I will work harder and longer when I know I have that balance. If that's what I'm achieving, if that's the goal.
Laura Park Figueroa: Yeah. Yeah. I think you're totally right.
And I love that you, I love that you said You're thinking like a business owner in terms of this person could help me get the systems in place. And you said, if I ever want to hire someone, and I would highly encourage you that you do want to hire someone because you are going to be limited unless you hire people outside of admin.
Like admin, it's tricky because admin is really they don't bring in money, right? They just take it. Because you are going to be limited. And if you, let's say, since you said you have 22 clients and that was your goal, Let's say that's your cap, right? Like you just know with life and family and all the stuff going on with three children, like you, you don't want to work more than 22 kids per week, right?
That's a finite cap on your income then, right? If you hire people, There is essentially an infinite cap on what you can make in your business, right? Because you are able to, for every person, if you do it wisely and, think through it before you do it and make sure you're not paying too much for your employees then you can really grow and scale the business and you can continue to be paid.
And work less hours even work less than 22 kids, but still be making what you were making doing 22 kids. And even What a dream. Yeah, right? I think and I'm not to say, I'm not saying that you like outsource everything in your business. When you grow, there do become bigger problems to solve, right?
Like it's a completely different thing to be running a team of, 30 people or so than to be working by yourself. So there's beauty in simplicity, but also I do think that even if you're just going to run a small nature based practice where you might have a few therapists that are on your team.
You essentially free up your own time because you don't have to be delivering as much direct service. You could be working from home more. You could be available for your kids more, even though you might be doing some work, but you're around, it's a very different it's a very different job than seeing kids for 22 hours a week and running the business.
You have to free up time in your own brain to be able to run the business. For the admin person I think. You want to make sure that you can afford to pay an admin person. My advice would be to start, at least start, with a hourly model so that you know how much they are actually working. Okay, because like a contractor, you can hire this person as a contractor, obviously, because they are not providing speech therapy services.
They're providing a service that is not What you're directly providing in your business. You may know this, I'm going to say it just for the listeners though, that you have to be very careful when hiring people in your business. be very clear if they are an independent contractor or an employee.
And the IRS law is pretty, California law and the IRS is starting to follow suit. If you run a speech therapy business and you hire a speech therapist as an independent contractor, that raises some red flags, because The government wants people to be employees. They don't want people to be independent contractors because they want their taxes.
So basically it's pretty cut and dry with an admin person. When you hire an admin person that's clearly a role in your business, that your business is not providing admin services to people. So if you hire an admin person, it's fine to do it as an independent contractor. That's the easiest way.
Literally it's just an agreement. You're not paying their taxes. You're not paying benefits to them. It's like they're working on their own. You're not setting their deadlines. It's a very clear independent contractor relationship. People that work as virtual assistants or business managers will give you like a set, I'll work. It'll be for eight to 10 hours a week. It's this set fee of this much money or whatever. And I would just recommend like a, at least a trial period of where you're paying them hourly. Like you agree on an hourly rate and you have a list of things that you want them to do.
And then you're able to see from week to week what they're billing you. So you know how much they're working. And then. As they get more efficient, maybe you might move to a monthly retainer fee, where it's just I pay you 2, 000 a month to manage the whole business or, working, we're assuming it's about this many hours.
It includes these tasks or whatever. I struggle with the flat fee. Both of my one of my admin people is an hourly rate and we're probably going to move her to a I need to talk to her. It's this week that we're having a meeting, but I'm probably moving her to a more like flat fee kind of rate.
But my other admin person, who's been with me for eight years, she's really like an executive assistant. She really is like high level strategy thinking, profitability finances in the business. I pay her on a flat fee kind of every month scale. So the hard thing is when you're paying that flat fee to start, it can feel like you're not able to give them more tasks, cause if you're paying let's say you pay a thousand dollars a month or whatever, and you agreed for them to do this, then. If another task comes up you feel like you can't give it to them because you're already paying them to do those things, but you can't add to their plate because you're only paying them, whatever, so the hourly to start is really helpful because you can see week to week what they're invoicing you and what they're doing.
And then if you give them more work, you have to pay them more. And it makes. You, as the business owner, keep a check and balance on what you're actually asking someone else to do and what you're keeping for yourself. What, do you have, that's a question, do you have a list of tasks, or are you starting a list of tasks that you would want someone to take off your plate?
Yeah,
Kate Glennon: absolutely. I have a running list and I think it could probably be bigger. Okay. I also, just from listening to you talk, like it's almost convinced me in the opposite direction, like that my focus should be more on hiring like another clinician and being able to manage that on my own.
