The Day I Finally Understood Why I Was Stuck

I want to tell you about my ex-husband’s football stipend.

He coached for an entire season, summer conditioning, fall practice, film sessions, early mornings, late nights, staying until the last kid was picked up, for an $8,000 stipend. Which sounds decent. Except when I actually sat down and calculated the hours, he was making somewhere around seven or eight dollars an hour. Less than minimum wage in most states.

He also didn’t see a single dollar of it until the season was almost over.

I think about that calculation a lot. Not because of the marriage, but because of what it taught me about how we are conditioned, especially in helping professions, to measure work by effort and mission rather than by math. He wasn’t coaching football because of the money. He was coaching because he loved it. And because he loved it, the money felt like a bonus. Which meant nobody ever questioned whether the math made sense.

Your practice might be doing the same thing to you right now.

The “just keep swimming” years

When I started my business, I wasn’t I didn’t start out with a plan. I started out surviving.

I had taken a job as a school counselor because I was trying to get to something, more meaning, more flexibility, a little more quality of life. What I didn’t expect was that I’d end up in one of the lower-paying districts in my area, forty-five minutes from home, spending more on gas than I’d calculated, driving a car that needed replacing, and paying for before and after school care because both my then-husband and I worked at schools. I was making about $36,000.

But that’s not the worst part.

Because we were working so far from home and not on the same schedule as the kids, we were actually going into debt, paying other people to take care of our children while we were being underpaid to do the same thing across town. And there was no end in sight.

I didn’t have a story I was telling myself about why that was okay. I wasn’t in denial. I was just swimming. Patching together part-time jobs, making things work at the margins, keeping my head down. Living off of hopes and tax refunds. Technically it was survivable. But survivable is not the same as sustainable.

What I didn’t know yet, what nobody had shown me, was that there was a version of this that didn’t require the trade-off. I had been operating under the assumption that making more money meant giving more of myself. More hours. More nights. More of the things I actually cared about.

That premise was the problem. Not the job.

The TurboTax moment

There’s a specific day I go back to.

I was sitting at my computer doing our taxes. I’d been entering W-2s, school job, part-time jobs, the whole patchwork, and I was watching the refund number in the corner of the screen. I had mentally calculated what we were going to get back. I had plans for that money. I knew exactly where every dollar was going.

I entered the last W-2. It was from a part-time job that had earned me maybe $1,000 that year. I drove across town to do it. I left my kids for it. I added it to the pile.

And when I entered it, the refund number dropped. By $3,000 to $4,000.

That part-time job, the one I’d taken to make more money, had earned me just enough to bump me out of the Earned Income Tax Credit bracket. I had driven across town, left my children, added stress to an already stretched schedule, and the net result was that I had less money than if I had stayed home.

I said out loud: “Something has got to give.”

The switch that flipped

Not long before that moment, my sister Elizabeth, the CEO of the practice that I run today, had mentioned more than once that I could do parent coaching through her practice. So I started. And I made exponentially more per hour doing parent coaching and consulting than I had ever made as a school employee.

I also applied for an IDA account, a federal program that matches your savings if you use the funds to go back to school, buy a house, or start a business. I saved for maybe six months. Then I pulled out my savings and the matched funds and bought my first laptop.

That’s how my business started. A laptop bought with matched savings. A part-time coaching arrangement. A willingness to see if the math could look different.

Within 5 years, I had signed a contract for almost as much as my annual salary, doing exactly what I knew how to do, and it only took me about 10 hours a week and half the school year to deliver it.

What this has to do with your practice

I tell you this not because my story is yours. It probably isn’t, in the details.

But I’ve sat across from enough practice owners in Practice Revenue Diagnostic sessions to know that the underlying pattern is almost always the same. You are working hard inside a structure that has a mathematical ceiling, and the ceiling isn’t visible to you because you’re busy doing the work, not looking at the architecture.

The football stipend wasn’t a bad deal because my ex-husband didn’t work hard enough. It was a bad deal because the structure was set up to pay him a fixed amount for an unlimited amount of effort. The contract was the problem, not the coach.

A lot of therapy practices are running on the same math. Fixed reimbursement rates. Unlimited effort. A contract you didn’t negotiate with an entity that does not have your best interest as its first priority.

Where I am now

The practice I helped my sister build from the beginning, now does over $500,000 a year. It has multiple 6-figure contracts which lets clinicians earn 30% above market rate for private practice.

None of this is magic or impossible. Right now, I am still signing coaching, consulting and speaking contracts for 4 and 5 figures, as a solopreneur,with no full time team. The group practice that I run is on track to have close to a 7-figure year. I run BOTH in under 30 hours a week. This happened because we looked at the business and built the structure that worked with how we wanted to live.

I was a school counselor making $36,000 a year. I can now earn $36,000 in a single contract.

I’m not telling you that to impress you. I’m telling you because I spent years not knowing that was possible for someone like me. And if you’re reading this and the football stipend math felt a little too familiar, I want you to know that it is possible for you too.

If you calculated your actual hourly rate, the one that includes all your documentation time, admin hours, marketing, the low paying panels and sliding scales, what would the number be? If the number is not what you want, let’s talk.