How to Pivot Your Therapy Business When Life Changes with Whitney Goodman

Whitney Goodman (00:00):

I think the biggest compliment to me that still doesn't feel real is that we have a lot of therapists in our groups at Calling Home that are coming because of their own family relationship issues. I also hear from members like, oh, my therapist told me about this. I don't follow you on Instagram. I'm not part of that space. I just heard about it in my therapy. And that to me is the biggest compliment.

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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. Welcome to Heard Business School. My guest this week is licensed marriage and family therapist, founder of Calling Home, author of Toxic Positivity. You know her as sitwithwhit on Instagram with over 500,000 followers. Whitney Goodman, welcome to the show.

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Whitney Goodman (01:02):

Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

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Michael Fulwiler (01:04):

So excited to have you on. I was looking back and was remembering that I sent you a message on Instagram in October of 2020.

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Whitney Goodman (01:16):

Wow, that's crazy.

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Michael Fulwiler (01:19):

Peak COVID. I had just started a newsletter for therapist called Therapy Marketer, and one of the ideas that I had to grow my newsletter, especially initially was reaching out to therapists to interview them and feature them. And you were one of the Instagram therapists at the time. You had 275,000 followers. I looked back, so it's almost doubled since then, but that's how we first connected. It's been fun following your journey since.

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Whitney Goodman (01:51):

Yeah, I can't believe it's been that long. It's wild.

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Michael Fulwiler (01:54):

No, it's almost five years now.

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Whitney Goodman (01:56):

Yeah, geez.

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Michael Fulwiler (01:58):

When you started on Instagram, do you feel like you were one of the first therapists to have a big following? Because I feel like now it's more common to have therapists on Instagram and TikTok.

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Whitney Goodman (02:11):

Yeah, I think so. I started my Instagram, I think it was early 2019, late 2018, something like that. And there was no one else really doing it other than I think there were one or two people. And it was actually, a lot of people told me it was not a good idea, it was crazy, it was unethical, blah, blah, blah. And it's funny to see how that has transformed. But yeah, I think there were a few of us that started around that same time and now it's like almost everybody at least has a presence. Right?

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Michael Fulwiler (02:41):

Yeah, I remember it was you and Elizabeth Earnshaw. It was Liz Listens who was on the show in the first season. So taking a step back, you're from Tampa, so you grew up in Florida, went to Tulane for undergrad, came back to Florida to go to Miami for grad school. When did you start to think about becoming a therapist?

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Whitney Goodman (03:06):

Whenever I tell this story, I wish it was a better story, but really I got to the end of my time at Tulane and I was like, wow, I have a degree in sociology and gender studies and Spanish. What the heck am I going to do with this? And I thought I wanted to be a teacher. I always wanted to work with people in some capacity like that, and so started looking up grad schools and I found marriage and family therapy programs and I was like, wow, this is really what I want to do. So I applied to a bunch of schools and I really wanted to get back closer to home and ended up going to...and that was that.

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Michael Fulwiler (03:48):

When you were in grad school, was private practice the goal or were you just figuring it out at the time?

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Whitney Goodman (03:53):

A hundred percent was always the goal, and I think that's something that drew me to becoming a therapist was that I thought there was a lot of flexibility. I've always wanted to be entrepreneurial in some way and I knew I wanted to have a certain balance because I wanted to have children, and so that was always in the back of my mind of what's a career where I can work for myself at some point and it's relatively easy to go out on your own.

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Michael Fulwiler (04:21):

What was your exposure like to private practice when you were in grad school or after grad school? Did you work at a group practice or did you go work for an agency or?

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Whitney Goodman (04:31):

I worked while I was in grad school at a place called the Cancer Support Community that's associated with Gilda's Club, so I was mostly running groups there and then doing some individual work. We had a clinic at the school that we all worked in, and then after grad school I worked in addiction treatment centers. I did some agency work. I never worked in a traditional group practice because I think I wanted to get a lot of hands-on, very intense experience before I went into private practice, and so I started doing small private practice work on the side as I moved along in my career.

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Michael Fulwiler (05:12):

What was that process like? What did you do first and could you walk us through those steps?