Yeah. And I was hiring that admin and I've had this conversation with my husband too because I was like, do I need a bookkeeper or am I managing this okay on my own? Do I need someone to oversee that? And again, she does like a, the woman that I was speaking to does a, like a flat rate.
And she's if you invoice this many people, I'm like, I'm not, it's all done. They're all invoiced through my system. So my system is my bookkeeper in a way. So I don't really need to add on that additional fee because then it's like I'm paying the electronic medical record fee, I'm paying the bookkeeper and it essentially gives the same thing.
Same. Making me think about where my dollars are going and what is the most valuable to me.
Laura Park Figueroa: Yeah. So I'm really glad you brought up a bookkeeper because I've told this story before, but it was like a really, I don't even remember if I've said it on the Tigo podcast. It might have been from my old business podcast I did, but when I first opened my business, I met with a friend who was like, and she's like a big, she works in San Francisco at some entrepreneurial fancy firm or something, but she was like a friend of mine through church.
And so she met with me and basically the thing I don't even remember what we talked about at that little coffee that we had, but the thing I walked away from that conversation remembering was that she was like, whatever you do, do not do your own books. She's like, get a bookkeeper, walk, do not, or run, do not walk to the first bookkeeper that is.
competent to help you get someone to do your books because you will mess it up on your own. So unless you were an accountant or a bookkeeper before you became a therapist, you should have someone helping you with your books. So there's lots of online, you can do research online, right? But your EMR and your invoicing system and your EMR is not a bookkeeping system.
Bookkeeping is about really making sure that what you're bringing in and what's going out are keep, they're about keeping you profitable, essentially. You should be about keeping you profitable, but they are and again, the more complex the business gets, the more important it is that you have that in place.
So I would say that would be good money to spend right away, Even if you're listening to this, people out there in the podcast world, if you're listening to this and you haven't even started, like I would say to spend that money from the get go for a bookkeeper because it's going to keep you accountable with the finances in your business.
So that was just a tip from Morgan. So I did spend money early on. I was early on, I used an online platform called Mizuma. I do not recommend it, y'all. Mizuma was not great. But there might be other ones out there. I think Bench might be one, like an online account. There's one
Kate Glennon: called Wave that our personal financial planner.
And I downloaded the app and it was, like, pretty great. I did my first interviews to the school through that. It was super easy. But it's very similar to QuickBooks. The one woman that I've been chatting with she's I I only really work with QuickBooks and I'm like, okay, do it.
So then it's that tab and then her tab and yeah,
Laura Park Figueroa: I wonder so, so wave is like an online accounting system and like with the one I had Mizuma early on in my practice, I haven't used them for years because I've had a book, a person bookkeeper who's like for all my businesses and my taxes and for the last several years, but yeah, When I used Mizuma, the key was that you have a person who you can ask questions of.
So I don't, can you do that with Wave? Do they have an accountant or a bookkeeper, a person that you can actually talk to? No.
Kate Glennon: So that's why I decided to go through this woman and hire her. Keep tabs through my QuickBooks and everything. And it's I don't know, it's 250 a month for, I get three hours of her time.
Laura Park Figueroa: Okay. Per month? Per month. Or is that per quarter? Or per year. I don't know what that would be. Per month. I think it's
Kate Glennon: per month. Okay. So it's like 250 a month. That's her three hours of time. Yeah.
Laura Park Figueroa: Yeah.
Kate Glennon: But I don't know. Is that like exorbitant? Is that average? Is that
Laura Park Figueroa: no, I don't think 250 a month is I pay like for, we have a real estate business, the therapy, the great outdoors business, outdoor kids OT.
And I pay like over 900 a month for accounting services for all of
Kate Glennon: them. She doesn't do taxes that like she'll prepare everything for you to give to your tax professional, but Do you find someone who does taxes and bookkeeping? Do those people exist? It's harder
Laura Park Figueroa: and harder to find. So my, my accountant actually used to do taxes for all of her people, but, and she kept me on because I'd been with her for so long.
She kept me on as a, I'll do your taxes client, but she pretty much told all of her clients I'm not going to do taxes anymore. So I do still think that it's worth the money. If you think about. 250 a month. If, this is a big if the person is actually going to meet with you and talk with you, like I know my accountant, anytime I have a question, anytime I need to meet with her, we schedule a Zoom call and she'll go through everything with me and I don't do it every month, I'm not like a I don't monopolize her time, but I think that to have that access to someone who can look at your books and can really help you, I think it's worth the money.
And I think 250 is like well within the range. Something you might want to look at too is profit first professionals. That's a website. That is designed by the book Profit First by Mike Michalowicz. I talk about it a lot, but it's a really great business finance book that I think every single business owner should own as a reference on their shelf.
