Private Practice Elevation with Daniel Fava

Your website launched a few months ago. It looked great, it went live, and you felt good about it. Then something started to feel off. Pages load a little slower. A contact form stopped sending. An email showed up about an "update," and you have no idea what it means or whether clicking it will break something. A website keeps needing work after launch, and nearly all of that work happens where yo...

In this episode of the Private Practice Elevation Podcast, you'll learn how an independent practice can hold its own against the venture-funded therapy platforms crowding the top of Google. Many therapists feel squeezed right now.  Headway just announced a $9.99 fee on every session with a new client it sends you. The big platforms have the budgets, the content teams, and the search rankings.  And...

Someone is looking for a therapist tonight, and they have your website open next to 3 or 4 others. They are scanning fast, a few seconds per site, and every one of those sites reads about the same. Warm, professional, safe space, judgment free, here to help you heal. The site that gets the call is the one that named what this person is dealing with, in words that sounded like their own. This episo...

Growing a solo counselling practice into a 19-person team sounds like it takes a master plan. Barbara Egan didn't have one. She built Alive Counselling in Kelowna, BC through a cold call, conversations at the hockey rink, and a lot of trial and error. In this episode she walks Daniel through the whole thing: from a career-ending hockey injury at Ohio State, to sole proprietor juggling nap times an...

If you're deciding whether to build your own therapy website or pay someone to do it, this episode gives you a clear way to make the call based on where your practice is right now. The hard part is that both paths can go wrong. You can lose a month of weekends to a DIY site that still doesn't bring in clients. Or you can hire on price alone and end up redoing the whole thing a year later. You migh...

Your client decides whether they feel safe in your office before they say a word. The room does that work. Most therapists put real thought into their clinical skills, but what about the space a client walks into?  Harsh lighting, a stiff waiting room, a cold and sterile feel. When a client shows up nervous and the space adds to it, you spend the first session rebuilding trust you didn't need to l...

If you're planning a new website this year, the most important work happens before anyone starts designing.  Get that part right and you build the site once, instead of paying to redo it in 18 months. Many therapists treat a website like a one-time purchase. You pay for it, it launches, you move on.  Then a year and a half later you're back where you started, writing another check for another site...

Is your website actually bringing in clients, or are you just guessing? Most practice owners track their website traffic, watch the number climb, and assume things are working. Then the schedule stays quiet. Traffic is only the first step. Where most practices lose clients is everything that happens after someone reaches out. Whitney Owens tracks all of it. She runs Water's Edge Counseling, a priv...

68% of Google searches now end without a single click. When someone searches for a therapist, most of the time they never reach a website at all. That's a problem if your practice depends on being found online. You can have a beautiful, well-written site and still get skipped, because people are getting their answers before they ever click. The way people search for a therapist has changed fast. A...

Your practice is making money. Your bank account doesn't seem to know it. If that sounds familiar, this one's for you. A lot of practice owners hit a point where the numbers say "profitable" but the account always feels empty, and they can't figure out why. My guest is Emily Bowie, a CPA and Cash Flow Strategist with more than 15 years of experience, including her time as an audit manager in Big F...

Welcome back to On The Trail, where we cover the common questions therapists and private practice owners have about websites, SEO, and online marketing as they grow their practices. A lot of therapy websites have the same gap. No real logo. Just the practice name typed in a nice font, sitting up in the corner. It feels like a small detail. It carries more weight than that. In this episode, we look...

You can build a group practice with a full team and still feel like nothing runs without you. That's the trap this episode is about. Daniel opens by sharing something that came up on a recent family vacation: his wife, who leads a team of 5 clinicians, often had to field texts and questions while trying to enjoy family time. It's a familiar pattern for a lot of practice owners, and Brittany Schank...

If you've been wondering where to actually start with AI in your practice, this episode is for you. Documentation, insurance, intake, session prep. For every 45 to 50 minutes of therapy, a clinician spends about 90 minutes total, and most of that is admin that eats into your evenings and weekends. Daniel talks with Ian Knox, Chief Product Officer at SimplePractice, about the 4 places AI saves ther...