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Whitney Goodman (05:17):

Totally. So while I was working full-time at an addiction treatment center, I started putting the private practice together. I have a lot of experience just in my family with people starting businesses. My husband, who I was dating at the time was in law school and I just had a lot at my disposal for people to help me start up a business entity and things like that. So I did all of that myself with the help of the people around me and I created my first website on my own, I think using Wix or something, and found an office in Miami that would allow me to rent by the hour for $25 an hour. And once I had all that up and running, I started doing that just late at night. After I would work from nine to five, I would go to this office and I would work until eight o'clock at night or something seeing private practice clients until I got enough clients that I was able to move into working part-time at the agency I was at. And I kept doing that for about another year and a half or two years before I went fully out of my own.

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Michael Fulwiler (06:25):

How were you getting clients at the time? Was it mostly word of mouth?

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Whitney Goodman (06:29):

It was totally through my website and Psychology Today. I worked with my first client that found me online for five years after they found me. They kind of would come in and out of therapy, but I still remember this client. I was acting like I was so much more legit than I was. They had no idea that they were my first client, but they found me, I think they're Psychology Today, and then my website started gaining some traction. Then I started my Instagram and I started getting some clients through there. That was why I started my Instagram was really just to grow my private practice.

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Michael Fulwiler (07:05):

And you said you started that 2018, 20?

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Whitney Goodman (07:08):

Yeah, I think 2018. I got licensed in 2017, and so I think I started it about a year after that when I was trying to really go out more full-time on my own.

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Michael Fulwiler (07:21):

Did you get traction on Instagram pretty quickly? Because externally it seems like you just blew up, but I'm sure it's more of a process than people realized.

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Whitney Goodman (07:33):

It definitely was. I think a personality trait that I just have is I am not really embarrassed by failure, and so I was just kind of like, I'm just going to do this and see what happens, and I would just write stuff and put it up and see what happened. And it took, I remember it taking a little while for it to grow, but I didn't really care how many likes I was getting. I was more like, oh, maybe could I get a client? And around when I did that toxic positivity first post I ever did about that, that ended up becoming my book years later was when I remember getting a lot of followers at once from that, and this was back in the day where The Holistic Psychologist could share one of your posts and you're going to get 5,000 followers. That was kind of how it was at the time, and it's not like that anymore. So it did grow quickly, I think just because of the state of affairs on Instagram at the time too.

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Michael Fulwiler (08:27):

Yeah, I love this idea of just trying things to see if it works and if it doesn't work, that's okay. Giving yourself permission to fail. I think a lot of therapists struggle with perfectionism when it comes to their business or their marketing, their social media content. Oh, it's not ready to put out yet, but something that you've done and I want to talk about more is you try something and then you pivot and you try something different and it's been fun to watch you make that growth over time. I'm curious, as you were building your practice in the evenings, did you have a particular niche that you were trying to market to or work with?

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Whitney Goodman (09:09):

Yeah, so I've always done things that are related to family relationships, and I think in all the pivots that I've done, everything kind of comes back to that or is related in some way. A lot of my experience was with families where a member was struggling with addiction or substance use or families that had a health issue, cancer diagnosis, something like that. So I was always marketing to some type of crisis happening within the family system. And then I've moved through some of these sub niches over time depending on what was coming in to my practice, and that has shifted over time, but I think it's always come back to what are families dealing with and how is it impacting their family system?

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Michael Fulwiler (09:59):

That makes sense. At what point did you make the decision to go full-time into private practice?

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Whitney Goodman (10:07):

So I had been working part-time doing it in the evenings and on weekends for probably about a year and a half, two years. I got married during that time, so I had the gift of being able to get on my husband's insurance and he had a salaried position, so that was a time where I always liked to bring this up because I never want someone looking from the outside to be like, oh, well I have Neil do that. I had the privilege of being able to do that. It aligned perfectly, and he was cool with me leaving my job. We had no kids, so it was perfect timing and I think I had maybe five or six private practice clients, and so I wasn't able to support myself on my own, but I could tell that it was becoming harder for me to work at the agency and grow. I had hit this peak of the mountain moment where I kind of had to decide which way I was going to go.

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Michael Fulwiler (11:04):

And when you made that decision, what happened?

