Learn The Math Behind Shrinking Your Caseload

Ready to get your side hustle off the ground? Let's talk numbers so you can learn the math behind shrinking your caseload

Numbers can actually be really exciting, especially when you know what numbers to analyze when launching your side hustle.

The best benefit of analyzing the numbers is gaining insight into what's possible.

And when you know what's possible, you're much more likely to take action and follow through to make it happen.

Let’s work on gaining this insight and clarity so that you can increase your financial freedom, location freedom, and time freedom.

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Full Show Notes (Transcript)… 

Hey risers. Welcome to Empathy Rising. So today's episode is the math behind shrinking your caseload. Let's jump into some of this math, and I'm not gonna like share numbers, but I'm gonna share different places that we wanna look at numbers.

We wanna look at numbers for our practice, but we also wanna look at numbers. For our side hustle, because like I said, this is what's gonna give us that insight into what's possible. And when you know what's possible, you're much more likely to take the action steps and take the follow through, um, to make it happen.

So the clinicians that I work with tend to fall into three categories. Some of them just want a few extra hundred bucks a month. They really want to get those student loans paid down, or they really want to maybe like, buy a house or pay their mortgage down or something like that. Some people who also fall into this category are people who maybe had an unexpected medical bill or an unexpected car repair, just things like that.

And they really want to not have to live paycheck to paycheck necessarily, or they want to just have these cash injections that they can rely on that will infuse a little bit extra money each month. So that's that first category. 

The second category of people who tend to want to have a side hustle have a medium caseload right there at 12, 13, 14, 15 clients. And it feels really good to them and they don't want to take any more. They're like, 14 clients is perfect for me. But the only way to make more money is to see more people, and so they don't want to cross that threshold. They know what size caseload is perfect for them, but they have goals or they have dreams or they want to make more revenue or whatever. And so they don't want to necessarily have to take on more clients to do that. 

Now, the last category, which honestly tends to be the majority of people that come and see me are the people who are way too full. It's not 14 clients, it's 34 clients, they're just way past the point of being overfull and overworked. And they need, not only want, but they need to scale back on the number of clients they're seeing. 

But they don't want to give up the cash flow. They got to 34 clients because probably they were in category two at one point. They had a good caseload, but then they were like, alright, let's increase the revenue here. And then it probably just went like a wildfire out of control. And then they ended up with 34 clients, and so once you're at that revenue level, it's really tempting to stay there (and not necessarily tempting, it might be the income that you need to stay there).

However, it's not sustainable from a mental health perspective or a physical health perspective, or just an enjoyable perspective to stay at that level of output. So it's "I need my revenue to stay here. I need to be making this much money, but I can't continue to see this many clients". 

So it's a little bit more of a desperate place to be, whereas the other categories are a little bit more proactive. And you might say that you resonate with a couple of these and that's cool. I'm just trying to give definitions to where I see people come into the side hustle process. And what's great about this first workshop in the Summer Slow Down series is it's really going to help whatever category you fall into.

I know it's the math behind shrinking your caseload, but you can fill that blank in with the math behind keeping your caseload where it's at, or the math behind making a few hundred extra dollars. So whichever category you fall into. These numbers are going to be important for you to know, and it's really gonna help you see, regardless of what your goal is, how we're going to have revenue from a nonclinical source. Right? 

That's really the big part here because it's going to help you recognize the monetary value of a single client, right? If you start to realize "on a monthly basis, each client is worth $2,000 for me. So then on an annual basis, that client is worth $24,000 to me". Now I know that math, right?

Here we are talking about math and I'm like... we want to make sure I'm doing it right. Now I know how much I need to make from a revenue stream to be able to not have to take on another client. Or to be able to take a client or two off. So this is exactly what we're going to be working with here.

I think it's a really important way to prep for starting your side hustle. I know that a lot of us just want to go fast and the point of this Summer Slow Down workshop is not to go fast. It's to streamline. And there's a difference there, right? I'm not telling you "let's hurry up through the summer and make our side hustle happen."

That's really the exact opposite of summer slow down, right? Summer Slow Down is about: let's take some intentional steps here. Three key points throughout the summer that are going to hit three key milestones throughout the summer. And we're really going to make huge progress. 