You launch a new website. It looks great. Your service pages are dialed in. You move on to running your practice. Then 6 months later, you realize you're not getting inquiries. What happened? A lot of practice owners assume their website will just work once it's live. And the truth is, some parts of your website can absolutely be set up once and left alone. But other parts? They need consistent at...

What if the heaviest part of private practice isn't the clinical work, but everything around it? For most therapists, burnout isn't about the sessions. It's the admin, the paperwork, the after-hours notes. You're working all the time and something feels off, but you don't have space to figure out why. Damien Adler makes the case that a draining practice is usually a design problem, not an inevitab...

AI tools are everywhere right now. And if you've spent any time on Instagram lately, you already know — there's a new one in your feed every single day. It's exciting. It's also a little exhausting. As a practice owner, you're already juggling a full caseload, managing your team, and trying to keep up with your marketing. The last thing you need is another shiny tool that takes weeks to figure out...

If AI feels overwhelming, ethically murky, or like one more thing you don't have time to figure out, well, you're not alone. Most therapists we talk to land somewhere between "nervous" and "fully avoiding it." But AI isn't going away. And the therapists who learn to use it well are going to have a real advantage when it comes to marketing their practices. In this episode, Daniel sits down with Dr....

Most private practice owners ask the SEO vs. Google Ads question like it's a one-or-the-other decision. Pick one, commit, go. But that's the wrong question. In this episode of On The Trail, Daniel breaks down when Google Ads actually make sense, the one quiet mistake that drains ad budgets, and why the smartest practice owners run both, and shift the balance over time. If you've been wondering whe...

What if the path to growing your therapy practice has nothing to do with adding more clients to your caseload? If you've ever come home from work so drained that all you can do is crawl into bed, this episode is for you. Today's guest, Jenny Melrose, helps therapists stop trading time for money by turning the psychoeducation they're already teaching in session into digital products and services th...

If you've been hearing about SEO and wondering whether it can turn your slow season around, this episode is for you. A lot of practice owners are feeling the pinch right now — fewer inquiries, quieter schedules, more pressure to keep clinicians busy. When things get quiet, SEO starts to look like the fix. But here's the honest truth: if you need clients this month, SEO probably isn't going to save...

Grad school taught you how to be a great therapist. But running a business? That's a whole different skill set — and it starts with mindset. In this episode, Daniel sits down with Dr. Charmain Jackman, award-winning psychologist, TEDx speaker, founder of InnoPsych, and author of The Black Therapist's Guide to Private Practice and Entrepreneurship . They unpack the mindset shifts that move therapis...

Most therapists treat their FAQ page like a parking lot for leftover content.  That's a mistake, and it's quietly costing you traffic, time, and clients. In this episode of On The Trail, the focus is on why the FAQ page might be one of the most underrated pages on your private practice website, and how to make it work harder for you. People search Google in questions .  They want to know if you ta...

Most practice owners run their business on instinct. But when you understand the right numbers—like retention, utilization, and revenue per session—you stop guessing and start growing with intention. In this episode, Daniel sits down with Madeline Larsen, co-founder of PracticeVital, to talk about the KPIs every therapy practice should be tracking (but usually isn't). Madeline and her team help hu...

Getting traffic to your website is only half the battle. Many therapists invest time and money into SEO, directories, or ads, but still struggle to turn website visitors into actual inquiries.  The problem may not be traffic. It might actually be conversion. In this episode of On The Trail , Daniel Fava shares 5 simple ways to improve your website so more visitors become therapy clients.  He expla...

AI is showing up everywhere — but should it have a place inside your therapy practice? In this episode, Daniel sits down with Maria Szandrach, co-founder of Mentalyc, to talk about how AI can actually help clinicians without replacing the human connection that makes therapy work. If you've been curious (or cautious) about AI, this conversation will help you sort out what's genuinely useful, what's...