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Whitney Goodman (11:07):

I remember being very scared. Now I had an office with a lease that I had to pay, and it wasn't like we were going to use our income to support that. I needed to at least break even. So there's a different kind of pressure there for sure. And that's when I really threw myself headfirst into the marketing component and being like, okay, I'm going to write blog articles every single day. I would take meetings because when I wasn't seeing clients, I would try to fill my day with work. So I did a lot of boots on the ground marketing then too, walking into doctor's offices, taking meetings with other therapists, and I just totally immersed myself in that for gosh, a good year I think.

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Michael Fulwiler (11:51):

Were there certain tactics that worked and certain things that didn't work when you look back now?

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Whitney Goodman (11:59):

Totally. To me, it's always been about keeping the ball moving up the mountain every single day, even if I didn't know if it was going to work or not. And it's really hard to look back and be like, what were the things that worked and didn't? I think it was such an amalgamation of everything I was doing, but I definitely had the mindset and it's a mindset I carry forward now of do something every day to get closer to your goal, whether it's measurable in the moment right now or not, and then you can look back and say, okay, did that seem to actually work? I think for private practice growth, growing within my community was very important and focusing on that over the internet at first, especially if you're looking for clients within your local spot who are going to come in in person. So meeting like-minded professionals, other people who were just on my street in my building, that seemed to move the needle a lot.

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Michael Fulwiler (12:55):

I love that. That's been my experience as well as a marketing professional, it's never one thing, it's never one channel, it's never just Instagram or just SEO. It's a combination of all of the things that you do over time. I also love the metaphor of it's like you're pushing a boulder up a hill. As long as you keep going, at some point you're going to reach a tipping point where now it's going to start going down the other side where you've generated enough word of mouth and referral sources that you're not having to do as much, but it takes work and it takes time to get there. I think.

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Whitney Goodman (13:34):

Oh my gosh, absolutely.

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Michael Fulwiler (13:35):

Often what we see on social media is it should be so easy to fill your caseload. There's definitely a reality to that that isn't the case. With that said, how long did it take you to go from, okay, I'm going to do this full-time now to now my practice is full or at least to a caseload that you wanted to get to?

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Whitney Goodman (13:59):

I think it took me about a year of that consistent work to get to a caseload that felt comfortable for me, which really was about, I don't know, 12 to 15 people a week. I knew in the back of my mind that I always wanted to do something else. I wasn't in a mindset of I just want to be a full-time therapist who only sees clients all day long. I just needed to get myself to making enough money and having that consistent to then where I could start looking into what that other thing would be.

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Michael Fulwiler (14:34):

And this was right around the start of the pandemic, right? 2020, 2021. So what was that shift like for you, I imagine, but you're no longer seeing clients in the office. Were there other changes that you had to make?

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Whitney Goodman (14:47):

Yeah, so this is where one of my biggest pivots comes in is that right before the pandemic, my husband and I opened up this office space in Miami that we were renting out to other therapists by the hour we had tenants, and I really wanted to create this space where I could help therapists market themselves, but they could remain independent. And this was the collaborative that I opened and I forget exactly when we opened, but gosh, it was like eight months before the pandemic or something. And so now I have this office space, this big lease payment, and we had our best month in February of 2020 and we were like, oh my God, this is taking off. This is going to be something. And then the pandemic hits and I'm like, oh my God, what am I going to do? Because all the therapists are emailing me, I'm not seeing clients anymore.

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(15:41):

I don't want to pay my rent. Everybody is dropping like flies. I'm trying to keep people in the office. I'm also pregnant with my first child at this point just to give everybody the full picture. And we had just bought our first house a month prior to this as well. So it was a lot going on at once, and that was when I decided to start making online courses, which I think is when you and I first connected because I was like, I have got to start bringing some money in here to pay this rent. And that was when I launched that Emotions 101 course was right around when all of this was happening.

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Michael Fulwiler (16:20):

Yeah, I remember. I think you had reached out to me about helping you promote that. And I mean, I think that also just goes to show you can have the best business plan in the world and then life happens. Obviously a global pandemic isn't something that anyone anticipated, but just the importance in entrepreneurship of being able to pivot and be scrappy and for you, I think you had the luxury of an audience already that you had built, so you had spent a lot of time and effort to build that, but it was something that you were able to tap into and I'd love to talk about. So in that first course that you did, it was on emotions, right? You've also talked about family relationships being a content focus for you, but then toxic positivity is another thing that came up and it sounds like that actually came out of one post that went viral. Was that something that you were thinking about of toxic positivity, this is something that I want to start creating more content about, or was it something that you just posted about and then took off?

