The primary focus of this episode is to elucidate the three distinct pathways available for establishing a successful and gratifying business in school contracting. We commence by discussing the merits of intentionally maintaining a small business model, which affords practitioners the flexibility to align their work with personal priorities while avoiding burnout. Subsequently, we delve into the concept of "growing deep," whereby professionals expand their operations by hiring a limited number of providers, thus creating a stable and collaborative environment within local schools. Lastly, we explore the ambitious strategy of "growing wide," which involves scaling operations into a comprehensive agency, allowing for extensive outreach and significant revenue generation. Throughout this discourse, we emphasize that success in school contracting is defined not by the scale of one's enterprise but by the alignment of one's skills and goals with the needs of the educational institutions served.

Takeaways:

• The podcast outlines three distinct pathways for service providers to develop successful school contracting businesses, emphasizing flexibility and personal alignment with professional goals.
• Staying intentionally small allows contractors to maintain a manageable workload and focus on specific interests, which can lead to fulfilling work-life balance.
• Growing deep involves developing a small team or private practice that serves local schools, offering the potential for passive income while maintaining professional relationships.
• The scaling path encourages ambitious providers to expand their businesses into larger agencies, which can significantly increase revenue and impact in the educational sector.

Links referenced in this episode:

• www.thetherapistsupportnetwork.com

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Therapist Support Network

Welcome to beyond the Big Agencies, the podcast for SLPs, OTs, PTs and related service providers who want to work with schools, but not for them.

I'm Elise Mitchell, an slp, a school contracting coach, and the owner of the Therapist Support Network.

Here to help you take control of your career, do what you love and build a sustainable practice on your terms.

Because school staffing should be left to the professionals.

Let's dig in foreign.

Hey guys, welcome back to beyond the Big Agencies.

It is Elise here and thank you so much for joining me today.

I'm so grateful to spend this time with you chatting about a topic that I love so much.

All right, so today we are breaking down three pathways that you can take to build a successful and fulfilling business in school contracting.

So one of my personal favorite parts about school contracting is that there's no one size fits all approach, right?

You can tailor your business to fit your professional goals, your priorities and your life and you could still make the impact you want to make.

And that's what I love.

My business has evolved so much since I discovered coaching.

Since I my kids became in a sports filled chapter that they are in, since I discovered gardening, I mean my business has just evolved.

I used to take ESY contracts and now I don't like.

There's so many cool things that happen as you expand and as you learn and as your life changes.

And so I love this idea that school contracting businesses can evolve right along with you.

And there's no, you know, right way, no wrong way like just you, you can set a business that meets your needs and I just thoroughly enjoy that.

So, so let's talk through, number one, let's talk through the first path and that is making the decision to stay intentionally small.

So not every contractor wants to build a massive staffing business or bring on people underneath them.

And that is okay.

Some of the most successful and satisfied contractors intentionally keep their business small.

Intentionally serve just as an independent contractor and don't take it anywhere else.

And that's totally fine.

So let's talk about who this approach might be beneficial for and then some considerations.

So some perks and some considerations.

If you decide, hey, you know what, this year I'm going to stay small.

So this is great for maintaining a flexible and manageable workload.

Small.

So right now if you have got a lot going on in your life, this is a beautiful setup for you because you really can just focus on providing a service and then being off when you are done, you don't have anyone else that you have to worry about for their income, et cetera.

You also can choose contracts that align with your skills and interests.

So if you are someone that your passion is sensory or AAC or executive functioning and you're really looking for those contracts, staying intentionally small caters to that, right?

Because you don't have to find providers that have that equal skill set and you can sell something that you genuinely love.

You are invested in the certifications and this knowledge that you have.

And staying intentionally small allows you to keep your business really focused in that way.

This approach is also really good for providers that have a very specific school in mind.

So let's say you want to work at your kids charter school.

Staying intentionally small really caters to that because the charter school may only have one opening and it's a district that you love and you have a vested reason for wanting to work there.

So this is great for that.

And then this also just lets you avoid burnout while maintaining a work life balance.

So this approach truly gives you that time away.

When school's out of session, that summer off, you don't have to worry about hiring or recruiting or anything like that.

So you're able to stay intentionally small and just focus on your school.

So some considerations.

One, typically contractors that I coach that stay intentionally small.

One of the downsides is you do have your eggs in one or two baskets.

So if that contract was to fall through, you don't have any backup contracts.

I will say that this usually doesn't worry me all that much.

I've never seen schools that don't need providers.

There tends to be a large shortage at this point in time.

And I've never seen companies not needing providers.

So worst case, we tend to have job security as providers at this point of the podcast.

So I don't let that worry me, but I do give that consideration.

You have your eggs in one basket with your business.

Another consideration to make is at some point your opportunity to earn caps.

