Free consultations? Should you offer them in your psychology/therapy practiceWelcome to this week's episode of the Business of Psychology podcast. This week, I'm considering one of the questions that I get asked most frequently from my students in Psychology Business School, and that is should we be offering free consultations for therapy work? Now, as you might expect from me, if you've been listening to this for a little while, I don't really think that there is a clear cut answer and there's certainly not a one size fits all answer. If you'd asked me this a couple of years ago, I would have advised you against doing free consultations in your practice. The reason for that is that I did not do these very well. When I had a really busy clinic, I was spending hours every week offering free consultations to people who then ghosted me, and I blamed the free consultation model because when I stopped doing those free consultations, those problems went away, I started to get much better quality referrals, clients who came for their first session stuck around, and I didn't get ghosted very often. Initially, I thought that was because free consultations led to client ghostings, mainly because of some of the stuff we talked about in last week's episode around ghosting and the beliefs that clients can sometimes hold about the value of our time. But we'll talk about that a bit later in the episode, because what I have come to realise is, it wasn't the free consultation that was the problem, it was the way that I did them, and specifically the lack of boundaries that I had around them. I do think they can be very valuable if you do them correctly and for the right reasons, in the right way. So today I want to talk a little bit about the advantages of free consultations, the disadvantages of free consultations, and some factors I think you need to bear in mind if you're going to offer them and do them well, and that is based from my own experience, but also from things I've learned from my students in Psychology Business School. So a big thank you to all my students who have talked about this many times in Office Hour; I am bringing a lot of your expertise to this episode and I hope it's going to help a lot of people. 
The advantages: why you would want to offer a free consultationIt's a really great opportunity to assess the goodness of fit for you and for the client. We're not the right therapist for everybody, are we? You could be amazing for the right person and rubbish for somebody else. For example, there's a lot of humour in my therapy sessions, I just can't get that bit of my personality out of therapy and frankly I wouldn't want to. But there are some clients who don't share that and that's not what they're looking for in a therapist. They will know that quite quickly in a free consultation with me because it tends to come out quite quickly in a free consultation. So it's a great idea for people to have that conversation with you so that you can show how you like to work, and they can decide whether that is a good fit for them, and equally, we often get that feeling don't we, that we're not the right fit for somebody. Maybe they're looking for a type of therapy that we don't offer, maybe you know that there is a model that would suit them better, and you've got a colleague that you could refer them on to. So assessing for goodness of fit is a great advantage to doing a free consultation.
You can use it to iron out any accessibility issues. When I did offer free consultations, I didn't do it as a phone call, because I don't offer phone therapy, so I don't really think it's that useful to do it on the phone. I used to get people to come in to my physical therapy room because I used to work in person, or I used to get people to log on to zoom and have an online session with me if that's what they wanted, so that way we could work out if we have technical problems, or do you find it difficult to park near my room? Iron all...