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Whitney Goodman (17:31):

Yeah, it's crazy how that all transpired because I made that post on the floor of my office in between clients on a whim and put it up, and it ended up changing my entire life. It was just something I had been noticing. I saw some stuff that day and I was like, oh, I'm going to make this table. And just that little decision was so transformative, and I think it does go back in the book. I talk a lot about family relationships and how that is the birthplace for toxic positivity for a lot of people, but it's just kind of how I've always been. I see something and I'm like, oh, I want to talk about that, or I think this would be interesting, and then I see what sticks.

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Michael Fulwiler (18:15):

Yeah, and I think that's the really important piece is you put stuff out and then if you get signal back or there's a post is resonating to then say, okay, there's obviously something here. How can I go deeper? And just continuing to follow that versus, oh, this seems like this topic really resonated, then I'm just going to move on to something else. So at that point, did you then continue to create more content about toxic positivity and kind of focus on that just because it was being received so well?

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Whitney Goodman (18:49):

I did. And when a topic gets a lot of negative feedback, when people are super against it or they seem confused, that fires me up even more. And I think that's why I've pivoted into family estrangement now is I feel such a need to explain things and make it understandable for people that that's really what fueled me about that topic. It wasn't necessarily the positive feedback, it was actually the negative feedback of people being like, you're insane. How could positivity ever be bad that I was like, oh, I'm going to keep talking about this, and that's what really lit a fire under me, and I did keep creating a lot of content around that as much as I could.

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Michael Fulwiler (19:32):

This is an interesting topic for me. I'm glad we're going here. So when you get negative comments like that, do you respond to them? How do you handle that?

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Whitney Goodman (19:43):

So I divide it up into buckets. There are negative comments that are just cruel and mean or someone talking about me as a person that I try to totally ignore those. But there are negative comments that I think come from a place of someone not understanding, feeling triggered, like something has been hit in them that makes them feel bad about themselves because of that. And those are the type of comments that I look at and I say like, okay, there's clearly some confusion around this topic. This person doesn't understand. I bet if they feel this way, other people feel that way. And so I would respond in a way that is using that as fuel to create more content to help people create an understanding.

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Michael Fulwiler (20:29):

That makes sense. So it sounds like it's trying to understand the intent of the comment. I want to stick with this journey here. So the pandemic happens, you have to pivot, then you start to develop courses, toxic positivity topic blows up for you. And what then happens to the collaborative? Did you just shut it down?

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Whitney Goodman (20:53):

We did. So we realized after a couple of months this pandemic was not going anywhere, and I could see a shift that therapists were probably not going to go back to the office for a long time, even if the restrictions were lifted. And I was in Florida where there weren't a lot of restrictions around. People still weren't going into the office, and I was like, I don't want to go back to the office. So I took that as a sign that we should probably shut this down. I had the fortunate situation that my landlord had owned that building since 1975, and so she didn't really need me there. She had paid off the building. She ended up letting me out of my lease. I had to give her my down payment and security and all of that, but we ended up at least getting out of there and not having to pay more money, and my book was in motion at this time as well, so I was like, you know what?

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(21:50):

We're going to scrap that. I took it as a failure at the time. Even though it was a COVID related thing, it was a hard pill for me to swallow. I had put a lot of time and energy and money into that business, and now it was gone in two years, so that was a little bit of a bump in the road for me. But I luckily had this book project going on and I was about to have a baby, so it was easy for me to divert my attention away from that, and I started doing these courses. That was really how I made the money to get out of that mess and kind of move to the next thing.

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Michael Fulwiler (22:29):

Can you talk more about the courses that you were creating? Were they asynchronous? Were they live? What was the format? What was the price point? How did that look?

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Whitney Goodman (22:38):

Yeah, so I do not launch something without testing it first. So I will typically do something free, do polls on my Instagram. This emotions course idea seemed to land really well with my audience. People were also doing a lot of this kind of stuff at the start of the pandemic, so I tested out some of the material as posts, pulled my audience, did emails, and then realized, okay, this will be good. I can't even remember exactly what I charged for that first course. I think it was a couple hundred dollars.

