Opening a psychology practice is one of the preferred career paths for many psychologists oriented towards mental health intervention or education. Those who choose to offer their services independently often do so in order not to be subject to the limitations of working in a highly hierarchical structure where there is little control over decisions.

However, when going freelance, one must also know how to manage other pressures, especially those related to the initial scarcity of resources, on the one hand, and to the competitiveness of the market, on the other.

In the following lines we will see some basic ideas to know how to open a psychology consultation in the best possible way .

How to open a psychology consultation, step by step

We must be clear that any project that involves starting a business will require us time, effort and a minimum amount of money. However, the risks and costs of starting your own business are less if you have some basic ideas about what to do, information that allows us to straighten out the situation to avoid the extra problems that can arise if we do not know very well what the steps are.

In short, knowing how to open a psychology practice does not mean opening it and starting to make money , but losing as little as possible along the way and doing everything in our power not to generate unwanted situations with capital, with the law or with clients.

Furthermore, we must be clear that however well we do so, whether the project prospers or not depends a great deal on factors that we cannot control directly, such as the economic and social ups and downs to which any country is subject. Fortunately it is not usual that these occur abruptly, so if we consolidate the consultation of psychology in an appropriate time and do not make the deficit situation becomes chronic, be attentive to what happens in the present before making the first movements will eliminate much of these risks.

1. Define your project

When it comes to entrepreneurship in psychology, you have to follow the same fundamental rules that should underpin any entrepreneurial project, and one of them is to have the idea first and make the first moves later. This must be so, among other things, because in a moment of vulnerability such as the first stage of the creation of a business, it is very likely that we cannot afford to completely change the business model a few weeks or months after having started, when we are still in deficit or have only recently crossed the line of profitability .

The first thing to do is therefore a market investigation, however modest. Studying the competition is a must, and you should keep in mind that if your services include online therapy, it is not limited to the rest of the psychology practices in your neighborhood.

With this information, raises the different types of services you can offer and the way in which you would market them , evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of each one. In the case of psychological intervention, try to define as specifically as possible what type of services you will emphasise in each of these options to choose from.

In this way, it is easier for you to choose the right niche in the market, being aware of whether there is a lot or little competition, a lot or little potential demand, etc. For example, if your area has a large aging population and there is already a center that specializes in child therapy and the like, the intervention in childhood and adolescence will probably not be the most important path, so it would be better to either focus the work on another service, or change the location where you want to work.

2. Define your work philosophy and business plan

Once the previous stage has been overcome, the next step when opening a psychology practice is to go into the concrete and leave established in a more systematic and predefined way how you are going to work and on which ideas and values you are going to base yourself . For example: are you going to rely on collaborations with other professionals, or will you rely almost exclusively on your work and experience? do you want to offer a very specialized service, or one in which you give an image of versatility? will your communication style be very neutral and institutional, or will you focus on creating a very personal brand image that blends to some extent with your way of being in spontaneous conversations?

The disadvantage of creating a business plan is that, since every professionalization initiative is different, there is no rigid and predefined scheme to keep clear that with this information no ambiguities or unforeseen situations will appear in the future. However, you can rely on the idea that you must develop three fundamental aspects about your project:

Your objectives

It is what is usually known as the combination of vision and mission . In this section, it is necessary to specify what needs are going to be covered by the psychology consultation, and with what kind of strategies.

Your means

Here you can specify how much resources will be available during the first stage of project development.

Your work philosophy

This section includes the most abstract ideas about the properties that the company will have. It is necessary to explain this in advance so that can have certain margins defined that, if they are passed on, indicate that we are moving away from the initial approaches that allowed us to shape the project and make it form a coherent unit.

3. Continue to define your target

The target audience is the “target” audience that you must impact with your strategies to make the initiative move forward and prosper. It is very important to have a clear profile, since having in mind one or another type of person can lead to enormous variations in the success of your communication and work policies. Economic, social and psychological differences show why different people behave in a characteristic way.

For example, if the people you want to reach are defined by having relatively few resources and tend not to have gone through university training, it doesn’t make sense to use a communicative style full of technicalities. If they are characterized by being older or middle-aged, it is probably not a good idea to bet on having a lot of presence in social networks with a very young user base, such as Instagram.

4. Set your prices

With the information that has already been specified so far, you can now set your rates . It is important that you take time to do this, because not paying much attention to it can lead to constantly changing rates, and that is not good from a marketing point of view; it generates an image of unpredictability and instability that feeds mistrust.

5. Specify your communicative tone

Beyond choosing the communication channels through which you are going to make your psychology consultation known, it is important to specify in a definitive way what the tone of your communication will be, both textually and visually. It is important that you have a graphic style manual, as simple as it may be, in which the usual shapes and colours that you are going to use appear, both on your website and in your practice, as well as in other marketing elements such as business cards. Not keeping a certain consistency in this aspect gives an image of unprofessionalism.

6. Go to a legal advisor

At least in Spain, psychology is a sector that suffers from a certain amount of deregulation, so it is easy to find doubts and ambiguities. That is why it is worth going through legal advice. A small investment that will save us problems in the future.