How to Get More Private Pay Clients with Danielle Swimm

Danielle Swimm (00:00):

That's why my mantra is like do less but be better. You can't do everything if you have a lot of responsibility at home, but when you are working in those working hours, if we can be really strategic with what you're doing, you can still get these fantastic results that somebody else who's able to work 20 hours a week is getting. I do think it's how you work, not how much that can make a big difference.

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Michael Fulwiler (00:25):

This is Heard Business School, where we sit down with private practice owners and industry experts to learn about the business of therapy together. I'm your host, Michael Fulwiler. This week I'm joined by Maryland-based licensed clinical social worker, Danielle Swimm, also known as The Entrepreneurial Therapist on Instagram where she coaches therapists to build sustainable private practices with emphasis on mindset, marketing and systems. We're all about celebrating therapists as entrepreneurs on the show, so I'm excited to finally have Danielle on. In our conversation, we discuss her journey from community mental health and crisis work to building a thriving private practice as a single mom. Danielle is an advocate for combining clinical excellence with smart business strategies to help therapists create fulfilling thriving careers. She has so much wisdom to share, so let's get into it. Here's my conversation with my friend Danielle Swimm. Enjoy. Danielle Swimm. Welcome to the show.

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Danielle Swimm (01:32):

Thank you for having me on. This is really a cool opportunity.

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Michael Fulwiler (01:35):

Very excited. I feel like this is a long time coming. I'm such a fan of you and your brand. I feel like as The Entrepreneurial Therapist, we're very aligned. We're all about entrepreneurial therapists at Heard.

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Danielle Swimm (01:48):

Yeah, when I knew you guys had a podcast, this is definitely a dream to be on, so I definitely appreciate being here.

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Michael Fulwiler (01:55):

Thanks for saying that. You probably should be a spokesperson for Heard at this point, so it's actually just a pitch for you to, yeah.

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Danielle Swimm (02:02):

Yeah, maybe.

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Michael Fulwiler (02:05):

So I know that you live in Maryland. Are you born and raised?

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Danielle Swimm (02:10):

I am, yeah. I grew up in Bowie, which is probably 30, 40 minutes outside of DC if you're familiar with the area at all. But yeah, I grew up in Bowie. I live in Annapolis now. That's where my practice is. I love Annapolis. It's on the water, but still close enough to DC and Baltimore where you can really get to anything that you want to. It's nice.

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Michael Fulwiler (02:33):

And I know you went to Maryland for undergrad, but you went to The Chicago School for grad school. How did you end up in Chicago?

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Danielle Swimm (02:40):

So I actually went to the DC location for The Chicago School, so I never actually went to Chicago for school, so I always kind of stayed. University of Maryland was College Park and then grad school was DC so it wasn't too far from each other. Chicago School is small and not a lot of people know about it and their DC location, even smaller like a satellite school, but it was a cool experience to be able to go to school there and I loved grad school. I felt like I was in with my people wanting to become therapists and it was just a really good experience all over.

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Michael Fulwiler (03:14):

When did you decide that you wanted to become a therapist?

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Danielle Swimm (03:19):

Yeah, it's funny. I knew at 16 years old I knew I was going to become a therapist around 16, 17, definitely by my senior year I remember taking a psychology class and I was just hooked. I loved studying human behavior. I was fascinated by the DSM at the time and I was all about it. I wasn't really into school that much. I struggled a lot in high school. I did not get good grades. I didn't attend class a lot and I was really unsure if I was even going to graduate high school for a few years. And then I went to community college and by that time I had known I was going to become a therapist of some kind and go into the field and that's really the only reason I finished school and went through everything is because I found something I was passionate about and wasn't just bored with everything else that you had to learn.

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Michael Fulwiler (04:13):

So you go to graduate school, what was your career path after even in grad school and then after grad school, where did you work?

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Danielle Swimm (04:21):

So my dad was in real estate growing up and he had his own business. He was self-employed and I always saw the flexibility with being self-employed and then my mom worked for the government and had a very strict schedule, had to be in DC, no flexibility, and I just knew growing up, watching, comparing the two of them, I was like, I need the freedom and flexibility no matter what industry I go into. So in grad school I knew I wanted to go into private practice. It wasn't talked about at all. I don't even remember people mentioning it, like professors or anybody, and so I just kind of kept it to myself, but I knew I was going to do that once I figured out the field a little bit more and how to navigate it. But I got an internship and then when I was going to graduate, I was lucky enough to get hired full time at that community mental health agency and really get my feet wet and I just became obsessed with, which this is so me looking back, but I became obsessed with the director of the community mental health agency and how she ran things and how she structured her day and she was a mom and I wanted to be a mom and she had this huge team and I would sit down and the other interns would go over clinical case studies with her and I would do that, but I'd be like, what are you reading?

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(05:39):

How did you start this and how long did it take you and what are your work hours and how do you manage a team this big and tell me everything from the beginning. And she was kind enough to let me in on some of the books she was reading and I would go buy them and they were about business and let me in on some of the marketing that she was doing and I just studied it. My life depended on it. I just lit up when she would talk about it.

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Michael Fulwiler (06:02):

That sounds like an amazing opportunity to learn from, but also just being proactive. Was it the typical 40 clients a week caseload?

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Danielle Swimm (06:11):

Yeah, I would say at times it was definitely more than 40 clients. I mean maybe I was seeing 40, it might've been more at times, but I was also working another job too, so I was always over 40 clients a week. I mean it was burnout central, it wasn't sustainable. I learned a lot about what I wanted to do and what I didn't want to do and I was there for a few years before I really started to take action to go out on my own, but I was really forced to go out on my own because I was like, I can't make less money. I was already making almost nothing and I was driving for Uber, I was working two jobs. I had this fancy graduate degree but really struggling to make ends meet. I had this huge student loan debt at the same time, and so that's when I went back to what I always wanted to do, which was private practice and there weren't a lot of people teaching it online at that time like there is today. We have podcasts like yours and a lot of other people talking about it, but back then there wasn't as many. It was like I just had to ask people I knew and I found a couple people online and I really studied what they were putting out to just give me hope that something different could happen for me.