We're not going to be spending 20 hours a week doing this. It's three Saturdays over the summer. And I think it's important to prep for the side hustle. And that's what we're going to be doing in this first workshop. Because jumping in with both feet and just making a mess is not actually progress, right? 

So let's have a little bit of a plan in place. Let's have a little bit of insight into where we're going on workshop one and then workshop two and workshop three will be much more action-oriented. Okay, because knowing these numbers and doing this prep, I've said before, it's eye-opening to what's possible, you can start to see what you want to do.

Price-wise for your other income stream, you can see what you want to do. Volume-wise for your other income stream, it can inform you how high touch you want to be in that other income stream. If your caseload's full, you probably don't want high touch. And that's a generalization and an assumption, and it's not always true.

However, until we know the actual numbers behind all of these options, we don't really know what's possible or what we want, right? Knowing the numbers puts it into perspective because you'll be able to see what type of program you want to do. If you need to generate so much revenue, do you want to do that with a membership site, which has a lower price and needs more people?

Or do you want to do that with a group program, which has a higher price, but then needs fewer people? So we need to take all of these into account and knowing the numbers and the math behind them is going to be what makes that happen. Now you also don't get insight into what type of program you want to do, but the other ramifications of that such as the marketing, right?

If you need more people, you might need to do more marketing. If you need less people, you might need to do less marketing. But then that opens the door to sales. If you need less people for a higher price program, you're going to need to know how to sell a higher-priced program. So all of these variables are intertwined and they all start with knowing the numbers. They all start with knowing these revenue numbers and these goal numbers. 

Okay, also knowing the numbers helps you evaluate your time investment, right? Because in your practice, you directly trade time for money. We need to value the time that it takes to build these things, too. Because if you were going to spend an hour on a side hustle project, it needs to be worth it instead of you just spending that hour with a client.

So we need to evaluate the time investment as well. And I think that's the transition. That is most daunting to clinicians because if I put in this time, if I actually take five hours from my practice (which is literally five hours I could be making money) is there going to be a payoff?

Is it going to be worth it to start building another business when my time is my money right now? And this is where we have to think, and we have to know that we want this lighter lifestyle. We want to stop trading time for money, and we want to have money come from easier sources. We want to have more location freedom, more financial freedom, and of course more time freedom.

So that's why we need to know the actual monetary number of our time, so we can assign it a value and we can see what side hustle makes the most sense. And if it takes time to set up, we need to be making a return on investment at that time. So all of this is what we're going to be covering in the workshop.

I think once you see everything laid out on paper or on spreadsheets, so to speak, you're going to see the math behind this. You're going to get a really clear picture of how it's all gonna work together, and it's gonna bring you a lot of clarity. And I think clarity is what we need at this first workshop.

Stage clarity is what we need. So that in workshop two and workshop three, we're inspired and we're ready to take the action. Because I think what I have seen before when students come into Side Hustle or when students come into Space Holder is they might not know some of these numbers. And when you don't know exactly how much a single client is worth to your practice, it's operating blind (which, I hate that analogy).

It's not what I like to say, but like you're in the dark, right? Because you might not even know your annual revenue for your practice, hopefully, those numbers. But if you do know your annual revenue for your practice, do you know your profit margins? And if you don't know your profit margins, you don't probably know how to tell when you're full, which is probably how a lot of you guys got in this predicament in the first place is because we didn't have enough of a financial or a monetary... we didn't have enough numerical information. So we just kept taking clients, and all of a sudden we're overworked and we need to shrink our caseload in the first place. 

So the first area of numbers we are going to look at is your practice numbers. Also though, when it comes to adding a side hustle, you need to know how much you need to make from your course, how much you need to make from your membership site, how much you need to make for your group program to cover that single client. So we're going to know the monetary value of a client that way we can establish a monetary value for your online income stream. 

I think this really helps us also set prices. A lot of people, especially clinicians, get daunted by the idea of setting a price, especially because online income products tend to be priced higher than therapy.

So it could be like it brings up money mindset stuff, and it just brings up a lot of money history and money story. Seeing this on the spreadsheet is going to hopefully help you cut through that and just literally see the facts and the figures of the numbers. And then of course on the workshop, we're going to be talking about: what are these reflections that are coming up?

