Rent Your Office

Hi, this is Dave Kats, a therapist consultant, and I have a tip for you.

Every so often, we have a therapist call in and say, "What can I do to produce more revenue other than just seeing patients and doing counseling?" And there's lots of things you can do. One thing that you can do that really help the patients is do assessments on all your patients.

Another thing you could do is provide product. For instance, if I was doing marriage counseling, or if I was a patient going to marriage counseling, or a client going to marriage counseling, and you gave me a set of six CD's to listen to, maybe, three to five times a week for six weeks, it would help me a lot more than just going to the counseling sessions. So, maybe, you should be selling products, then maybe you should be having group sessions. You can make more in group sessions than in individual sessions, by and large.

Then there are instances where you may meet with married couples, six hours in a week, maybe, three hours one day and three hours the next. And there's lots of other ways, but one of the ways I want to talk to you about today is renting out your excess office space. Now, you may say, "I only have one room." Well, I have a very good example of what you can do. I have a therapist in Dallas and she has one room, and she works Monday through Thursday; Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. She rents out her office, the evenings of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and Saturday to two different therapists, who share it, one pays $300, one pays $350. She collects $650 rent from them for doing absolutely nothing.

She virtually never sees them. She said, "I just show up one day and the rent check is on my desk." And by the way, her total rent is $650. So she's practicing rent-free because she had somebody come in and rent her excess space. Think about it, if you're renting your own space, you might want to think about putting an ad in one of the places like, Psychology Today, or indeed.com, or somewhere and tell people that you have space available for therapists. It would be a good way to increase your income without spending more time in the counseling room.

This is Dave Kats, thanks for listening.