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Michael Fulwiler (07:25):

When you say that you learned what you wanted to do and what you didn't want to do when you were at the agency, could you tell me more about that? Be more specific?

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Danielle Swimm (07:35):

Yeah, so I mean it was a large team and I eventually got promoted to help with marketing, so I was in one of the leadership positions, which was awesome, but I mean with a large team, there was some therapists that were doing things that I was like, I just don't want to be in this environment where they're treating people this way or acting this way. I'm a very sensitive person and I just wanted to be in a really healthy environment where we treat people really well, we take a hundred percent responsibility and the culture was hard to be in. I think that's it for most community mental health agencies. It can be tough to be in that culture and so I was like, I got to get out and find a space that feels really good to work in that I can just build myself, I can build my own team of people. I want to be around that really value personal development, accountability, the clinical doing really high quality clinical work and I mean I was only 27 at the time, so I don't know if anyone took me seriously, but I just knew I had this big dream and I wanted to go out on my own and do it.

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Michael Fulwiler (08:38):

And you said you had a second job. What was the second job?

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Danielle Swimm (08:42):

I come from a family that does work a lot and so it wasn't unusual for me to be working a lot, but my second job was at a crisis center where people could just walk in without an appointment who were in crisis and get so I mean experienced a lot there. I eventually took on another job down the line where I was doing county crisis work, so I was going on the scene with police to calls throughout the day and just seeing people at their worst, but that's one piece of advice that I will give that I got and that was if you're going to go into private practice young without a ton of experience, you want to make sure you can handle the worst case scenarios because right now if somebody walks in my office and does need to be emergency petitioned or something like that is going on, I need to make sure I know what I'm doing.

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(09:31):

I don't have somebody else next to me to really ask, Hey, can you help with this? I need to know what I'm doing in the worst case scenarios. And so I put myself in those situations to make sure I knew it like the back of my hand. So it helped make me more confident that even though I'm not marketing necessarily to this population that's higher acuity, if that does come my way, I at least have the clinical skills to know what to do with it, which made me feel a lot better and I think I needed to prove it to myself. I got a lot of comments when I would go to networking events in the beginning. Are you Danielle's intern? Somebody asked me one time. I just looked. I was young and I looked younger than I actually was and so I was like, oh, I'm going to be the best at what I do and this is one of the ways I'm going to get really good at it and I'm really glad I did because it was really good experience and I'm a little rusty now. I've been out of the crisis scene for a while, but the therapists that are doing it now, I mean my heart goes out to them because they care so much. It's so needed and it taught me a lot along the way.

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Michael Fulwiler (10:32):

Absolutely. You've talked on Instagram about doing home visits. Was it at that time that's what you're referring to?

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Danielle Swimm (10:39):

I did home visits at the community mental health agency that I was at for years and so there would be Mondays and Tuesdays I would go into homes and I mean it's just wild that they send therapists anywhere and it's not monitored at all. Definitely nobody had my location. I wasn't checking in and out with anybody, but again, I learned a lot. I had some really good experiences with home visits and then I had some that were pretty sketchy and I was like, I know I can't do this longterm.

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Michael Fulwiler (11:07):

And was this in the Baltimore area?

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Danielle Swimm (11:09):

Yeah, it was closer to Baltimore. It wasn't in Baltimore City by any means or even Baltimore County, and it wasn't in a bad neighborhood per se, but you just going into someone's home, you just never know and you're going in by yourself. You don't know what you're walking into, you don't know who else is going to be there and you're going to be in there for an hour and just kind of hope for the best. You got to learn. I have a very high tolerance for being uncomfortable. It takes a lot because I've just been put in so many scenarios where I did have to hold my own and navigate different scenarios.

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Michael Fulwiler (11:41):

That's interesting. So now it's probably not anything that'll shock you or surprise you that a client won't bring up in session.

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Danielle Swimm (11:51):

Totally, yes.

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Michael Fulwiler (11:53):

So you also drove for Uber. What was that like?

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Danielle Swimm (11:56):

Yeah, I did. I drove for Uber because I needed to make more money and I had this huge student loan and it scared the life out of me. I liked Uber because I could pick my own schedule so I could be at community mental health for those 10 hours that day and be like, do I really want to drive for two hours? Let me just see how I feel and I could just turn it on and off. I didn't do it super long because I think female drivers just have a lot more to worry about with just letting strangers into the back of our car. But I did do it and I made some money off of it and I guess you make conversations with people, but it was like take a deep breath, just hope a good person gets in the back each time, so I didn't do it long.

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Michael Fulwiler (12:39):

Wow. So it sounds like you grew up in a family of entrepreneurs, at least your dad had his own business and you had this entrepreneurial mindset and you said that you started to try to learn about private practice. You said that there weren't really the business coaches and courses that there were today, but what were some of the things that you were trying to learn before you started your practice?

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Danielle Swimm (13:04):

Yeah, the biggest was the marketing. I was like, I think I can figure out how to open this, but what happens after that? What if I don't get clients and the high achiever in me, it is very ego driven, but I think we all are afraid of this of looking bad. What if we open a practice and other people can see that we failed or we have to shut it down or we're not making money. So that fear, I really used it to just learn as much as I could about marketing and really how to get clients in for myself, and I just found it fascinating because the marketing was always changing. So this was like 2019, 2018, and so things were still changing a lot with social media. Things were coming out about SEO things that we take for granted now. Were a little bit newer then, and I just found it very exciting because it's controversial. Some of 'em, it's like people have different opinions on how to do some of this marketing, and so during my lunch breaks I would learn about it and see what I could implement on my own and it really challenged me. It was so out of the box from what I was used to doing.

