Latest / The Brain Dump / I Left Corporate America and Rebuilt It With My Own Hands: What I Wish I'd Known Before Building My Practice | Ep. 21

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I Left Corporate America and Rebuilt It With My Own Hands: What I Wish I'd Known Before Building My Practice | Ep. 21 · The Brain Dump

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, I'm Sandy Boone, therapist, coach, and nervous system educator with 30 years in the healthcare and mental health fields.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: I built two practices, got diagnosed with ADHD at 50, and learned the hard way that healers need healing too.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: I helped female therapists and healers regulate their nervous systems, reclaim their lives, and stop being everyone's everything.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Braindump with Sandy Boone.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: I left corporate America to build something different.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's the story most of us tell ourselves when we go into private practice.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: We left the bureaucracy, the metrics, the grind, the feeling of being a cog in someone else's machine.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: We were going to build something of our own, something meaningful and something that actually reflected who we are.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then somewhere along the way, without ever deciding to, I rebuilt corporate America inside my own practice with my own hands.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't notice it was happening.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's the part that still gets me.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: I thought I was building freedom and I was actually recreating the exact system I thought I'd escaped.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Today I want to walk you through what I wish I had known before I built Foothold Counseling, the decisions that mattered and the ones that I got right, the ones that cost me years I didn't need to lose.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: And the moment when I finally saw what I had built and I realized it wasn't what I thought it was.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Here's something that might surprise you.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: I thought building a practice would be harder than it actually is.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: This was before telehealth was normalized.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I was in an in-person office, and it's before was before anyone was doing what is now completely standard.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: It was a lot of work.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not minimizing that.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: But what I discovered early on was that whatever issue came up, I could research it and find the answer.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Whether it be credentialing, billing, paperwork, licensing across state lines, none of it required some secret knowledge I didn't have access to.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: And as it turns out, I have some pretty intelligent colleagues.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of building a practice is just common sense, applied consistently over time.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: I don't say that to diminish what it takes.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of therapists psych themselves out before they even start, assuming the business side of this work requires an entirely different brain than the one they already have.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: It requires patience, research, and a willingness to figure things out one piece at a time.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: What actually got hard wasn't the logistics.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: It was the decision fatigue.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: The sheer volume of choices about services, about scheduling, about money, about who I was willing to work with wore on me in a way it wasn't visible from the outside.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: And underneath the decision fatigue was something I didn't see clearly for a long time.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't always making those decisions from clarity.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: I was making them from whatever felt safest in the moment or whatever my peers were doing.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: That distinction matters more than almost anything else I'm going to tell you today.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: So let me tell you about the hedgehog.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Early in my practice, I tried animal-assisted therapy with a hedgehog.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: I thought it could be a meaningful addition to my work.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: After all, how else do you teach mindfulness other than with a prickly hedgehog?
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: I researched it, I considered it carefully, and then I actually did it.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: And what I discovered was that it stifled my intuitiveness as a clinician.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: I was so focused on managing the animal, its comfort, its behavior, the logistics of having a hedgehog in session that I lost access to the parts of myself that make me good at this work.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: My attention was split in a way that didn't serve my clients or me.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I stopped.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: The hedgehog taught me something important fast, and I didn't need to keep going to learn that lesson twice.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: Animal-assisted therapy cost me my intuition, and my intuition is the thing I trust most in a session.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: That was enough information to walk away.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: It sounds simple, but it's not simple when you're early in building something and terrified that changing directions means you failed.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: I was willing to work with kids, I was willing to work with couples, and I wasn't being honest with myself that this isn't the work that I actually enjoy.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: I said yes to things because I thought a real therapist, a confident practice owner, should be able to work with anyone who walked through the door.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: And underneath that yes was a belief I hadn't examined, that my preferences didn't matter as much as my capability.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: They do matter.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: Capability and enjoyment are not the same thing, and conflating them cost me energy I didn't need to spend.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: I want to talk about something I've touched on in previous episodes, but from a different angle today.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: I started with insurance panels from a place of scarcity, not a strategy, not a thoughtful business decision weighing pros and cons.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: It was scarcity.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: I needed clients.