Starting a Private Practice: Yay or Nay?

In this first week of my tenure as a full-fledged professor, I’m going to take a moment to reflect on my time in private practice. In some ways this seems fitting as until this week I have never held a full-time position as an employee.

I ran across a question I received awhile back from a music therapy equivalency student at the University of Kansas. She was working on a project about the rewards and challenges of starting a private practice. As part of her project, she asked me to list the 5 most rewarding and 5 most challenging aspects of being a music therapy business owner.

Going into private practice is not a decision to take lightly. It’s not for everyone. I, however, LOVED it. I did not start out knowing I wanted to have my own practice, but the opportunity presented itself, I took a chance, and I fell in love.

If you are weighing the pros and cons of taking the leap yourself, here are my thoughts on the benefits and challenges of being a music therapy business owner.

The Benefits

1. Flexibility. Political consultant Mary Matalin wrote that “(h)aving control over your schedule is the only way that women who want to have a career and a family can make it work.” Flexibility is incredibly important to me if I am to be the career-minded mommy I aim to be. And there are few jobs more flexible than owning your own business.
2. You get to create something out of nothing. I remember driving in my car a couple years into my time in private practice, thinking “Wow, everything I am working on now, I created. Out of nothing. It wasn’t there before.” This your professional baby and when you step back and reflect on it…it’s a pretty amazing opportunity.
3. There’s always a challenge and a new learning opportunity. Challenges and a commitment to being a life-long learner keep me engaged and interested. Starting a private practice brings more than enough of that with each new client, new site, new service, and new business growth opportunity.
4. It expands your network and the number of people you can learn from. Marketing is about building relationships. Owning a private practice forces you to put yourself out there—either online or offline—to connect with and grow your network of prospects, clients, and supporters. As an added bonus, the more people you interact with, the more opportunities you have to learn something new (see #3).
5. It provide immense personal and professional satisfaction. Not for everyone…but certainly for me.

The Challenges

1. Can struggle with motivation and self-initiation. A successful private practice is dependent on your ability to create opportunities and stick with them. That’s not always easy to do.
2. Bookkeeping sucks. ‘Nuff said.
3. The learning curve can be overwhelming. Although there are transfers between the skills you need as a music therapist and those you need as a private practice owner, there’s a lot to starting and running a private practice that you don’t learn in school. It takes rolling up your sleeves, digging in, and persevering as you muddle your way through. (This is one of the reasons why I wrote The Therapy Business Blueprint.)
4. Potential for feeling isolated. This is true for many music therapists in general, and can be especially true if you are contracted with a site (i.e., are not a “formal” part of the employee family) or if you drive around to various homes. Luckily there are now networking groups you can find locally, at national conference, and on FB that are dedicated to business owners (sometimes called MTBOs, or Music Therapy Business Owners).
5. Figuring out the financials. It can be a major headache to work out when and how to file the appropriate taxes (federal, state, and sometimes local), figure out insurance, set your pricing, and create a budget. But it’s vital to managing a business.

So fellow private practice owners . . . do you have anything to add? 🙂

Tagged as: business, Music Therapy, Private Practice, running a business, start a therapy practice, therapy private practice, working mom