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Michael Fulwiler (14:12):

I think that is such an interesting point that marketing does change so quickly. I've said on this show that even as a marketing professional who's been doing this work for 15 years, I wouldn't consider myself an expert, right? Because when I started marketing in 2010, 2011, it's like therapists were marketing on Facebook and they had Facebook pages and it's completely changed now to Instagram and TikTok and other channels. Even SEO has changed a ton. I know that's something that you've talked about on your Instagram now with AI and how people are searching online, and so I think that for me at least, I see that as a good thing because even someone who has more experience than me may not know more than I do just because I feel like it evens the playing field. So I hope for therapists that at least gives you some confidence that even if you don't know a ton about marketing or if you haven't been doing marketing for a long time, no one really is an expert on marketing today because it changes so fast.

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Danielle Swimm (15:11):

Which is amazing and it's like I don't have to be the techiest person not, but if I can learn more and really commit to learning, which I think a lot of people once they feel like they've made it, they have a full caseload or they're making an income that makes them happy, sometimes they'll check out and be like, I don't need to continue learning and have that hunger. And I've made sure I continue to dedicate time for courses and for my own learning so I stay up to date with it because I think that does help set me apart from somebody else if I can know what's coming up around the corner or how to translate some of the tech stuff into therapist language because our brains work a little bit different, it just helps us implement it a lot easier.

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Michael Fulwiler (15:57):

Do you think that attitude towards learning comes naturally for you, thinking of yourself as more entrepreneurial?

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Danielle Swimm (16:07):

But I've been humbled if I get out of this box where I'm like, oh yeah, I got it, I know it. The universe will humble me quick. And so even if it's a launch where I'm like, oh, I've done this course launch nine times, I think I know what I'm doing. The market is always different and I will be humbled and won't have a good launch. So I need to keep that humility and I've learned the hard way many times of I don't know too much to learn from this person. I will sit in groups where I'm in a Mastermind right now where I was like, oh, do I know too much about social media to sit in this Mastermind? But the truth is I've learned so much from it and I'm with people who are just starting out, but Instagram is always changing and so I can learn and evolve with just the new stuff that is coming out. So I think I need to be coachable and the people that I work with need to be coachable as well, and that humble attitude is a must for succeeding in private practice or business alone.

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Michael Fulwiler (17:05):

I imagine it's the same clinically that even after you get your license and you complete supervision, it's still important to have consultation groups and continue to talk about cases with other therapists. You're never going to know everything.

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Danielle Swimm (17:21):

I think therapists naturally are good at this. I don't think in general we're like an arrogant industry that thinks we know it all by any means. We are very hungry in general, which does suit us pretty well in business too. Like okay, I want to be learning, I want to be implementing and I want to stay on top of whatever's coming up next.

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Michael Fulwiler (17:42):

It is interesting because when I have talked to therapists about being an entrepreneur, which is something that we talk a lot about at Heard, some therapists push back and say, well, I don't want to be an entrepreneur. I'm not a business person. I just want to see clients. And I'm curious your take on that.

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Danielle Swimm (18:00):

I always wonder why our industry doesn't like this. Sometimes the word ambition, the word entrepreneur tends to rub us the wrong way. I think it comes from our training from grad school. There's a worry of does that make me money hungry or does that make it so I don't care about people and that's not true at all. I mean, my honest thought is if you don't want to call yourself an entrepreneur, fine, you are one, whether you call yourself one or not. If you're in private practice, you're running a business according to the state that you're located in, that you registered your business in. And so let's just go with it, embrace it, and the therapist that I've worked with that start to embrace it, I have myself. I mean it's my brand name, really do well instead of whatever that model is in our mind of what an entrepreneur needs to look like.

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(18:50):

Maybe it's someone who's very selfish with money, very arrogant, critical, doesn't care about their family. I have a new model in my mind about what entrepreneurship is for me, which means I can go to my daughter's soccer practice and I can go to her school play and I can travel with my family and I can give back to my community and I can actually be kinder and more compassionate because I'm an entrepreneur. So because that's my definition of what it is for me in my life, what works then I'm going to totally run with this because I think we need more therapists that are entrepreneurs because we do care and our emotional intelligence is so extremely high that we're able to help society at a large if we can continue to increase our income and our time so that we can really see from a macro standpoint the views of what society is struggling with and be able to have that power financially and with our energy to help is just such a beautiful thing that I actually hope more therapists embrace that term and still you're clinical, you're going to see your clients. I am with you there. I still see therapy clients. I love it. I went to school for years for it, so we're not going to take that away from you, but can we pair the clinical with some of the business? And if you're like, I love my clinical, let's make the clinical 70% of your week, 30% of it in business, and I think you'd be really happy and well off.

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Michael Fulwiler (20:15):

There are some therapists who'd rather work for a group practice and not have to deal with the business side of things and just show up and see clients. And that's totally fine. I think for therapists who do want to be in private practice and have that independence, to your point, they are an entrepreneur and business owner even if they don't see themselves in that way. So hopefully that reframe is helpful. I think it probably comes from this kind of influence of hustle culture. Entrepreneurs have 10 income streams and they work 60 hours a week and they get up at four 30 in the morning, which is not what it is. I think that there are some people who are serial entrepreneurs and have six businesses and that's the path and journey that they're on, but that's not what an entrepreneur is by definition.