Right?

Schools will only pay so much.

I argue that it's better than what they pay employees.

It's still a beautiful income, but at a certain point in time it stops because that income, to generate income, it requires you to provide the service.

So staying intentionally small is definitely the path with the least amount of revenue.

Right, because it requires you and you only have so much time during the day and schools are only open so much during the day.

So those are some considerations with staying intentionally small.

All right, so let's talk about another path.

And this next path is, I like to call it growing deep.

Just Because I, I like to give it a name to remember.

But essentially growing deep means you serve your caseload and you bring on just a few hires, or let's say you have a private practice and your local school calls you and you bring out a few hires to serve that local school.

Right.

So you essentially are going from becoming an independent contractor to becoming a small business.

So if you love stability and strong partnerships, growing deep might be the best fit for you.

Also, if you want to earn some revenue that's quote unquote passive.

Let me give this caveat here.

I try to be careful with passive revenue and that wording because in my experience, never have I felt like working with schools is a passive thing that I could just sit back and it just kind of happens because schools are, they have unique needs and they do require my attention.

So with this, you do have to recruit, you do have to manage, you have to manage a contract, you have to invoice, you have to navigate billing.

But out of all of the approaches, this one tends to really lend itself towards a more passive revenue style where outside of, you know, the recruitment and the admin, once you get up and running, things tend to run pretty smoothly.

Especially if you're able to retain your provider and the school and they work for each other, with each other for several years.

I mean, you become really someone that just does check ins and invoices.

So it can be passive, but it's not completely passive.

So this approach really is contracting with a small number of school districts or contracting with one district and expanding the services within them.

You can offer to staff a few SLPs, or maybe you have an OT there and you're going to add on an SLP, or you have an SLP there and you want to add on otpt.

So you're really focusing on one area and you're leaning into that area and serving them.

Oftentimes you're focusing on a long term relationship with a district that leads to consistent work and financial stability.

And usually the sales, when growing deep, when just adding on a few hires, the sales tends to be less of a pain point than compared to our next option.

Right.

So this model is really good for either private practice owners that want to bring on a few providers or direct contractors that want to serve their schools in a larger capacity.

If you're working with a school that has a series of large agencies in there, it's a really great opportunity to grab a few more contracts and expand your revenue and expand the way you serve that school.

And what I love about Growing deep is you can take on a larger caseload, but you're not the one serving them.

So none of this requires extra therapy time from you, which will help lend itself towards, okay, you're going to meet your financial goals without providing therapy 80 hours a week, so to speak.

So some considerations with this one, if you're like, wow, maybe one, this works beautifully.

If you have a district that you know has a need, if you're in that charter school like we talked about a minute ago, where you know they only needed one provider and you're there, this is a little bit more difficult because you do have to insert yourself in sales.

It's not impossible.

It's still totally possible.

But this is such a beautiful thing.

For those of you who are contracting in a school that you know is using other staffing agencies, that's a chance for you to bring on a few more providers and just focus on recruitment.

So that way you're not focusing on sales and recruitment.

So some considerations with that.

Another consideration with this approach, and I like to be really transparent about this, let's say you need to make $100,000 when you bring on a few providers because they do get a portion of the contract as they should, and you get a portion of the contract as you should for managing it and selling it.

But the portion you get is nowhere near the portion they get.

It is nowhere near the portion that you get by providing the therapy.

Right.

So it's depending on 10, 99 or W2, whatever path you choose, your profit margins can be anywhere from like 40% to 20% of the contract.

So it's just not as much money.

So with this approach, unless you have another revenue stream, like you do private practice, or perhaps your financial needs aren't that great with this approach, you usually also have to be providing therapy as well.

I haven't seen providers that just have a handful of hires, you know, one or two or three.

I haven't seen them be able to completely step away from direct therapy and have their income needs met completely by subcontracting out or hiring out.

If you just have a few providers underneath you, if that makes sense.

So just a consideration to make is, this is awesome for adding on that Disney money or pay back my student loan money, or, you know, just build your business revenue.

But know that it takes a while for having providers underneath you for you to completely step away.

Unless you don't have that great a financial needs and then you can absolutely step away.

Another consideration to make, and this is important for this one and the next one.

And it's something that I make sure to talk about because again, it's a big topic and that is running payroll.

Right.

So paying your providers without going too far into it, because I'm not a financial advisor, I'm not a cpa, I'm not a lawyer.

I'm none of those things.

I am simply just someone who has done this and can advise accordingly with schools.

So let's say you get a school contract in August.

Schools can sometimes be slow to pay.

And if you have my contractor packet or my contractor packet training, actually, I think I talk about this in literally every resource.

If you have any of my resources, you have heard me talk about this or my free resources, I just, I shout this from the rooftop.