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: I believed insurance was the only realistic path to get them, and I made that decision from fear, not from a clear-eyed assessment of what I actually wanted to build.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I wish I would have never started that way.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: Once I was on panels, I compounded the problem.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't set boundaries around my time.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: I was it was not unusual for me to see 10 or 11 clients a day, 30 clients a week.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: I was working at a pace that would have been considered unreasonable in almost any other professional context, and I had chosen this field specifically to get away from unreasonable paces.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: I did not choose corporate America, and yet I was recreating it inside my own practice with my own hands.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody made me see 30 clients a week.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: After all, it wasn't community mental health.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: I did that to myself because scarcity thinking doesn't stop once you have clients.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: It just shifts its target.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: First it's I need clients, then it's I need to see as many as possible because I don't trust that this will keep working.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: This is corporate America's exact internal logic.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Produce more, don't trust that enough is actually enough, and keep going because slowing down feels dangerous.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: I just build it myself from scratch without a single supervisor required.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: I want to be honest about a few decisions I didn't make because what you don't do shapes your practice just as much as what you do.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't hire a business coach, and that probably cost me lots of time.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: Years if I'm honest.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: I was trying to figure out alone, things that people had already systemized and could have taught me directly.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: I treated asking for that kind of help as an unnecessary expense rather than what it actually was, an investment that would have paid for itself many times over.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: I did my own taxes for years.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of practice owners are doing the exact same thing right now and telling themselves it's responsible to save money.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: Accountant fees are still less than the money you're wasting by not having an accountant.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: The hours I spent, the mistakes I probably made, the deductions I almost certainly missed, none of that was actually free.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: It just felt free because the cost wasn't itemized on an invoice.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: And this connects to something bigger that I had to learn slowly.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: For my practice to actually grow, I had to learn to spend money on things that weren't my forte: CPAs, website design, eventually business coaching, a virtual assistant.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: Had to get comfortable paying for expertise instead of white knuckling my way through everything myself.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: And there's one more piece of this I have to be honest about because it took me far too long to get it right.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: I needed a virtual assistant.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: That part I figured out eventually.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: What I didn't figure out quickly was how to find the right one.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: I hired four virtual assistants before I found someone reliable and competent, one of which still owes me money.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Four.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Not one stumble, four separate attempts, four separate disappointments, before I landed on someone who actually held the role the way I needed it to be held.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: And every time one of those didn't work out, I went right back to doing everything myself in the gap, which meant I was relearning the same lesson over and over.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: I cannot do this alone, and I also cannot hand it to just anyone.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Hiring support is not a single decision, it is a skill.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: Knowing what to delegate, how to vet someone, what good support actually looks like in practice, that takes repetition to learn.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know that going in.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: I thought hiring help would solve the problem in one step.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: It took four tries to understand that the help itself had to be the right fit and not just any fit.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: Also, I had to learn I couldn't skip monetarily on this.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: And underneath all of that was something harder to name.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: I struggled to see myself as a business owner.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: I was white knuckling all things business, and it took an enormous amount of time and energy that I didn't even recognize as optional.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: I thought that was just what running a practice required.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: It was what running a practice looks like when you have given yourself permission to be the kind of business owner who delegates, invests, and trusts other people's expertise and is willing to pay for it.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want this to sound like a list of regrets because some things I did get right early, and I want to name them.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: I formed relationships with my community early, and that mattered more than almost anything else over the long run.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: Referral relationships, local connections, showing up as a real presence in the place that I was practicing.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: That groundwork paid dividends for years and continues to do so.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: So it wasn't all weight knuckling and scarcity.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the foundation was solid.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: I just built the wrong structure on top of parts of it.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the turning point.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't a strategy session or a business coach or an epiphany that I planned for.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: It was COVID.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: When the noise of other therapists' opinions disappeared, because let's be honest, we were all too busy to consider chats and trying to figure things out together.