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Michael Fulwiler (23:14):

Yeah, I remember it being maybe in the 150-200 range.

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Whitney Goodman (23:19):

And I did either you could pay less if you paid all at once, or I offered a payment plan that was a little bit higher of a rate. This course did have a live component with me where I would do kind of these 20 minute check-ins where people could come and ask questions once a week. Otherwise, it was all stuff that I made slides and recorded my voice with it in my bathroom of my house. I didn't have any of this equipment and I didn't know how to edit stuff at the time, so I would literally record myself through not making any mistakes a bunch of times, and then I lined it up in iMovie and was like, okay, good to go. This was bootstrapping at its core. Put it all on Kajabi. I made all the worksheets myself in Canva. I think I had someone start helping me towards the end, and then I made some landing pages and sold it, and I was able to sell quite a bit. That was one of my best courses I've ever done, and now I have it available inside Calling Home for members. I don't do that live component anymore, but the course content is still evergreen.

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Michael Fulwiler (24:30):

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(25:27):

Something that you said that I think is really important that I want to reiterate here is validating your course idea or really any offering before you spend a lot of time creating it. Because what a lot of people do is they have an idea for something that they want to launch. They spend six months recording all the videos, and then they launch it and then no one signs up. And there are various reasons why that would happen. One being, well, it's just not the right topic or it's not the right offer. There's not enough demand. And so if you have an audience, it's easy to just put up a poll in your Instagram story or on LinkedIn or on Twitter if you're still on Twitter. So I think having an audience allows you to do that to validate, almost do your own market research. And same thing with having an email list or a newsletter. It allows you to validate something before you put a lot of time and effort and then we've already talked about, but just getting past the perfectionism of just getting something out and you can always iterate and improve, but I think people get stuck in, like, well, the video quality isn't good enough, the audio quality, it's really about the content and if it's helpful and valuable. So this is interesting. So the collaborative, my impression was that it was a group practice, but it was really a coworking space. Is that..

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Whitney Goodman (26:49):

Yes.

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Michael Fulwiler (26:49):

Accurate?

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Whitney Goodman (26:49):

Yes. Everyone was independent, so...

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Michael Fulwiler (26:52):

People just then shifted to virtual at that point. Did you shift to virtual as well? Did you continue to see clients through the pandemic?

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Whitney Goodman (27:01):

I shifted completely to virtual. I was pregnant, and so I was like, oh, I can't really take this risk. Once I closed the office down, I stayed virtual and I have been virtual ever since.

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Michael Fulwiler (27:12):

Are you still seeing clients?

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Whitney Goodman (27:14):

I am, but only previous clients. So I have a very small caseload. It's people I've been seeing for years that take breaks and come back. I probably see five to six clients a week.

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Michael Fulwiler (27:26):

When you look back now, at that time when you were building your practice, were there certain missteps that you took or mistakes that you made that you learned from?

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Whitney Goodman (27:41):

I think I move a little too quickly sometimes. So when I get an idea in my head, I'm like, I just have to do this right now, and sometimes I need to slow down and really plan it out, and it's hard looking back, it's easy to say, oh, everything kind of worked out the way that it should, but I definitely spent money on websites or branding things that were super rushed. I've tried to hire people to help me with social media that has failed every single time. There's definitely been some money wasted on things that I wish I didn't do or maybe I had thought about more.

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Michael Fulwiler (28:21):

Why has that failed, do you think?

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Whitney Goodman (28:24):

I have found that it is very hard to find someone who is not a clinician or has experience really. I feel like you have really put yourself within this community and you understand the nuances of how this stuff works, and I could see that when you helped me with my emails and stuff. People that I have hired to do social media have not been able to straddle that line. And I think sometimes they try to implement techniques or sales techniques from other arenas that don't work in this sector because they come across as too aggressive or whatever.

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Michael Fulwiler (29:05):

Yeah. What are some of those that come to mind?

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Whitney Goodman (29:09):

I think being really overly pushy and salesy in an aggressive way, using a lot of not delicate language, I think, around mental health or not understanding it at all and making posts that are just "Buy now" in yellow letters and people that I saw do really great content in other arenas ended up bombing it and they tried to do things for me.