Schools can be slow to pay.

We do the best that we can to put up safeguards.

We try to address it in our contract.

We do the best we can.

But often they can be net 30.

And that's not unheard of in my experience.

I have not been able to execute a school paying net 15.

That doesn't mean they're not out there, especially private charter or some schools can do every other week payment.

I haven't perfected it yet, but it is out there.

But Most schools do net 30.

So let me explain why this is important and I'm going a little bit off topic.

Then I'll get back on topic and we'll talk about path three.

So this is relevant to path three, too.

Let's say your provider provides services August through September.

Right?

You bill the school for the services your provider did.

You bill them September 5th for the services they provide in August?

That's the most common setup.

The most common setup is schools are invoiced monthly, often because schools run that invoice by the board for board approval to cut the check.

Now, there are, there are schools that don't use this approach.

And that's amazing and awesome, but I'm just speaking the majority of time.

This is what happens.

So your provider provides services in August, you bill the school September 5th for the services your provider provided in August.

Right.

The school takes it to the board meeting, let's say September 20th, and they cut you a check that comes in the mail October 3rd.

So the problem becomes, in many states, you need to pay your provider within 30 days in order to be legal.

And honestly, I advocate for that.

Providers are not business owners.

They should not have to wait more than 30 days to get paid.

That's.

I mean, if that's, that's the weight that we bear as a business owner, that is our weight.

So the reason I'm bringing this up is let's say you get your check October 3rd, but what happened end of September, you had to pay your provider for the August work.

So all of this to say.

A very wordy way of saying a consideration when you start to hire is you do need to have access to payroll in case a school is slow.

They may not be slow.

Let's say the board cut the check September 20th, you get it September 23rd, woo hoo.

No problem.

You have enough for payroll.

You don't need to pursue other methods.

But that doesn't always happen and I would rather you be safe than sorry.

So a consideration when you start to hire is I highly recommend having access to liquid to run payroll.

And you can chat with a financial advisor or bank or whatever with this.

It can be liquid if you have a savings, it can be a line of credit, it can be whatever your local bank offers, but just something should a school be latent payment.

You want to be able to pay your provider for the work they provided.

So a consideration with this path and the next path we're going to talk about is you do have to have the ability to run payroll even if schools are late to pay.

So access to liquid is a consideration.

Doesn't have to be a ton.

I say two months payroll.

Your financial advisor, your cpa, they can advise much better than I can on this topic.

But it is important that we keep that as a consideration.

So growing deep, amazing.

If you want some extra money on the side, it pairs so beautifully.

If you're doing direct therapy and you're getting that salary already, I mean it's just extra money at that point in time.

And who doesn't love extra money?

And you serve your community even more without adding to your therapy calendar.

So you serve your community, you ensure students have access to services, but.

But you're not running yourself ragged trying to get those students served.

So absolutely beautiful.

I love Path 2.

It has such a special place in my heart.

Bring it on.

A handful of providers, you have a beautiful small business that's serving a local community.

I love it.

All right, path number three.

And this is our scaling path.

So path number three is grow wide.

And I love this path.

This is the path that I work with a lot in my skill program.

And this is for those who have an entrepreneurial drive.

And growing wide means scaling your business into an agency, dare I say it, a good agency.

So this is the path and I argue and you know, feel free to fact check me.

I argue that this is one of the fastest ways to get to seven figures as a provider.

Seven figures is hard to obtain.

School contracting allows you to get there.

I mean if we do our Math, that's what 10, 10 FTE, 10 full time equivalents.

So that's not impossible.

Many people do it.

I've worked with companies that do it.

This is beautiful for those of you who want to become an agency, a provider run agency and serve schools in a beautiful way while making significant revenue.

So this means expanding into multiple disciplines.

So SLP ot and you honestly don't have to do that to, to reach a scale size agencies.

You just, you can serve multiple territories with one or two disciplines.

I actually love just doing one discipline, that's fine because you, you know that discipline really well and you can really develop some awesome services and provide a big impact.

So this allows you to streamline and scale your recruitment, your sales process because you do have a good amount of liquid coming in.

So you can streamline and become really a well oiled machine in the school staffing space.

This allows you to not only hire and manage other therapists, but you can bring on directors.

This path is essentially the path to becoming a CEO and to completely stepping away from therapy and just managing a team of providers and one day managing a director who manages a team of providers.

This is awesome.

If you want to expand to multiple states or if you have a state where that uses RFPS and you can get into a school and serve that school in a really large capacity.

Growing wide is, it's, it's a beautiful thing and it does wonderful things for revenue.

And also it allows provider run staffing agencies to step in where we have had investor run staffing agencies kind of calling the shots.

This allows provider run agencies to step in and to make a big impact.

So this model is perfect for contractors who want to make a large impact in education while providing therapists a great place to work.