Not a library checkout book y'all, like a book you should own and write in and review every year. It basically teaches you how to set up a system for managing the finances in your business. Maybe I should do an episode on that because I modified it a bit and it works for me, but I don't do exactly how he says it's like a sequence of seven different bank accounts.
And that was too confusing for me. So I do it a modified version in my budgeting software. But my point is they have a, if you read that book and understand the system, they have a, like a certification for accountants and bookkeepers, and you can go to profitfirstprofessionals. com and find someone who understands that system.
And generally those professionals I feel like are more. More attuned to their role as a bookkeeper or accountant in helping you actually understand the data and make decisions in your business based on the current data and not letting your business go into no profitability, basically keeping your business profitable.
So that might be another place to look to find someone. I, this lady may be fine that you're talking to, too, but, That may be another resource you could look at. I feel like we went down the accounting rabbit hole. We might have. Yeah, but I do think it's a really valuable, it's a really valuable thing to think about because I do think it's something that's the one thing that I tell people early on in your business, because if you get too far in and you don't have accounting help, it's.
Overwhelming to dig back through and try to figure out the finances way back. And, if you use profit first and you have a bookkeeper who's really helping you, it should mean that you can pay yourself more. More money, like hopefully you're looking at the numbers in your business and you can afford to pay yourself more.
But let's go back to, let's go back to hiring. We were, you were saying you think maybe you have it backwards and maybe you should hire an employee first. So let's talk about that a little bit, because I don't know the right answer for you. I've always said yeah, get. Get yourself admin help early.
But I usually say that with the understanding that would free you up to bring more money into the business by working more with directly with clients. And if you're already at where you want to be working with clients I'm just spitballing here and wondering out loud, like maybe it does make sense for you to keep some of the admin stuff, establish the systems and hire.
An employee who would then bring money into the business. But what are you thinking when you said that? What were you thinking when you were like, oh, maybe I shouldn't, maybe I should hire an employee first. Let's talk about the pros and
Kate Glennon: cons. I think, as of right now, if anyone else contacts me, I'm going to have to put them on a wait list.
I just don't have time in my schedule to do it. I would like to be able to service those children using this model because there aren't people around me that are doing this. So I think it, one, it does that, and that makes me feel good. It also, again, listening to what you were saying, is it does, it.
It will bring money into the business and if I am deciding this is my capacity of what I want to see for one to one, if, even if she takes a couple of those, that gives me more time to, or he, more time to do admin work. And again, opens up, what other opportunities can I share that are going to drive revenue that maybe aren't necessarily direct therapy.
Yeah. Having that person that is going to drive revenue alongside me, that kind of seems like a no brainer versus the one that's going to just be a paycheck out of. My paycheck .
Laura Park Figueroa: Yeah. Yeah. It does take money to grow a business, so you need money coming in. I think the hard thing with hiring right now is that you don't have a wait list yet.
And typically people that take a job they're typically, they wanna know they have X number of hours. So it's hard to find, at least in my experience, it's been hard to find people who are like, Oh, I'll just work slowly. I'll work two hours to start for a few weeks. And then if it builds up to 40 hours a week, great, like usually they want to start with 10 or 20 or they want to know what they're going to work.
So that's a consideration too, is you need to be certain that you can hand this person work once you hire them. So you might not be ready to hire yet. Now that I'm thinking, thinking through all of the.
Kate Glennon: No, but I think if we're thinking like six months to a year. Yeah. Oh, sure. The ultimate goal.
And at the, at the growth rate that I've been at since I started, it does, as long as I continue on that path, I don't see why that. Wouldn't be reasonable. And then, I do have a lot of colleagues in the area that are very interested in what I'm doing. They're like, I just did this.
Would you be interested in contracting for like reading of vowels? And I'm like, yeah, if you could take that off my plate and then, they don't want to service them. They just want to do the evaluation work and the diagnostic work. I'm like, great. You can do that. Then I have another client to service but it just builds a service that is billable that is not added to my plate.
Yeah. So that's huge.
Laura Park Figueroa: Interesting to think about this then because, I don't know, I think for you, I would maybe explore the idea of getting a little bit of admin help. earlier than six months from now. Like you're not going to be able to hire someone right away because you need to build that waitlist.
But while you're building the waitlist, you can be building out the systems and the list of everything that you need to do to onboard someone and just really focus on documenting those systems so that when you do hire an admin, they can have those systems in place. You can have them rock solid, right?
