In this episode of the Traveling Therapist Podcast, I sit down with Uriah Guilford, a therapist and entrepreneur, to discuss how he successfully manages a thriving therapy business while enjoying extensive travel. Uriah shares his journey from the early days of struggling to take vacations as a solo practitioner to creating multiple streams of income that allow him the freedom to travel the world.
Uriah and I dive into essential strategies like building a team, creating systems, and leveraging passive income to ensure business continuity even while on the road. Uriah also shares a fun anecdote about making money while enjoying Disneyland, highlighting the joys of truly automated income. This episode is packed with actionable tips for any therapist looking to achieve financial and time freedom while exploring the world.
Key Points:
About Uriah Guilford:
Uriah Guilford is a licensed marriage and family therapist, a group practice owner and the creator of Productive Therapist, a virtual assistant company that serves therapists in private practice. He is a technology nerd, a minimalist travel packer, a rock drummer and business development enthusiast.
Websites: https://productivetherapist.com/ & https://www.intunefamily.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/productivetherap
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/productivetherapist/?hl=en
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Instagram: @thetravelingtherapist_kym
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https://kymtolson.kartra.com/page/ai
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TRANSCRIPT:
00:00
Welcome everybody to another episode of the traveling therapist podcast. Really excited today to have Uriah Guilford on with me. Uriah, I can't wait to talk about everything you do, but I just want to say I'm surprised we've never done this before. We've known each other for quite some time. We partner on some things, and he's an avid traveler therapist. Is a therapist all that good stuff. So Uriah, I always like to start out with, how did you go being a typical therapist to a traveling therapist? Ooh, good question. Well, so I've been a traveling therapist since 2018, properly. Okay, probably before that. Be honest with you, back in the day, when it was like the early days of my solo private practice, I struggled to take vacations. Everybody in that position, when I didn't see clients, I didn't make any money, and I was never super good at saving enough money to feel like, Oh, I've got a cushion to go ahead and take a week off or take a take some time off. So not so great. Honestly, it took me until I started to practice and felt like I had more money coming in, and I had more going on in my business to take proper vacations, and when I say proper more than a week. So it was around 2018 when I took my first sort of extended travel. Didn't work, didn't see clients, and still made all the money that I needed to support myself and my family. Yeah, I think that would probably the biggest change for me. Yeah, love that. So let's talk about just even your most recent trip. Because you took a recent trip, I was like, oh my god, bucket list, dream trip. I saw you posting that on social. And then you also posted this amazing blog post that you wrote about how to do what you did. Let's talk about the trip and the blog post and all that good stuff. Yeah, definitely So, and I'll share the link with the listeners, but the post is called How to travel the world while your business thrives. And to be honest with you, I was just always so thrilled when this works, even now after all these years, I'm like, Oh, I just left for three weeks and my income didn't go down. This is amazing. I'm always like, extra excited about it. Oh yeah, we started doing some extended travel, mostly to Europe, back in 2018 and we've gone on several trips, and we have two daughters who have now older teens. And then about two months ago, we did our most recent trip, which was just under three weeks. And part of that was in London, England, and then the majority of it was in Sicily, which was it really was amazing. And I've never been. This was my fourth time to Italy, but I've never been. We've never been to Sicily. And my great grandfather is from a part of Sicily. So I was like, you probably go there and check it out. And it was really cool. That is amazing. Oh my gosh. And I know you and you're always traveling to conferences and stuff. I don't know, you know, I feel like you probably work that in, you know, you get to see some cool places and go to these conferences and all that. I love it. I love how you do that, like mixture of work and play and all that stuff, too. So let's talk about the blog post. I know you had some really good points in there. Let's share it with the readers. Of course, we'll put the link down below. So yeah, read the whole thing. Yeah, for sure. So when I was thinking about this, and as I think about this, I think everyone, no matter who you are, want these two main things from your business, whether you're a therapist with a private practice, or any other small business owner, you want financial freedom and you want time freedom, because it's not enough to just make the money you need to support yourself and your family. But if you're working all the time and you can't ever take a break like that's not success for most people, right? So you want both those things, and I think most of us work really hard to get the first one first, to make enough money. And then the trap that I find, and that I found myself in, is, look, I've built this business where I'm extremely busy and I'm doing all of the things in the business, and I can't go anywhere. Yeah, right, like I was mentioning before. So then I think time freedom becomes the next sort of goal for most folks. And I kind of wrote down four things that have helped me have the most time freedom, as well as financial freedom. And these, some of these apply more effectively to businesses that are not just a solopreneur, right? Because that's there. There are definitely ways to pull this off. And I think your podcast and everything that you share is a great example of that, right, for sure. So the first one that I came up with, and this took me a long time to be honest, is create a product or service that's not dependent only on you. Yes, that's yes. Let's talk about that might be the most important one, right? Because if it's just you providing therapy, back in the day, was in an office, right? Years ago. I don't know when was the first time you did a teletherapy session? Do you remember? Oh my gosh, yeah. I took amber light a step by step, course. And then I did, like, maybe two from home. And I'm like, I'm done. What year was that 18? Yeah, it was 18. Okay, I remember doing a little behind some Skype sessions. That'll date me a little bit some teletherapy over Skype, going like this. Okay, am I allowed to do
04:48
this? I know, seriously. Yeah, possible now. So the solo practice, it does make sense to travel, be a traveling therapist, and work your clients around that and have fun. But if possible, a lot of so.