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Michael Fulwiler (29:38):

Yeah, no, that makes sense. I think a lot of therapists, when they hear the word sales or they hear the word marketing, it feels very icky and it's because of bad marketing and bad sales. When I work with therapists around marketing and launching particularly offerings outside of therapy, there's two things we talk about. One is creating some sense of scarcity in a way that feels ethical. And so that could look like there's only 10 spots or there's 20 spots. You're limiting the amount which drives some sense of urgency. And that's the other piece is giving people a deadline to sign up or if you join a wait list by this day that you get a discount. And so I think that you can still have some sort of incentive to get people more motivated to take action, but it's important that it feels good. And I think especially in this space, it's important that it doesn't feel exploitive because it's so inherently personal. So we've mentioned Calling Home, would love to go there next. At what point did Calling Home start to formulate for you?

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Whitney Goodman (30:58):

So there's another pivot in between the two things there.

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Michael Fulwiler (31:02):

That's going to be the title of this.

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Whitney Goodman (31:06):

But I hope everyone listening sees how many times I have had to readjust and start over. I think that's at the core of if you want to do this stuff, that's something I've had to get so comfortable with. I started writing on Substack and, gosh, I'm trying to remember what year. This was probably two years ago, and this is where I really started to dial in on writing about adult family relationships. I noticed that everyone coming into my practice was talking about this. A lot of my content was doing well in that arena, so I was like, I'm going to start a newsletter. I started a paid subscription on Substack that was 9.99 a month. I would write emails every Monday, and I started doing some live Q and As in there as well. I was able over the course of the year to get that Substack to six figures of revenue, and that's when I was like, okay, this needs to be something else. I don't want to keep this on so much more. I want to do, I want to make this bigger. And my husband has been extremely helpful to me whenever I'm making these decisions. And so we talked about it like, okay, let's start a membership community where you can have support groups so much more. So we spent about 15 months while I still ran that Substack creating Calling Home and building that out with a branding company and building a website, and then launched that a year ago.

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Michael Fulwiler (32:38):

That's amazing. How do you feel like you were able to grow the paid newsletter because paid newsletters are tough. Was that from Instagram or from the email list, the free email list that you had already built?

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Whitney Goodman (32:50):

So I had a free email list when I started it that had about, I think 25, 30,000 people on it that I grew mainly from Instagram, but it wasn't something I had been nurturing very much outside of selling courses. When I started the Substack, I was like, my main goal here is to just keep growing this, and I would send one free email out every month. So that helped. Substack also has a great organic growth component to it that people will share yours, other people on there will see it. So that helped me a lot. I also was sharing it through my Instagram and that of course was a main source of driving people there, and I was able to get that list up to around I think like 40,000 people before I made the pivot. So almost doubled in a year, which was great. When I decided to take that newsletter off and move it to Calling Home. We of course saw a dip in converting people, and that has been another mountain to climb.

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Michael Fulwiler (33:48):

I've been curious about the pivot from toxic positivity to family relationships. It sounds like it's always been family relationships. Was there a point where you were feeling like, oh, I'm now the toxic positivity person, and I literally wrote the book on toxic positivity now I'm sort of stuck in this kind of topic?

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Whitney Goodman (34:12):

For sure. I mean, anybody who has written a book about something and done press, you will get into this thing where you're like, I can't talk about this anymore. And I started to feel that way about toxic positivity just because it felt like I had taken it as far as I could take it. And with the family relationship stuff, I feel like I can talk about that for the rest of my life. And so it was kind of this feeling of I need to move into what I want to be known for in my career. I've been practicing now for 10 years. I felt like this toxic positivity thing was a cultural moment in time that I was able to strike while the iron's hot. That's amazing, but I want to be known for working with adult family relationships. That is what I feel like I want my career to be about. So I felt myself just kind of feeling like I've got to make a transition here and start talking about what I really want to talk about, and I can include my book and all of that in that as I make that transition.

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Michael Fulwiler (35:21):

You said you want to be known for adult family and relationships. Can you go a little bit deeper there and why?