What does it feel like to see these numbers laid out? And what does that mean for you wanting to have another income source? Because once you have all of the numbers that are in front of you, you're going to be able to see not necessarily from an emotion place, but literally from a numerical place, which online offer is actually best for you.

You're going to know revenue-wise where you need to be focusing on. You're also going to be able to see how much you need to bring into one client to cut five clients or to cut 10 clients, right? Let's say you want to remove 10 clients from your caseload. Do you actually know how much money that is?

First of all, once you know that number, let's talk about how we can replace that. We can replace that with this offer or this offer. We need this size audience, this many sales, and so it's literally going to break down into an equation. Now, some of you, like I said, aren't necessarily wanting to cut clients off your caseload, but you really don't want to necessarily take more. 

This same spreadsheet, the same workshop is going to help you see, alright. Your clients are worth this much to you. How do we make that much or more from your other revenue stream? We can look at this offer at this price point, blah, blah, blah. Again, taking a look at the different numbers. It's really going to break it down for you so that you can hit your next revenue goal or get to the place you want to be without adding more clinical work.

So knowing these numbers ultimately is going to make it easier to hit your overall business goals, but also your overall lifestyle goals, right? The lighter lifestyle that we're all looking for.

Alright, so let's talk about how exactly this is going to work. The first workshop is on Saturday, June 19th, and it is three hours long. You're going to need to do a little bit of homework before you come to the workshop. And that is to fill out a section of the spreadsheet. You're going to get this emailed to you with all the details.

So don't worry about it that much, but what you're gonna need to do before the workshop is to enter in your clients. And I recommend not necessarily their name, because if you want to share your screen with me or any of the other people at the workshop, and you want to get feedback, obviously we can't have identifying information on that.

So you might do just their initials or something like that. You might do client one, client two if that's helpful for you. So make sure you fill this out, but I would fill it out so you don't have identifying information in there. That way you can get feedback if you want, but you're going to fill out all your clients and whatever hourly rate they are paying you.

Some of you might have all of them at $250 an hour. Some of you might have some open path clients. Some of you might have a sliding scale. Some of you might have older clients who are at one rate and newer clients that came on at a different rate. So all of those things we're going to want to track, and you're going to want to have that input into the spreadsheet before the workshop starts because what we're first going to do is take a look at that.

How are you feeling about your revenue as it stands now? How are you feeling about your rates? Do you need to raise your rates? These are questions that we can have just about your practice. That's what we're going to do for that first step. The next step we're going to talk about is different offers and what their typical price points are. What market value is of different types of programs. And we're going to play around in the spreadsheet with those types of numbers. 

Then the second thing we're going to talk about is marketing. Like audience size and marketing. What does it take to hit these types of numbers? And we're going to put that into the spreadsheet. And so that way you'll really have a couple of different scenarios to walk through. So for example, we'll say, your practice is bringing you $67,000 a year. And you want to cut for clients, but you want to get to $100K like, that's your goal, cutting clients and also adding revenue. 

So we're going to fill in your practice revenue first, and then we're going to run through different scenarios of different types of programs at different types of price points and different types of marketing intensity, the time exchange, and then we will come up with a few scenarios that you can say "oh, I like this one. This one makes the most sense. It helps me cut my clients that I want to cut. And it gets my revenue to the next level". That's where I want to start focusing. 

I really think this is special and unique, and I think it helps in an objective way. There's so much heaviness that can come with money. So sometimes just seeing the numbers is going to make it more objective. And it's going to make it more black and white and clear cut. 

And it brings that clarity like I said, so you're going to see, okay:scenario one, not for me, right? Scenario three. That's intriguing. And maybe scenario five - oh, I really like those two. So I want to play more with those. It's going to give you direction. It's going to give you insight and it's going to inspire you. I would want to say how easy.

There's a difference between simple and easy. So I don't wanna say how easy it is to make you know that plan happen. But it can be simple. It can be simple, and it can be straightforward. And that's what I think that the math is gonna show us. That there are options here. There are paths forward here, and now we get to pick which one makes the most sense for us.

And so I really like that it streamlines it. , I don't think that's the right word. It streamlines, makes it more objective and it is gonna really give us that clarity. 

All right, guys. Until our next episode, keep on rising.

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