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: When I wasn't in consultation groups, wasn't absorbing everyone else's anxiety and certainty and competing philosophies about how practice should run, I finally had quiet enough to hear myself.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: And what I heard when it got quiet was this.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: I needed to have something sustainable, and I currently didn't.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: 30 plus clients a week was not sustainable.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: Insurance dependence built on scarcity was not sustainable.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: Saying yes to populations I didn't enjoy working with was not sustainable.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: And white knuckling the entire business side of my practice also was not sustainable.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: None of that was visible to me when the room was full of noise.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: It became visible the moment the room went quiet.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: I think about that a lot now.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: How much of what keeps practice owners stuck isn't a lack of information, it's a lack of quiet.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: There is always someone in a consultation group or a Facebook group with a strong opinion about how you should be running your practice.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're not careful, you absorb those opinions as truth rather than one person's perspective, filtered through their own scarcity and their own unexamined patterns.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Which brings me to the decision I wish I had made earliest of all.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: Giving myself permission to show up as I really am, giving myself permission to shift direction, to shift my niche, to stop performing a version of confidence that wasn't actually mine.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: I want to give you a real current example of what that looks like now because this isn't theoretical for me anymore.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: Earlier today, I was in a therapist support group on Facebook.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Someone asked about incorporating holistic nutrition into their practice for clients with ADHD.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: And someone else, anonymously, behind a cartoon tiger avatar, jumped in to tell her it was out of her scope and then specifically called out a course I'd taken, saying it was below surface level and insufficient.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: The commenter said, it's out of scope.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: Unless you're a dietitian, you can only offer nutrition for health and wellness.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: That course is below surface level and insufficient.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's still out of scope.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, which is why I obtained more training.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted more.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: That still doesn't allow you to do nutrition advice for ADHD, or otherwise these courses are misleading.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: And here's what I said.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to start my day arguing with strangers on the internet.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: Psychoeducation includes providing information about the gut microbiome and the connection to mental health.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: A connection that we're learning is growing stronger and stronger every day.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: I named my actual training, real credentials, stated plainly with zero defensiveness.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: That exchange, as small as it was, is everything that this episode is about.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: The old version of me would have handled that differently.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: I would have stood on it alone, replaying it, wondering if there was something to her accusation even when there wasn't.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: This time, I was pissed because what she said wasn't true, and I knew it wasn't true, at least not where I practice.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I did something useful with that anger.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: I reached out to my business coach and talked it through with someone who could help me see it clearly instead of carrying it by myself.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: The version of me who came out of COVID quiet, the version who spent years learning to show up as she actually is, knew the difference between anger that needed a witness and anger that needed to be managed alone.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: I got support, and then I stated my training and declined to engage further.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: If she wanted me to talk about her more generously, she should have acted better.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's not pettiness, that's just accuracy.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: That is what showing up as you really are looks like in practice.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's not loud, it's not a dramatic reinvention.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's just no longer outsourcing your sense of legitimacy to strangers who were never going to give it to you anyway.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: If I could go back and talk to the version of myself who was seeing 30 plus clients a week doing her own taxes and saying yes to populations that she didn't enjoy because she thought that that's what a real practice owner did, I would tell her this.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: You did not leave corporate America to rebuild it with your own hands.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: Stop performing competence and start practicing honesty.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: The clarity you're looking for isn't going to come from another consultation group.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's going to come from quiet.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: I built my own corporate America once, and I'm not interested in doing it again.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: What I have now is smaller in some ways and far more sustainable in every way that actually matters.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for being here.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: If something resonated today, check the show notes.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: You'll find information about working with me, whether that's through coaching, through the ethical exit, if insurance is part of your story too, or just connecting with the work that I do.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: Grab my free guide, 50 Things I Do to Calm My Freaking Nervous System while you're there.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: Come find me on Instagram at the Sandy Boone.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're a healing professional looking for a community that actually feels good to be in, unlike certain anonymous tigers in certain Facebook groups, come join us on the Rooted Calm Collective on Facebook.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's a space built for support, nervous system tips, and building your best life as a healer without the drama.