05:00
Therapists are doing this, creating other streams of income, creating courses, or maybe some speaking, or maybe some workshops or webinars, etc, but you have to have something that you can sell to folks that helps them solve a problem while you're not directly showing up. That's the gist of that one. And before we hit record, we were talking about just anyway, right? I swim in the ocean, I come back, I look at my phone, you know, my emails, and I've got sale. It's like all this, not totally passive, but at this point, a lot of it's passive, you know, just coming in, joining my memberships and and to me, that is the definition of success. Like you're talking about that time, freedom, money coming in, not even having to do anything, it's amazing when you can get to that point, like you're saying, create something solves a problem that people want, and it sells itself in a lot of cases, right? It's wonderful and a little bit addicting. Yeah, I used to think my goal was to make money while I sleep, right? So, like, I wake up in the morning, like you said, check your phone. Oh, look, we've I've got made some money while I was sleeping, but now I've accomplished my newest goal, which is to make money while riding rides at Disneyland.
06:01
Tell us more. Yeah. And that happened, my oldest turned 18, graduated high school, and so we she wanted to go to Disney, Disneyland with a friend, and so we took both our kids and with their friends. And actually, every day we were in the parks, I happened to be checking my phone. Probably shouldn't have been, but I was, yeah, and there was a lot of sales coming in. I was like, what is happening? Like, I'm making a lot of money while I'm riding rides at Disneyland. And it was like I told you earlier, an affiliate partnership with someone who had sent out an email talking about our products and programs, and then they were selling. So I was like, This is great. I love this. That's amazing. Oh yeah, I love it too. And we could probably do like, a series on multiple income streams and how to create them, yet even Uriah and I park together because he has a specific audience. I have a specific audience, and we partnered together. We made really cool product, and that continues to sell. To this day, I'll get an email and it's like, watercourse sold, and it's just cool to be able to partner with people and have it come in like it is, yeah, check it out. A billing system, billing assistant, pro.com, yeah, train your biller. It's fantastic. I think it's a really good it's a really good course, yeah, I get feedback about that all the time. People love it. And just basically your admin, you can teach them how to bill for your business and go right. Give them the course. They go through it, and they're a billing Pro from zero to zero. So
07:24
that's number one, create a product or service that's not dependent only on you. And obviously another example of that is having a group practice, like I've done. That's one way to do that. And we can circle back and have a round two on that topic. Number two is to build a team and empower them. So even if it's just you and you made a course, let's say you built a course, or you wrote a book. I'm probably going to need some help from a team, whether that's a bookkeeper, a CPA, those kind of things, or maybe a virtual assistant that helps you promote that course to create social media content. Fill in the blank. You need somebody else to assist you, to just help that thing get out to more people. So building a team is huge. And I think, and my book, the productive practice, is all about this, that delegating, building a team and delegating is like the biggest lever for growth and success. And it can be you and a couple freelancers, or it can be you and a whole team of w2 and therapists, or whatever you want that to be. So that's key, and that's been huge for me. Yeah, absolutely, that's been the hardest part for me, is learning how to I don't know how to manage people, or that's been really quite the learning process for me, like hiring and how do I train them, and they organized and efficient. And a lot of times, I realized that if there's any problem or bump in the business, it's probably because I haven't put a good system in place for them to learn better, or to learn how to do it correctly, absolutely, you know, which has been a huge thing for me to learn in my life, just in general, yeah, it's an ongoing it's ongoing for me too. Like, you never cross the finish line and you're like, oh, look, I won a business. It's done.
08:57
I guess that's the day you retire officially, but you just nicely teed up the next point. So after you build a team and empower them, and when I say empower them, you have to let them do what you've asked them to do. Step so then the next thing, where it goes hand in hand, is creating systems and documenting all your procedures, from the most simplest task to the most complex task. At some point, you can make some progress by just finding a really good virtual assistant that will figure things out and maybe help you figure out what you actually want them to do. But at some point, it's got to be documented. It's got to be written down, procedureized, maybe walk through videos. There's all kinds of different great tools to do that. And then once you have the team and the systems documented, then you have something pretty amazing that can run without you. Yes, yeah, see, that's the part I always skipped. Was the SOPs. You know, it's so easy to do.
09:49
Set this email up for me. No, so you know nothing. You know, it's inconsistent and all that stuff. Well, I gotta tell you, let me say this real quick. So my favorite tool for documenting SOPs and having one source of truth for your business.