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Whitney Goodman (35:27):

Yeah, so I really saw such a gap in content about family relationships for adults. I think we focus so much on children, parents raising young kids that I felt like there just wasn't a lot of discussion, especially around adult sibling relationships, parents and their adult children. And I have realized that I love talking about that. I cannot get tired of talking about it. And that to me is the fuel of I need to go in this direction because I think that's what you need as an entrepreneur, honestly, is so much passion about something that you feel like you want to keep doing it. That motivates me more than money, anything else.

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Michael Fulwiler (36:09):

What's the response been with other therapists? Are therapists asking you for training or supervision if they're working, if they want to work more with clients who struggle with their adult family relationships? What's that been like?

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Whitney Goodman (36:24):

I think the biggest compliment to me that still doesn't feel real because I still feel very young in the field and new still and is that we have a lot of therapists in our groups at Calling Home that are coming because of their own family relationship issues. I also hear from members like, oh, my therapist told me about this. I don't follow you on Instagram. I'm not part of that space. I just heard about it in my therapy. And that to me is the biggest compliment of all time. We have some groups where it's like 50% therapists there, so there must be a correlation. I'm like, wow.

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Michael Fulwiler (37:01):

This is probably a reason why those people became therapists.

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Whitney Goodman (37:04):

Yeah, exactly. The pipeline is strong, but I have noticed that that's something that's happening. That's really cool. I haven't moved into the training therapists thing yet. That might be another frontier that I tackle later, but right now we do have a lot of therapists using what we produce at Calling Home.

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Michael Fulwiler (37:24):

That resonates with me. When I was at Gottman, I remember something that I learned was that anything that we put out for therapists was relevant for therapists, but anything we put out for people in relationships, therapists also loved and bought and came to the workshops because they wanted to integrate it in their work with their clients. And there are also people in relationships, and so if you're launching something for the general public, I would say don't overlook therapists as a referral or even a distribution channel, especially if it's relevant to the types of clients that they work with. Therapists love resources, and so I know you've put out workbooks and things like that as well. Any of that stuff, even if it's not for therapists, therapists may be interested in it.

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Whitney Goodman (38:17):

A hundred percent.

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Michael Fulwiler (38:18):

Could you walk through the membership and kind of the different levels and how it works and kind of how you landed on that for folks who are listening and they're nodding along and saying, wow, this sounds amazing, I have wanted to launch a similar type of membership? What is the actual, the business and the numbers side look like?

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Whitney Goodman (38:35):

Yeah, so I mentioned the Substack. I was running that for 9.99 a month, and that seems like a good price point, and I decided on that mainly because that was the average rate on Substack that people were charging for the amount of content that I wanted to produce. What we did find was that when you have a monthly membership that people can continuously opt in and out of, it creates a lot of work administratively. It also doesn't give people the opportunity to actually commit to doing the work. And so I think that the results are not as good for them. I ultimately decided that I only wanted to sell memberships that were either six months or a year, and the main kind of push behind that was that I really felt like people needed to commit six months to the content and using it to actually get the benefits.

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(39:30):

And of coming to our groups. We did a lot of research on what people were charging for these types of membership communities and ultimately ended up on it being $150 for six months and $240 for a year. So you get a bit of a monthly discount when you sign up for a year. This has really cut down on a lot of that, like, oh, I don't need it this month and then I'm going to join next month, which can create a lot of work for people, especially if you don't have help. You also have to imagine people are going to be asking for refunds. They forget to turn off their subscriptions. You end up becoming a consumer facing business that honestly needs help running just that part of the business. So that was a good way to help us with that and also to get people in who really were committed to doing the work.

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(40:23):

And I run support groups at Calling Home. We have 15 plus groups every month, and I wanted people to be attending the groups and have there be the same people there. There can be a lot of chaos when you have a person attending one month and then they drop out and they come back six months later, and I wanted to avoid that as well. So we have those two price points for the Family Cycle Breakers Club, which is our highest level of membership. I did create this lower tier of membership where all you get is articles, which is exactly what we were doing on Substack to try to mimic that and get some people to come over. What has been interesting is that 90% of our members are the higher tier. I am almost considering getting rid of that lower tier, except it does kind of bring us in people who end up converting to the higher tier.