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Danielle Swimm (21:06):

Yeah, totally. And I mean this is one of the reasons I started Entrepreneurial Therapist. I would go to conferences or listen to podcasts where there is the male entrepreneur who's in his twenties and is doing the ice baths at 4:30 AM and wants to run the marathon, and I get so amped up with the testosterone and the ambition and the motivation, but then I go home and I would need to be up with my 18 month old in the middle of the night and then I'm a single mom and then I have all these responsibilities and I was really like, is this possible for me too? Because I'm seeing people talk about this that aren't living the same life as me and just don't have the same values as me. They're different. And so how can I curate this entrepreneurship to fit what I actually is my reality and how I want to build my life moving forward?

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Michael Fulwiler (21:55):

I love that. It sounds like you're redefining what an entrepreneur is

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Danielle Swimm (22:00):

For

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Michael Fulwiler (22:00):

You and for therapists. It doesn't have to be this toxic masculine model,

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Danielle Swimm (22:07):

Right? Yeah. It doesn't work for most therapists. It's never worked for me and I've still been able to build businesses that truly do make me happy.

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Michael Fulwiler (22:15):

Absolutely. I want to come back to this. I know we sidebar here, but I'm glad that we talked about it. I do want to talk about your transition to private practice. So you're learning, you're learning about marketing in particular. What was that process and transition for you going into private practice?

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Danielle Swimm (22:32):

And I think it's important that I tell this part of the story because it took way longer than I thought it was going to. And I'm not patient when I'm going after my dreams. So I actually was planning to go out on my own in the state of Maryland. I'm able to do it before I'm licensed if I have a supervisor who's agreed to see my cases or oversee some of my cases. So I had a supervisor agree and then I had everything ready. I was like, this is the year it's happening. I'm doing all of the things. So excited to get out of community mental health. And then the supervisor backs out and is like, oh, I didn't realize you were not licensed yet or you were starting your own private practice. And I was devastated and I was like, I can't start this practice now because I don't have what I need legally and clinically to do it.

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(23:19):

And so I decided to wait and I had to wait, I think it was nine months until I was fully licensed, which felt like forever to me because that's a long time when you're not making a good income and you're really burnt out. And so during those nine months, I really started to read any books I could find on private practice. I did find Joe Sanok on Entrepreneurs on Fire. I heard him on that podcast and I was like, oh, finally a therapist that is speaking my language. So I found his podcast, listened to that, and I just soaked it all in for nine months. Then I was able to open on my own and I started just with, I was very conservative with how I did it. So I started my practice and I rented a space for half of a day on Mondays, and I talked my full-time job into letting me leave early on Mondays.

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(24:10):

So then I would go into my own sublet office and I would see people, I think I had the space for six hours and I was like, I'm just going to fill this six hour slot and then I'll do another day in another day. This is before virtual was even really talked about much. And so that's how I started. I did start out on insurance, but I didn't actually want to take insurance. I was just so scared I couldn't get private pay clients. And so the first year I was on insurance and I made the really risky decision to go off of insurance and go private pay. Those were big transitions the first year into it. So I've ran an insurance-based practice and then for the most part it's been private pay, so I understand both worlds.

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Michael Fulwiler (24:55):

What was that process like getting off insurance? So for a therapists who are listening who are taking insurance and they want to get off insurance, what were the steps that you took in order to do that?

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Danielle Swimm (25:05):

I decided I wanted to do it because I really wanted to specialize and get this certificate in eating disorders, certified eating disorder specialists, which cost thousands of dollars and lots of work. And I also just knew I wanted to go private pay. I didn't believe I could do it. I knew how I wanted to structure my practice. I knew I wanted kids one day and going insurance was going to be a lot harder to do the things I wanted to do. And so I contacted the contract I was in for the insurance panel I was on and had to figure out a date when I was actually able to come off. So once I had that date, I let clients know about 60 to 90 days before that contract was going to end, that I was coming off their insurance panel. That's a tough conversation.

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(25:50):

Anyone that's had to do that, that's not easy because you have a full day ahead of you of sessions, which is already can be tough. And now you got to tell each person that you're not going to be taking their insurance anymore. You're dealing with different reactions. So clinically that can be tough and from a business standpoint because you are going to lose some people who just want to use their insurance, some people are going to stay too. And so I went through each person told each person and I knew I was going to lose people and I would need an influx of new private pay people coming in. And it was a process and it wasn't an easy one. And honestly, this is how Entrepreneurial Therapist was born because I struggled hard. I wasn't getting clients right away. I was really thinking about shutting down my practice.

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(26:31):

I was like, I don't know if this is going to work for me. I don't want to go back on insurance, but I'm not getting anybody, so I don't know what to do next. And that's when I became very strategic and focused on implementing marketing each and every single week and working on the mindset, this is why I'm always talking about mindset. That's really what changed everything for me. And eventually I did have a wait list of private pay full fee clients and was able to accomplish that goal, but it was messy and it was chaotic and it wasn't fun to go through. But I teach the marketing to this younger version of me who went through it. I know exactly what she needed. I know exactly what she could have done differently and that's where my heart is when I'm teaching about this.

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Michael Fulwiler (27:14):

You mentioned mindset. What are some of the mindset shifts that you made and that you teach therapists now what to make?

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Danielle Swimm (27:22):

Yeah, so I was just doing one-to-one coaching with a therapist yesterday who is doing all the marketing and not getting the results. And this girl is working hard. I mean, she's doing the marketing but she's not getting calls. And what I started to figure out is it's very much like what I was doing where it's the manic marketing is what I call it. So it's just you're doing all the marketing strategies, you actually have too much time on your hands, so it's not very focused or strategic. You don't have hobbies and it becomes your life. So then that just creates a ton of anxiety because you're not getting calls in finances aren't great. And so I started to realize I needed to do less but do it better than anybody else. So I was just going to pick less marketing strategies and be better than anybody else was doing them for me.

