We’ve all faced the “Sunday Scaries,” whether you realized they had a catchy name or not. This term describes that feeling of apprehension, dread, anxiety, and/or sadness that creeps into your subconscious as the weekend rapidly winds down, mixing with thoughts of that looming load on your Monday morning schedule. Even if Mondays are rather light for you, you may just feel bummed out that the weekend is coming to an end, and you have to get back to it a few short hours later.
When I first started my practice, the Sunday Scaries were real. Let’s be honest, I spent plenty of time on the weekend thinking about marketing, blogs, social media, or heck even writing patient reports, but I knew once Monday hit it was back to the office, and back to the grind. As you might expect, I didn’t have an insanely packed patient load in my first few months, so you’d think I would take advantage of this down time to reset, relax, and prepare for the eventual flood of bookings coming my way. Absolutely not. I was in earlier and stayed later than I ever had- hospital staff, fellowship, graduate school- there was no close second. You see, when it is your practice, and you are the only one in the space, you are the one responsible for its successes… and its failures. I felt like my success should be directly tied to how much work I put in, and I was not about to let the practice fail. So, more time, more grind… but were there really more patients?
The Truth
I am going to let you in on a secret that perhaps you already know deep down but need to hear again: the quality of your work and the product you provide to clients and their families matters way more than the number of hours you clock behind the desk. I am grateful that now, a year into my private practice, a good majority of calls I receive are from someone who got my name from a friend whose child came for an evaluation with me, or someone who saw a satisfied family discussing my services on a Facebook group for example. Whether I am sitting at my desk or not, referrals from prior satisfied clients are what brings new clients through my door- at far faster rates than self-promoting on social media, writing blogs, or sending out flyers to local businesses.
How To Get Those Referrals
Okay, cool, but what can you do when you are just starting out? It can be hard to know what exactly to do to increase initial referrals (so that you can then do that good work and people can then go out and talk about how wonderful you are)! As I touched upon above, admittedly few referrals I receive are from my own professional Instagram or Facebook pages. More often, they are from individuals I have met, face to face or over a virtual meeting, who have gotten to know me as a person and have gotten to know my philosophies around patient care, assessment, and treatment. They also stem from conversations I’ve had with related service providers, who may have clients they saw for speech, occupational therapy, or talk therapy, who are seeking an evaluation for their clients.
If the pandemic has any silver linings, it has shown me that personal connection matters tremendously, and thus meeting people face to face, chatting about approaches to care and value systems, and demonstrating that your practice aligns with those values often turns professional connections into steady referral streams overnight. It only takes a couple of steady client referral streams to fill your testing practice. If you choose to supplement your testing with groups, therapy, or coaching, you’ll likely grow your practice that much quicker.
Action Items
- Reach out to 1-2 related service providers, therapists, or even primary care physicians in your area with whom you want to get acquainted. Drop them a quick note to say hello and see if they have the time to connect over coffee or a zoom call. Maybe to start you do this weekly, then monthly, then quarterly. There is never a bad time to make a new and meaningful connection.
- Consider their population of clients, and tailor your brief conversation to their needs. For example, if this is a physician in primary care, discuss the ways your evaluation explores attention or mood concerns. If this is a speech/language pathologist, plan to discuss the language measures you use and the ways your evaluations might complement each other in providing comprehensive care to the client.
- Follow up with a thank you and include any electronic resources describing your practice or services. In this way, the provider can quickly send a patient your information, and they do not have to spend their precious time explaining what you do.
- If you genuinely want to refer your clients to this provider, follow up in the future with a “just a heads up, I sent a client your way” or “hey, I have a client I’d like to refer to you- are you still taking new patients?” In this way, you are back to the top of their minds, and this might jog their memory of someone they’ve recently seen who might benefit from an appointment with you.