So that when someone comes on. It's very easy to say, this is how we intake a client, this is how we share assessment results, this is how we document. Do you use Loom? No. Okay, so Loom is a screen recording, free up to a certain number of minutes, but maybe a paid service after that. I think I have the paid version because we do a lot of Loom videos in my business, but, so Loom is a screen recorder, and it's really helpful for recording processes in a business so that you can have a bank of videos to just share with an employee or with a virtual assistant or a business manager, like anyone, admin team, anyone that you would hire. If you need to share something with them on your screen for example, like I just had to share, this is how you pay the quarterly taxes to the state of Wisconsin for the, whatever.
And I recorded the screen while I did it and then I share the password and then my admin team does that in future months, right? We added into the, we use ClickUp now, which is this like massive project management software. It's the bane of my existence. It's taken me like eight months to learn how to use it.
Anyways, Trello is my favorite. I wish that my business still fit in Trello. It does not. But Having some sort of project management platform is also really important as well, is like getting, how are you going to communicate with your, with the team once you have a couple of people, like, where are you going to house all of this?
Where are they going to find the videos on how to do XYZ? So Trello is really easy to use. It's basically a digital bulletin board. It's lists with cards on them. It's very simple and I think a good, a lot of nature based practices that I've worked with I recommend using it because it's a good central hub to keep everything for central access for everyone when we're working online and working remotely.
Questions, what questions do you have?
Kate Glennon: I think we've covered. The most of them without going down a whole different rabbit hole than what we've already
Laura Park Figueroa: discussed. Except for the bookkeeping rabbit hole, that was an important,
Kate Glennon: yeah I think it, it gives me a direction of where I need to focus my time and energy into and then really looking at those long term goals, like setting the systems into place now and which ones are going to be the most valuable.
Yep. Long term. Yeah. And I think I've thought about how can this help me right now or and it does or it doesn't feel like as necessary right now, but I, everything I read in terms of growing a business, it's like you need your systems in place now. So when you are big, you grow, it is easy. Yeah.
Easier. It's never easy, but easier.
Laura Park Figueroa: Yeah. Systems are key and they're always going to change. You're never going to get to a place in your business where everything's just perfect and you don't have to do anything, right? They're always going to change, but those initial systems are really important to get in place now, especially where you're at right now with thinking about hiring and getting admin and stuff like that.
Okay. So let's wrap up with. What are the top two or three, maybe? I'll give you three if you need three. What are the top two or three things that you feel like you need to do after this call? To take action in some way on, on any, anything that we talked about?
Kate Glennon: I need a bookkeeper.
I need to finalize all my systems. So everything gets into my electronical medical records. The billing can start going through there, everything. Get that platform that I'm already paying for. Working for me in more ways than just like holding my schedule and intaking paperwork. Yeah. Bookkeeping and then, time, I think the third is that time blocking is making the time in my schedule and utilizing that time in my schedule to work in those public places.
So I'm not creating myself the overhead of having an office space because that's just, again, it's more money out. So I think I need to think more financially when I'm making decisions, not just like that feels really good. So that's the decision I'm going to make. Yeah. Yeah, and then have to worry about the financial end of it.
Afterwards. Yeah. Also interconnected. It's just like such a web I think that's why we bounce all over the place because one decision affects the other, you
Laura Park Figueroa: know? Oh, totally. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think those are great takeaways. I think if, yeah, if that's what you're going to do after this call, I'd call this a win.
Kate Glennon: Absolutely. Absolutely. I appreciate your time so much. It was. Yeah.
Laura Park Figueroa: Bye. Yeah. I'm so glad I got to meet you and I just love your, I love the name Outdoorsy SLP. It's so great. And I also want to say, I'm so excited that more SLPs are starting to do this. Like I, I feel like I'm starting to see more people online and like more people in the therapy in the great outdoors community.
Like it's very exciting. It's very exciting. I
Kate Glennon: think we need to learn that there's a different way to. do our therapy. I'm a closet O. T. in my next life. I'll come back as an occupational therapist. For now, I'm never going back to school,
Laura Park Figueroa: oh, yeah. No, I know. Me neither. Me neither. I am done. D O N E.
Completely done with school. Never again, people. Never. Thank you, Kate. I'm so thankful to you for making time to be here, and I hope it was helpful to you in some way, and let's stay connected.
Kate Glennon: Absolutely. Thank you so much. Take care.
Laura Park Figueroa: Wait a second, don't go yet. Do you want 120 ways that you can take your pediatric therapy work outdoors into nature? I wrote the free big huge list of nature based therapy activities just for you. The big huge list will give you quick ideas for nature based sessions. In the big huge list there are activities for gross motor, fine motor, visual perceptual, executive function, balance, group collaboration, and team building.
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com slash list. So until next time, get outside, connect, reflect, and enjoy therapy in the great outdoors.