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(28:08):

That was SEO and online marketing and I was just going to go all in on those. I wasn't going to do Google ads, I wasn't going to do the Facebook page. I had up, I got rid of that and the mindset around that was I was going to act as if I was already full with a wait list. So I was going to envision me writing a text to my mom saying like, oh my God, I just hit full and I was going to actually feel what that felt like and visualize the text message going out. I also carried my work phone around with me when I would go to Target in the middle of the day because I had no clients on my book and I would carry my phone with me to Target because I believed in my soul that it was going to ring and a new client was going to call in even though they hadn't been. There was no reason for me to believe this, but I had to be a bit delusional to help this mindset to really believe in myself again when I lost that belief. And that's really when things clicked. I could think clearer about marketing, I could be more logical. I wasn't dysregulated and I started to believe it. And this is when clients started to come in, this is when things picked up for me.

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Michael Fulwiler (29:14):

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(30:11):

Wow, that's so fascinating. I think, yeah, so often we get caught up in the tactics of what should I be posting on this channel or should I start a newsletter when often it's not about what you're doing, it's about your mindset. I love this idea of manic marketing. I've heard it called random acts of marketing, so I don't know, RAOM where it's like you're just kind of doing a bunch of stuff or there's no strategy behind what you're doing. I'm curious, just mental shift, was it something that you learned from someone else or took from another field or where did that come from?

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Danielle Swimm (30:46):

Are you familiar with Gabby Bernstein at all?

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Michael Fulwiler (30:48):

Yes, I think so. That sounds

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Danielle Swimm (30:49):

Good. Okay. She's like, I don't even know what her title is. She's very spiritual and she's an author and a speaker and she talks about therapy sometimes, but she's not a therapist, but she does talk a lot about the law of attraction and I don't know how much I know about it, but I know energetics are real. And if you are acting as if you're in scarcity and you're going to have to close down your practice, that could very well happen because you're already acting like that. But if I'm acting as if I have a full wait list of private pay clients waiting for me, I'm going to act differently. And I was really like, man, I'm doing the tactical, I'm doing the marketing, but up here there's an energetic block that's stopping me. So I needed to step into my highest self before it was actually happening. And I read books by Gabby Bernstein and listened to some of her stuff and it just helped reinforce that I needed that belief and nobody was in my ear telling me this was going to work. It very much could have not worked, but I needed to believe it. And I think that's the mindset work I talk about.

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Michael Fulwiler (31:54):

I love that. So you start The Entrepreneurial Therapist. Is that around this time?

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Danielle Swimm (31:59):

Yeah, so I was struggling with getting clients. I first was posting on my personal Instagram account, which has people from middle school and high school who don't even know I'm a therapist. They don't even keep in touch with me. And I would post stories about me planning my week and how fun I thought it was to plan. I love planning and business books I was reading and nobody cared, nobody was even interacting. And I thought, I just need to post this for people who are going to care about what I'm doing. And so I started the account Entrepreneurial Therapist, and I was like, I might change the name down the line. I don't know, I just randomly picked it and from there, it organically just found therapists on the internet and I would be on stories all the time. People who have followed me for years can remember me on stories being like, I launched a workshop for my practice and only one person signed up, so now I'm going to have to cancel it.

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(32:52):

Nobody came. And I was just very honest and genuine on Instagram about this isn't working and I don't really know what I'm going to do, but here's what I'm trying to do. And so I didn't come out as an expert. It was just like, this is what I've been trying. So eventually the audience I was building and it was very slow growth, they could see that I wasn't doing well and then I was so they were like, what's this gap? I'm struggling to get clients, can you tell me more? And naturally that's how it started to grow, where I helped therapists out with this one problem.

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Michael Fulwiler (33:25):

Yeah, I think there's something to sharing your journey on social media that people resonate with, especially if it's validates their own experience. So this person is going through or went through what I went through and now they're having a lot of success. What were the steps that they took? I'd love to learn from them. And so as a business coach now who teaches about these things, you had your own journey and growth, so you kind of, you're the model in that sense.

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Danielle Swimm (33:56):

Yeah, and I mean my value from the beginning with this account that then turned into a business has always been behind the scenes. How can I keep it as authentic that keeps me comfortable and doesn't cause too much anxiety about what I'm sharing publicly. I just want to connect with people. I wanted them to connect with me and I need to show up and be genuine when doing so.

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Michael Fulwiler (34:19):

Yeah, and I think that authenticity is everything. We hear that from almost everyone that we talk to that if you're not authentic, it's not going to work, people aren't going to resonate with it. And the fact that you do talk about being a mom and you talk about things that are going on in your life, I think people relate to it.

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Danielle Swimm (34:40):

If I'm learning from someone at this point, I need to know that they have been through something that I can kind of relate to because otherwise I'm like, you might just be one of these guys that gets up at four 30 and does a nice bath and is going to burn me out and I'm not going to learn anything from you. So I need to know that you kind of get my story enough that my ears are open now to listening to you and you have my full attention if I resonate with your story, which is also why I tell mine.

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Michael Fulwiler (35:06):

I'd love to pull back the curtain on your business. I'm curious, what are your revenue streams today? What does that ecosystem look like? And also do you have a team that you work with and how has that grown?

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Danielle Swimm (35:20):

Yeah, so today it's really cool. I mean this is really the first year that I've been full time an entrepreneurial therapist. I did it part-time, but I kind of split my time half and half between group practice and Entrepreneurial Therapist for a long time. And I leaned into Entrepreneurial Therapist much more this year, which has been awesome. It's been such a good change for me honestly. I still do see clients and my practice is still up and running, but I just love the work I do here. And so the different revenue streams that we have up right now, we have my signature course, which is The Practice Accelerator. So that's the very first thing I launched in 2020, and this is when courses were booming. Everyone was taking an online course. It was a newer industry and I wish I could sell. I did in 2020. It was a different industry.