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(41:18):

So that's something I think for people to consider is that you could do a lower price point or a free thing, but you have to figure out how you're going to get people into that ecosystem. And what I have found is that Instagram and social media do not convert directly into paying customers a lot of the time. There is this intermediary step that you've got to get people through either email list, a free download, a tier of your membership, but I would not expect to do this direct conversion when it's that high of a price point or that big of a commitment.

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Michael Fulwiler (41:53):

That's really interesting. That's something that I've seen as well, and I think it's a mistake that a lot of therapists make. They'll post a graphic on their Instagram or an Instagram story about a product they're selling or a sale that they're offering or a discount, and no one buys it. And it's like, well, why didn't that work? I have so many followers, and I think to your point, there's that when you think about the funnel, there's kind of that in-between stage that it's hard to get people to jump from, oh, I just follow this person on Instagram because I like reading their posts to actually want to buy something from them. But when someone signs up for your newsletter or downloads a resource, they're showing some intent, right? They're putting their hand up and saying, hey, I'd love to learn more from you. And then it's an opportunity to deliver more value through email.

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(42:46):

And I'm such a huge fan of email. I still think email is underrated. I hear like, oh, email's dead and there's too many newsletters. Email for the 15 years of my career in marketing has always been the highest performing channel in terms of sales. I think that it serves a different purpose than social media and Instagram. It's harder to grow. I would say the awareness piece of email is hard, but in terms of the middle and the bottom of the funnel to convert, I think that email is really great for that. And something else here, just to mention, we've talked about this on the show, is that when we think about Instagram and social media, we think about it as a borrowed audience. People follow you on this third party channel that could change, the algorithm could change. I'm sure you mentioned early on that someone would tag you on Instagram and you'd get like 5,000 followers, and that's not the case anymore. But email is a direct relationship. It's an owned audience, and so I would encourage folks who are considering a membership or some sort of offering to invest in email. All right, we're coming to the end here. We like to wrap up with a few rapid fire questions, so I have some I prepared for you. We talked about this a little bit, but I'm curious, what's the meanest thing that someone has said to you on social media?

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Whitney Goodman (44:16):

Oh my gosh. So many things. I'll tell this story very quickly, but I had a woman make an entire series about me, an estranged parent, like a video series, and there were hundreds comments just talking about, oh my gosh, my forehead is big. Talking about my voice. It was nuts. Hundreds of mostly women. Yeah, that was up there for sure. That's awful.

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Michael Fulwiler (44:45):

Well, at least you're able to...

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Whitney Goodman (44:46):

You have to laugh about it. Yeah.

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Michael Fulwiler (44:50):

I know you've talked about this a lot in your content, but I want to give you the opportunity to address it here. What's your take on parents deserving a relationship with their kids or grandkids?

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Whitney Goodman (45:01):

I think that healthy relationships are important for family members, and I am trying to promote the idea that we should treat our family as well as we do our friends. And when we do that, then we are deserving of relationships.

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Michael Fulwiler (45:17):

What's the toxic positivity saying that bothers you the most?

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Whitney Goodman (45:21):

Oh gosh, everything happens for a reason.

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Michael Fulwiler (45:25):

What's one thing people with toxic family relationships need to hear right now?

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Whitney Goodman (45:31):

That it's not your fault that your family is dysfunctional and that you can always do something about it to make your future family relationships better.

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Michael Fulwiler (45:40):

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

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Whitney Goodman (45:45):

Try everything. See...throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. And don't be afraid of things not working out publicly. It will get you somewhere.

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Michael Fulwiler (45:56):

I love that. Something that I was reflecting on as you were talking today was that you try a lot of things, but you also validate things before you really invest in them too, right? And so there's finding that balance between experimentation and validation, and I think that you're someone who's done that really well.

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Whitney Goodman (46:14):

Thank you, I appreciate that.

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Michael Fulwiler (46:16):

Thank you Whitney, so much for coming on. Where can folks connect with you if they want to learn more about Calling Home?

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Whitney Goodman (46:23):

Yeah. If you would like to learn more about Calling Home, you can go to callinghome.co and you'll find information about our memberships. We also have the Calling Home podcast on Apple and Spotify, and then you can follow me on Instagram @sitwithwhit and TikTok @whitneygoodmanlmft.

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Michael Fulwiler (46:41):

Great. Thank you.

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Whitney Goodman (46:41):

Thank you.

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Michael Fulwiler (46:43):

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.