It does require planning and leadership and financial management.

So if this is your end goal, I don't recommend being here year two.

Right?

This takes, you gotta, you gotta step, you gotta take steps to this one.

Some considerations to make with this one.

This is definitely a route where you get to be a CEO.

You can step away from therapy if that's your desire, but you get to be a CEO and that comes, that is not, that is not stress free.

You have multiple recruitment steps you need to take.

You are usually stepping into the world of large sales.

You have to have a Consistent sales funnel if you want to scale, because eventually just doing word of mouth or just doing this, it's going to run run dry.

And if you want to get larger, you have to have multiple, multiple sales streams.

So this is cold calls and conferences and doing multiple things to ensure that you constantly have new districts coming in.

Not impossible.

It's beautiful, it's doable.

But that's something to consider that you do have to have a sales approach if you want to scale because eventually just relying on the districts you know will run dry if you want to get to a large capacity.

And then with this approach, the thing that I mentioned a minute ago is even more of the topic.

You do have to always have liquid to rent payroll and payroll is really large when you are serving 10.0 FTE.

So that's just an important thing to know is because of the mismatch that we sometimes have with school payments versus when we have to pay, that that access to liquid is very important with this path as well.

That's when you also should start investing, right?

Investing in technology to make sales easier, investing in technology for hr, investing in technology for, you know, recruitment.

Like this is when you are making a good amount, but you are investing and you are essentially thinking like a CEO, a coo.

You are doing those things to create this scalable business.

I love this.

I would love for the biggest, most successful agencies that we see at these conferences.

I would love for them to be provider founded.

I think that that's a beautiful thing.

So I love growing wide.

I love the idea of providers.

I don't know, I mean, I'm talking money a lot and I hope that that's okay and you're comfortable with that.

But I love the idea of providers becoming millionaires.

I just, I'm here for it.

I am here for it.

It takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of contracts, but it is nowhere near impossible.

So if you are someone that wants to take that path, I mean, it's there for you and I am excited for you.

So final thoughts.

All right.

We got everything from staying intentionally small to like taking over the agency space.

But I'm so inspired and I'm excited to see what you do with that.

Because the big thing is, you know, no matter which path you take, success in school, contracting is all about aligning your business and your strengths and your goals with a district that needs that.

That's success.

It's not size, it's not revenue, it's not how many providers you have under you.

It is did you have these specialties, this experience, these goals, and did you find a school that needed that or 30 schools that needed that?

I mean, there's no right or wrong here.

And the great news, the great news is so important.

School contracts are annual, the majority of them.

There are some three years.

And that's awesome too.

But you can start small and test the waters.

I actually recommend that.

I recommend, especially if you have hiring on the radar, bring out a few providers, learn, evolve.

There's a reason why I created the scale program because you can start small, test the waters, make mistakes.

You're going to not mistakes, learning experiences.

You're going to learn things and you're going to course correct.

So I love the idea.

Stay intentionally small this year, bring on a higher next year, bring on a few more hires the year after that scale in a way that works for you.

Or don't bring on a school contract this year and do that for 30 years.

That's beautiful and I'm happy for you.

So choose a pace that works for you.

There's no right or wrong.

You are doing a beautiful thing and you're serving a beautiful mission and you are serving the community in a way that it needs to be served.

If you need my guidance on any of this, check out my resources on my website.

I have resources to actually align with every stage.

The contractor.

So if you're wondering like what inspired my packets a little, just a little insider, look here.

The contractor packet was designed for those who want to stay intentionally small or start out.

The staffing packet was designed for those that want to grow deep and bring on a few hires and stay there or not.

And then scale the scale coaching program.

That's the intensive coaching program.

That's 12 weeks and a lot of working with me.

That is for those that want to grow wide.

So I actually designed my resources with these three paths in mind.

And yeah, it makes me really happy to hear what path everyone chose.

So if you're listening to this episode, find me on Instagram, the therapists support network and let me know as you're listening.

Like, wow, Elise, I really think I want option number two.

Or you know what, intentionally small for life.

Let me know because the more that you say it out loud, the more you're committing yourself to one of these paths and you're getting in motion.

Thank you so much for tuning in today.

Be sure to subscribe, be sure to message me your thoughts and I'll catch you next time.

That's a wrap on this episode of beyond the Big Agencies.

Remember, success isn't just met for the big staffing agencies.

It's meant for providers like you who show up, take action and build something meaningful.

So go get em.

And if you're ready for more support strategies and a community that gets it, join us inside the Therapist Support Network.

You don't have to do this alone.

Head to www.thetherapistsupportnetwork.com to connect, learn and grow with other SLPs, OTs, PTs, and related service providers.

Building their own path.

Until next time, keep pushing forward.