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(36:08):

Courses still do well. I just got off of a launch where it did well for my course, but it's just so different. So I have my online course which therapists can buy at any time, so it's evergreen model. I also have my higher-end Mastermind, and so that's been going on for two years and this has been a transition of therapists graduate from my course. They're full and private practice and they want to talk additional revenue streams. So how do they go into group practice, start an online course? So I created a Mastermind where I can work in a more intimate setting with therapists. So those are my two main programs. And then I also do some one-to-one coaching with therapists, so that's higher level as well. And then I have my podcasts where I have sponsors, they sponsor the podcast, the newsletter, Instagram, different avenues like that. And then my private practice is where I'm seeing clients as well.

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Michael Fulwiler (37:01):

How many clients are you seeing now? What does that look like?

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Danielle Swimm (37:04):

Typically, it does fluctuate. So I tend to see about six a week, I would say is an average right now, and that dropped a lot. So my mom unexpectedly passed away last year, and when that happened, it really forced me to do less clinically. I actually had to refer some clients out because they were dealing with grief and I wasn't able to treat grief, and I just needed that first year of grief to be more focused on business coaching, and I still really wanted to be in the clinical, so I was able to see eating disorder clients and do that. It was really like I was forced to do it. It wasn't very strategic. It was just a life event happened and it needed to, but it's actually been great. I feel like I can be the best therapist that I've ever been. My caseload is so small and I can really be present, and I just love how it's structured now. I don't think I'll go back to how it was before.

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Michael Fulwiler (37:59):

I'm curious, the therapists who take your courses or part of the Mastermind, what are some of the common questions that come up or things that therapists are struggling with?

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Danielle Swimm (38:11):

Yeah, it's so funny because I follow everyone on Instagram that I work with, so I can see what's happening publicly, but then I can also see what's going on privately when I'm on calls with them and I know their numbers and I know what's happening. And I think Instagram is such a smoke and mirrors. We only can show highlight reels. I understand why we have to do that and not be posting if we're really struggling, but I think things that really come up behind the scenes that I see is a lot of self-doubt, a lot of burnout, especially with moms, a lot of they feel torn between, okay, in order to do this additional revenue stream, I feel like I need to work an additional 20 hours. I cannot do that. I have two kids at home and don't know how to do that. Being pulled in so many directions, and that's why my mantra is do less but be better, do less. You can't do everything if you have a lot of responsibility at home, but when you are working in those working hours, if we can be really strategic with what you're doing, you can still get these fantastic results that somebody else who's able to work 20 hours a week is getting. I do think it's how you work, not how much that can make a big difference.

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Michael Fulwiler (39:26):

I love that. Do less but be better. I think I've said at times when it comes to marketing, do fewer things that make a bigger impact, and it's really about focusing so you're not stretching yourself so thin. But I think what you said goes back to what we were talking about earlier that I think when therapists are entrepreneur or they hear multiple streams of revenue, that means more at work when it's just about actually focusing and prioritizing. But I think that's interesting that the mindset continues to come up. And again, it's less about the tactics. You can learn those things and it's more about the mindset that really makes a big difference.

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Danielle Swimm (40:07):

And I think there's the fear of being seen is the biggest mindset block. So therapists are really scared to be seen in general. We love things to be about other people and not us. I struggled with this a lot, so I can speak to it very passionately when someone comes to me who's having this about like, oh, but I don't want to post on Instagram or I do, but I'm scared about what if that girl from high school sees it? It's never the stranger that's a problem. It's whoever you're in your head that you don't want to see you going for and trying. Or I want to show up on YouTube, but I'm scared about the mean comments. Truly the fear of other people judging you of getting a mean comment, I think holds therapists back way more than the marketing. We're very intelligent people we can implement. We have a good work ethic, but it's the mindset of should I go bigger? Is this okay to do? Because not everybody is doing it. Making sure that you believe that not only is this okay, but you need to do it. If you're being called to, it's going to help your people so much more if you actually fully show up for it.

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Michael Fulwiler (41:10):

Yeah, it's so fascinating. So how do you help therapists get beyond that fear of being seen?

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Danielle Swimm (41:15):

Yeah, it does help if we're in a group together, whether you're in my course or my Mastermind, because there's other people in it who you have accountability and community. If you are in a silo, you're by yourself in your office and you're trying to get over the fear of being seen, it's going to be so much harder to do. You need someone in your ear telling you, okay, the fear of being seen is massive. Let's just take 5% effort this week by doing one post with your face on it. I need your face on it. I need you to actually be seen. Or let's take, let's pitch that podcast that you're really scared to pitch to and actually get you on that podcast because that's how you build the muscle. I was terrified. The first podcast I was on, I mean, I think I took the morning off and was nervous the whole day. I was so scared to be seen, and now I can show up to podcasts like this where I don't have those same level of nerves that it's like debilitating. So it's a muscle that starts to build the more and more exposure you have to being seen.

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Michael Fulwiler (42:12):

So you mentioned the podcast and all of these, the courses and other offerings that you have, do you have help at this point? Do you have staff or are you doing it all on your own?

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Danielle Swimm (42:21):

Yeah, good question. No way am I doing this all on my own. Oh my gosh, no. So I do, I don't have a big staff and I don't have anyone full time, and so that will be evolving and changing as I grow. But I do have what's called an online business manager, who is my right hand. Anyone that works with me talks to her. And so she does a lot of the backend scheduling, onboarding people, making sure recordings are going up. She's in... her hands are in every program, all across the board. And then I also have, for my course, I have a community manager who's in there answering questions. She's a fabulous therapist. She graduated from the course herself and does coaching with answering questions so that they can be answered in a timely manner where I got to a point where I couldn't do that anymore.

