Virtual Assistants Can Save Your Sanity And Make You Money, Too

Licensed Professional Counselor Aaron Potratz  and I started a conversation back channel after he picked up on my reference in a blog post to working with a Virtual Assistant.  He, too, works with a Virtual Assistant and was kind enough to offer writing a guest post talking about some of the benefits.

  (If you are interested in writing a guest post, check out the guidelines here.)

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 A Guest Post by Aaron Potratz, LPC

Owning a private practice is a lot of work. It often puts therapists in roles we may not feel confident in or have much experience with. We go to school and get a degree that prepares us for the clinical aspect of our work, but most graduate programs do not offer classes that address the business side. I’ve heard this from nearly all of my colleagues, and it’s an issue I’ve wrestled with on nearly a weekly basis in my own practice.

What’s a Virtual Assistant (VA)?

Fear not, fellow counselors! There are options out there to allow us to focus our time and energy on what we do best, leaving that other work for someone else to do. What I’m talking about is the Virtual Assistant (VA), also called a Billing Specialist, Secretary, or Administrative Assistant. I’m going to use the term Virtual Assistant, as the title implies duties performed remotely, a feature that may appeal to many private practices (as compared with an in-office assistant).

How a VA can Help

First of all, a VA is someone who can support your business by doing time-consuming or laborious tasks that you don’t want to and/or have time to do. There are two big advantages here:

1. The amount you would pay a VA is much less than what it would cost you to do the same tasks (assuming you pay yourself whatever your hourly rate is for therapy); and
2. Having someone else do these tasks frees up your time so you can spend it doing other valuable things, such as seeing more clients!

Do the Math

Think about it this way: doing these tasks for 2 hours per week may amount to a loss of 2 potential client contact hours and therefore a loss of income (unless you pay yourself for these, in which case you’ve just overpaid for those duties!). However, if you pay a VA $15-$25 per hour to complete them, you could be meeting with 2 clients and only paying $30-$50 to get them done. If your hourly rate is $100, then you’ve just earned $150-$170 while your administrative tasks were being completed!

Outsource Your Weak Suits

Secondly, there’s a significant mental or emotional value attached. Not only does a VA allow you to increase your income potential, but they can free you from the stress and headache of having to do tasks you may not enjoy doing – or worse, you may not even be very good at them! For example, let’s say that you’re a less than organized person but you realize that good bookkeeping is an important part of business. Outsourcing your billing duties can give you the peace of mind knowing you’re paying someone else to be on top of those, making sure everything is in order, and who will keep you up-to-date on client accounts. Of course, you still have your own responsibilities with client interactions but your VA is doing all the tedious work!

Don’t Forget Security

Finally, it’s important to consider the practical limitations of a VA, including confidentiality. If a VA works remotely, how are we supposed to work together without compromising the security of protected client information? If you’re asking this you’re already on the right track. There are many tools out there that secure client information and allow you to share it with staff members. The one I use is Office Ally (Practice Mate), an electronic clearinghouse that processes insurance claims and doubles as a record-keeper for accounting purposes. The VA I use can access that database, which is HIPAA-compliant, and manage information remotely. I have a client ID system that I also use, which is attached to every client, so when I have a question about a particular account I can email my VA referencing that ID (which gives away no personal information about the client) so she can look it up and easily find it. This way we can communicate virtually about accounts without any identifying information being transmitted electronically.

No Regrets and Expectations

I have utilized a VA for over a year and never regretted it. Whenever a task comes up that I don’t want to do, I can pass it along to her to complete. It has saved me so much time and I no longer have to stress about those parts of my job that I’m not terribly good at (pretty much anything related to math!), which has enabled me to focus all my efforts on doing high quality clinical work. One final word of caution: make sure you communicate clearly and specifically with your VA so you both understand what you expect and when.

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Aaron Potratz is a Licensed Professional Counselor and has been in private practice for 6 years in Hillsboro, Oregon. He enjoys looking for ways to make therapy current and streamlined through the use of various technologies. He is self-employed as the sole proprietor of his business, and also functions as a consultant for other therapists in their practices.