Our Journey to Building a Complete Business in 2015

Finding the balance by remembering the vision!

The call to adventure!

Joseph Campbell famously outlined the archetypal Hero’s Journey which begins with the call to adventure. As professionals in private practice, you’ve heeded the call to pursue the special work you are doing.

Like you, I’ve been called to many things for different reasons and one such call led me to pursue a degree in psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute and embark on the road to private practice. Along the way another path emerged that led me to build a successful software product for pre-licensed clinicians called TrackYourHours. Then came the call of SimplePractice.

Let’s face it, we’re all entrepreneurs.

With SimplePractice, I set out to build great practice management software that would make it easier to run your business, but that was just part of the vision.

What really drove me was my belief that professionals working in private practice are entrepreneurs that face many of the same challenges that we do. What I had seen firsthand from working with clinicians for over a decade was that most of them didn’t see themselves as entrepreneurs.

As 2014 came to a close, I reflected on our entrepreneurial journey over the past year and I realized that we were only fulfilling half of my intended mission for the company. We were building a hugely popular and rapidly evolving product, but were missing the other piece –providing you with valuable insights into running your business.

This led to the eye-opening realization that our blog was not very useful and didn’t reflect who we are as a company. We’ve had links to our webinars and some product updates, sure, but we hadn’t posted anything since September and the content felt flat.

So in December I decided to completely reinvent our blog.

What we intend to do with this blog is cover the lessons we have learned and continue to learn from our experiences, both our wins and fails, and share them with you in a way that is applicable to your business.

No topic is off limits and we plan to cover everything from websites, marketing, pricing, branding, to networking and more.

What makes this information different?

I know there are many other places for you to learn about most of these things. There are tons of resources and business blogs out there and of course I’ll be sharing the best of what I find.

But we are uniquely approaching this from a different perspective. Through giving you an honest and transparent view into the actual things we are doing, we will provide you with actionable takeaways that you can apply to your own business.

Where our journey starts.

Some of you are just getting started with your practice and others may have been doing this for quite some time. Regardless of where you are in the process, we will be covering things that apply to any phase in the lifecycle of a business.

Even established companies need to revisit things like pricing, website updates, blog strategy, etc…

Your business, much like a client or patient, is a dynamic entity that requires engagement to reach its full potential. So let’s engage.

Let’s get back to the vision.

Beginnings, like the start of a new year, provide good opportunities to reflect on our business and ask ourselves if we are staying true to our mission and vision. As I pointed out, when we did this, we realized where we strayed and now we are back on track.

When was the last time you did that? Do you even have a real mission for your business?

Now may be a good time to sit with this and create one or check-in and see where you’re at. Feel free to share any thoughts about this in the comments section below.

What’s next?

Hopefully, you will join us on our journey. It’s free and you don’t have to be a SimplePractice Customer (although you can easily sign up for a free trial here).

We’ll be releasing a new post each week. To get each post emailed to you as soon as it’s published, sign up for our mailing list below (if you already receive emails from us, then no need to sign up).

Our next post will talk about the importance of having a focus and some of the challenges associated with that.

See you next week and if you have something you want to learn more about, or want to comment on this post, let me know in the comments section below. Also, please feel free to share this post on Facebook and/or Twitter.