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(43:06):

I had too many people, too many responsibilities, so I hired that. I also have a podcast team who does the editing, who makes sure things are uploaded. So basically I just show up and record, and that's all I have to do there. I also have a graphic designer, and the newest person that I really brought on is a copywriter. And so that's helped a lot because not having to write your own copy is so nice you guys, if you can ever, it's such a luxury to be like, look at this email that I wrote horribly and please improve it. And it improves sales. So with each new thing, I'm like, where do I need more help? And I continue to need more help. So you just see what you're able to sustain. But yeah, that's who I have right now in the coaching side, and so it helps a lot 'cause I'm not the only one doing things.

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Michael Fulwiler (43:53):

For therapists who are listening and thinking, well, that sounds great. Where do I find those people? How have you hired and found people to help?

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Danielle Swimm (44:03):

And I would say always start with an executive assistant, a virtual assistant, online business manager. Those are a few different titles. I would start there. If you don't have anybody, they can kind of come in and then you see where else you need to hire. And so I interviewed a few people and then I asked my own coach. I was like, who do you recommend? And she knew the person that I ended up hiring. So getting referrals from other people I think is really helpful because these online business managers, director of operations, they're not always very present online behind the scenes with everybody. So it helps to just build out this community of other entrepreneurs where you can ask and get direct referrals.

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Michael Fulwiler (44:46):

And probably being part of your Mastermind and the other meeting and connecting with other like-minded therapists is probably another opportunity to share referrals.

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Danielle Swimm (44:55):

Totally. You need to be in the room with other people who are doing what you're doing. That's a huge thing I've learned, and it really does help push me ahead.

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Michael Fulwiler (45:02):

So I want to shift gears here a little bit. You mentioned you started on insurance and then you got off insurance. In 2025, today, what do you think is the best way to get private pay clients?

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Danielle Swimm (45:17):

I still am very SEO heavy. I do like search engine optimization a lot. I know it's a little bit more work now than it was when I did it in 2018, 2019 when I was just starting, but I still love that for online marketing. Instagram can also be great for some therapists and it can be a complete waste of time for others. So it really depends, which is why that's not ever my first go-to. But if we can get you ranking on page one of Google, you're golden. You are going to be getting clients. So I like a combination of that with community marketing, meaning you're meeting with other providers, they know you exist, they know you're accepting clients, you're building relationships, and I think that's a really good combination of making sure you're very present online and have a good website that they eventually land on and have referrals coming in. I think if you can do those two things really, really, really well, you're going to be fine, no doubt about it.

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Michael Fulwiler (46:15):

For therapists who aren't familiar with SEO or aren't doing SEO right now, what would you recommend as a place to start?

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Danielle Swimm (46:24):

Just start learning because there's two paths that you can take for SEO in private practice. One is you do it yourself, which is what I teach in my course. If you want to do it yourself, you want to learn yourself, do that. But second is you hire an SEO expert, so this is going to cost you 10 to $15,000 in about 12 months to hire an SEO expert. So not everybody can afford that when they're starting out, which is why I did it myself. Either path that you go down, you need to know the basics of SEO so you know what questions to ask. You also know what to do once that SEO expert is off your team and no longer on it after the 12 month mark so you can continue to optimize it and do the work. So I would recommend just learning the basics. I have a free SEO guide. I can send you Michael, and so people can download that about just where to learn, and I want to encourage people, if you're not techie, if it kind of scares you, I was the same way and I learned it just step by step so that it really just helps people starting out. And then it's like learning a new language. The more you practice it, the better you got.

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Michael Fulwiler (47:29):

I mentioned authenticity as something that comes up a lot on the show. Curiosity is another one, and that's what I'm hearing from you here is just being curious and open to learning about it.

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Danielle Swimm (47:42):

Right? Yeah, totally. Don't shut it out because it's very different than our clinical, but just be open to it.

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Michael Fulwiler (47:49):

I also want to talk about your perspective on the impact of tech in the mental health space, something that you've talked a lot about. I'm curious how you feel about tech companies coming into the mental health space. Do you think it's a net positive or a net negative?

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Danielle Swimm (48:11):

Yeah. I mean, in 2021, this is when it was huge. Billions of dollars was being shoveled into startups in Silicon Valley that were coming out. They weren't treating therapists very well, they were treating therapists awful. There was lawsuits everywhere about it. Some of them have shut down since. Some of them are barely hanging on. I don't know how they operate, to be honest. There's no way they're cash positive, some of them because it's like crazy. It was just such a boom, and I am curious how it's going to go over the next few years. And so I do think we've evened out in 2021, 2022. I was very vocal about it because I wanted people to be aware. Then the lawsuits started coming that made national news against some of these tech companies, and I'm like, yes, okay. Now everybody knows it's not a secret. If a therapist does sign up to work for any tech company that seems shady or whatever, at least they're knowledgeable beforehand and they can make an informed choice about what they want to do with it.

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(49:15):

Where before it was being marketed as this end all be all for therapists, and it was just not true. And so I think big tech companies, some of them can be useful in helping therapists get started in private practice or for the therapists who really don't want to market. And those platforms, if they all went away today, it would be a huge disruptor to our industry because so many therapists, private practice do rely on certain tech companies. So I'm definitely not fully against them. I think that they can do good. I think you just have to be really cautious with who you're talking to. Keep an eye on them. They're always changing. I don't know if I trust them fully, but I do think it's gotten much better since 2022.

