The unexpected costs of running a private practiceI know nobody likes talking about money. I don't like talking about money. But I am motivated to make an episode about money today, because I see so many people being completely blindsided by the costs of running a private practice, and setting their fees badly at the beginning of their private work, because they just don't anticipate some of the stuff that they're going to end up spending money on. This is a mistake that I made, and it's only from learning the very hard way, by not making enough money in my practice to even pay for my childcare, that I came to this realisation, and I don't want anybody else getting started in private practice now to be going through that. So I thought I would run through some of the unexpected costs of running a private practice, so that you can make an empowered pricing decision from the beginning. 
Supervision The first unexpected cost is supervision. Now, you probably know that you need supervision, and you probably have already factored that into your equation, but what you might not realise is that you might need a lot more than you think you do when you're starting out in private practice, because you might feel a little bit less confident than you do when you're surrounded by a team in an NHS setting. You also might find that you want specialist supervision on particular topics. I often talk in private practice about how beneficial it can be to have more than one supervisor. For a long time I had a supervisor who is a specialist in trauma, because I was doing a lot of trauma therapy, and I also had a supervisor who is a specialist in online therapy, because online therapy was quite a new thing for me, but also a new thing in general when I started it, and I felt like I needed somebody who had expertise in dealing with risk issues in particular, in the online context. So I actually ended up paying for two lots of supervision every month, though when I started out in practice I thought if I look at the hours I'm doing versus what I was doing in the NHS, probably once a month is enough. Well, it wasn't, so my supervision hours were always double what I had initially thought they were going to be.
CPD The other thing that I hadn't really considered when I set out in private practice was how much I would want to spend on CPD. Again, you might have already thought about this, maybe wanting to engage more in continuing professional development is a reason that you left the NHS or a reason that you're deciding to strike out in private practice. So it may be that this has been at the top of your mind, but for me, I hadn't really considered how much CPD I would want to do in order to feel like I was serving my clients to the best of my ability. We don't actually tend to do that much of it in the NHS, or I didn't; there wasn't as much opportunity for it. But when I got out into the private space, I became aware of all of these amazing courses that I could do, and while I would say that you need to watch your imposter syndrome sometimes, it may be that your imposter syndrome is telling you you need to do course after course after course, when in reality you'd be fine just reading a book and using your existing knowledge and supervision, there actually are times when it's really beneficial to your private practice to get an extra accreditation under your belt, or to spend a bit of time on some additional workshops that are going to give you that confidence that you need to push forward with your marketing. So making sure that you've got a healthy budget in your mind for CPD is really important from the beginning, in my opinion. 
InsuranceObviously insurance costs money, and you need to think from the beginning about what that premium is likely to be for you, make some calls and get a realistic quote. In my experience it's been going up year on year, and also because we're working in different ways, we might need to get more