Anthony Centore

We all make mistakes, but when it comes to mistakes in marketing and advertising, they can literally cost you. In this two-part column, we’ll review 18 of the most common marketing and advertising mistakes made by mental health professionals.

Selling a practice. It might be the largest single financial transaction of your life. And it could go very well, or it might not happen at all. Depending on the choices you make, your practice could fund your retirement…or it might be worth close to nothing. While it’s a much larger topic than this column can do justice, this month I’ll provide a few tips to help you increase the value of your counseling practice.

I don’t like risk, and the risks of opening a new practice and adding therapists to our growing team are many. We need the right location, the right staff, the right operations, the right credentialing, and even the right marketing. The failure of any one of these key areas will cripple the project.

Our culture has a strong bias toward growth; “go big or go home” has been the proverb of choice since the phrase first caught on sometime in the early 90s. Case and point, the popular business magazine “Inc.” every year releases the Inc. 500 and 5000 lists, which rank privately held businesses based on their revenue growth alone: Not how well they’re executing their missions. Not customer/client satisfaction. Not even their profitability. Just growth.

Some people will read this title and immediately decide that this column doesn’t apply to them. They’ll think, “I’m just getting started, I’m not in a place where I can consider selling.” If this is you, and you’ve made it this far—hang on. This is for you.