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Michael Fulwiler (49:58):

Yeah. The reason that I ask is that some therapists have a very kind of strong stance that tech is bad, and I think that as tech is evolving and changing, obviously I'm biased at Heard. We're a software company. We're not a therapy delivery company. We're an accounting and financial management software company, so we're not employing therapists by any means or contracting with therapists, but we still get some of that pushback as well. Interesting of how you're venture-backed and why are you in this space. And so there's some of that. But I also understand why I think therapists have been burned by these companies. I'm curious how you feel about AI and the impact of AI in the space as technology continues to advance.

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Danielle Swimm (50:53):

Yeah. I love AI from a business perspective. Love it. Great. From a clinical perspective, I think therapists are going to have to deal with a lot regarding AI, and there's a battle just this year, the media is coming out with a lot of headlines around. Forbes released an article recently about ChatGPT did better than therapists. That's very controversial and just completely inaccurate. And so therapists, I think clinically, the boards haven't come out. Code of ethics haven't come out around how to handle this. They tend to be slow with recommendations, and so we're trying to figure it out on our own because ChatGPT, for example, business side, love it. I have free guides on how to help it market your practice. Clinical, it's tricky. Our clients are using it for quote therapy sometimes to have somebody to talk to. Can you remind me the DBT skills? Different things like that.

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(51:48):

I do think eventually this can be beneficial for therapists. Right now it's just a little dangerous because it's totally out of our hands. We're learning it just like our clients are, Chat is not going to make the same recommendations as us obviously, and so it can be tricky to handle the relationships our clients are building with AI and how AI bots are now providing therapy and how do we navigate that as licensed therapists when it's really out of our control. And I think just educating clients on what we're learning is the best tool that we have right now on, if I were you, this is how I would use chat. This is not when I would use chat and this is when I would call a crisis line or call me or contact a human being. And I think the younger generations that are just growing up in AI are going to be the ones that struggle with this most, or my generation is like, oh yeah, of course this makes sense. So it's very nuanced.

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Michael Fulwiler (52:42):

Agreed. I think the distinction that you're making between leveraging AI for your business to help come up with ideas for marketing or whatever that you're using it for, that's a tool that you're using for your business and that can be a great thing. It can help you be more efficient, it can help you save time. Clients or people using AI as a therapy replacement is a very different thing, and so I think when we talk about AI, I think it is important to distinguish between the two because not just AI is bad.

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Danielle Swimm (53:14):

Right? Yeah. I think if we take that stance, it's really going to be a disservice to us. That's a very blanket statement. We need to be open to it. I think that's the theme of today, just being very open to it and see how we can use it to our benefit.

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Michael Fulwiler (53:27):

Absolutely. We're coming to the end here. I have a few questions to wrap this up.

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Danielle Swimm (53:33):

Okay.

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Michael Fulwiler (53:33):

What's the worst private practice advice you've heard or received?

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Danielle Swimm (53:39):

To not go into it, that you can't make much money off of it in private practice, and I did, when I started social media, I thought a therapist gave me pushback about not being on social media as a therapist. I think it's way more accepted now, but again, if you're going to be different in this field, I don't think it's a bad thing. I think you might actually be onto something good if you're different.

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Michael Fulwiler (54:02):

What's one thing you're not ashamed to admit as a therapist?

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Danielle Swimm (54:06):

I would never consider myself high energy. A lot of people ask me, how do you do what you do? I do have a lot of support and I am not getting up at 4:30, taking a nice bath. I get eight hours of sleep most night, and I really do value naps and sleep, and I'm that girl for sure. I can't do the hustle culture long-term. It's just not for me.

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Michael Fulwiler (54:30):

If you could go back, what's one thing you would tell yourself as a new mom?

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Danielle Swimm (54:34):

I would just tell myself that I'm doing a good job. I was so hard on myself. I really wasn't sure if I was doing a good job. I didn't know if I was cut out to be a mom. It was so hard in the beginning with a new baby and you're sleep deprived and it's awful. I would tell her, you're doing a good job and it gets way better.

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Michael Fulwiler (54:52):

What's the hardest part about being a therapist that you didn't expect?

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Danielle Swimm (54:58):

Being a mandated reporter. Actually, that's my least favorite part about this job is having to report to CPS or breaking confidentiality when it's required.

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Michael Fulwiler (55:09):

Finally, what's one thing that you want therapists to take away from this conversation?

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Danielle Swimm (55:14):

I really hope therapists just go for it. Whatever was on your heart when you were listening to this conversation that you're like, you're trying to go for it. You're looking for inspiration. You're looking for models that show you how, I hope you take away that if it's put on your heart, this dream is meant for you as well, and instead of thinking like, oh, why me reframe it to why not you? I do think we need more therapists out there who are putting themselves out there, who have these bigger dreams and who are willing to take the risk and go for it.

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Michael Fulwiler (55:43):

Well said. Danielle, this has been a super energizing conversation for me. I know it will be for our listeners as well. For folks who want to connect with you, where can they do so?

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Danielle Swimm (55:53):

Yeah, so you can listen to my own podcast, Entrepreneurial Therapist on Apple or Spotify. Every Wednesday, a new episode comes out. You can also find me on Instagram @entrepreneurialtherapist, and I'll be sure to link that free SEO guide for you guys to check out for anyone who wants to start learning SEO as well.

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Michael Fulwiler (56:11):

Thank you for that. Yeah, we'll definitely include that in the show notes in the description. Danielle, thank you so much.

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Danielle Swimm (56:16):

Yeah, thank you, Michael.

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Michael Fulwiler (56:17):

Thanks for listening to this episode of Heard Business School, brought to you by Heard, the financial management platform for therapists. To get the class notes for this week's episode, go to joinheard.com/podcast and don't forget to subscribe on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. We'll see you in the next class.