10:00
It's called waybook. You heard of this? Oh no, tell me. Waybook.com and there's some other similar tools. I think this is one of the better ones. And you and I were just recently talking about AI. So one of the nice things that they built into this two things, I'll say real quick. One is a an SOP creator, which does use AI, so you can basically just write, you can type in write me an SOP for requesting sick time, and it will write the whole SOP, and each week it and then you're done. It's good, oh my gosh. And one, the other tool that they built in there is called waybook, asks, once you've created a bunch of systems and procedures, maybe an employee manual, these kinds of things, give your team members access to this. And then they can query your business playbook, so they can say, where's that thing? How do I request time off? And then, boom, it'll source a coherent answer from all the documentation that you have. So waybook.com, okay, I'm gonna have to check that out, because I've I figured out, like, a half an AI hack on my own, like around that. But this sounds a little more sophisticated. I've just been, like, recording a loom, taking the transcript and then putting it into chatgpt and telling it to turn it into a detailed SOP for my you know, VA, yeah, but this sounds like it might be even better to share this story too, because it's so fun. So when I was on this last trip, I did use chatgpt to write my out of office email. I don't know you probably didn't see this, but and I made it, rewrite it to make it funnier, and I told it where I was going. So I think the title of the email was lost in London and sunburn in Sicily. It was really fun. And then the email was like, oh Uriah is currently dodging double decker busses in London. But it's, this is kind of funny story, because the CEO of waybook, who's become a friend of mine. His name's Mike Bandar. He happened to email me while I was gone, and so he got this out of office reply. He happens to be in London, so he responded and said, Hey, if you're in London, let's, like, Let's get together grab coffee or a beer or something like that. Like, fantastic. I didn't actually get that email because my assistant was checking my email and I was not. And she actually texted me and said, Hey, I think you might want to spot to this one. So anyway, we ended up meeting up for coffee. Had a great time, and I was very I do remember that email. I was like, That is a great email. All your emails are great experts. That was a fun one. Yeah, all your productivity hacks and everything, lots of share links that they could get on your your list too, because you do have the best emails. I always open your emails. I get lots of emails. That's great. I love it. So we're almost to the end here. Number one, create a product or service that's not dependent only on you. Number two, build a team and empower them. Number three, create systems and document all your procedures. And then lastly, you have to trust your people and your processes and actually go on vacation, turn your phone off and don't check your email. That's the hardest part. Now, that's the part I can't do. I tend to micromanage and always tracking. I'm always checking stuff. I'm not missing anything. I'm a little anxious. If you can't tell No, I understand. I go about four to five days completely off the grid, and then I'm like, You know what? I probably should just, like, organize my email inbox. Yeah. So I do pop back. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna upfront and let everybody think I'm like, the perfect productive therapist, yeah, yeah, yeah. Can we talk about the productive therapist, or, like, everything you guys do. I just, I love your brand and how helpful you are and how smart you are in the way you do things. Maybe we could talk about that a little bit and about your book too, because I'm guessing your book talks about all this that we're talking about right now. It does indeed, yeah, the productive practice book I wrote a little over a year ago, and it does walk people through a framework of approving your personal productivity and then creating business systems and then delegating to a team. So take some of the same things we talked about today. You read it. I need to read your book. Send you a copy. I'll send you a copy. I do love this productivity stuff, and not just, there's a bunch of reasons I love it, but mostly because I like being efficient so that I can actually do other things at the end of the day. That's kind of although I do really enjoy my work. So it's covered,
13:56
yeah, but if you check out productive therapists, thank you. Yes. Thank you. Therapist.com all of our resources are there, and we do have a strong focus on helping therapists to optimize and delegate their intake process specifically. So we've got some resources geared towards that, as well as a team of virtual intake coordinators that will take your handle all your calls and your potential client inquiries while you're on vacation, and that is the game changer. And like you just said, I'm having somebody that can just, you know, let can handle it for you, but then also know where to interrupt, like the guy like you. Maybe you might want to take this email not try to get you off your vacation. But here you go, somebody they just, yeah, exactly. It's fun when it all comes together, right? It really is. So how did they find you? Where did the best places to find you and work with you and learn about everything you offer? Yeah, there's only one place, productivetherapist.com, you can see the book there. You can see our newest course called intake accelerator, as well as our other offerings that it will help you get more done and have more fun. I love that. I like it too. I had to say.
15:00
Have to sneak that right and travel the world. Yeah, and I can't reiterate enough how important it is really to have this stuff in place if you want to try to live like the traveling therapist lifestyle, specifically because different time zones all the time, it's trying to coordinate calendars and time zones and VPNs and internet connections and just trying to get systems, all that stuff. That's okay. I'm waking up in London today, but I've still got the same way I'm going to do this no matter what, and I have these people in the background basically doing it all for me. If you get to that place where you can scale like that, yeah, yeah, it makes it so much easier, because it can be stressful being a traveling therapist, we talk about it in this it looks great when I'm sitting on the beach and pretty pictures and all that, but there is part of it that's pretty stressful if you don't have a good, really good system in place, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. It's worth the effort. And let's be honest, like, some of this stuff is not fun. This is not what you wake up on a Wednesday morning be like a do today. I'm just gonna write beautiful SOPs. No, you don't want to, but once you've got it dialed in, yeah, and then you test it, and then it works. And you make it better, like your life is better 100% so cool. Does that wait eight point or whatever? What's it called? Again, the way, book talking way. But does that edit the SOPs later, if you're finding that the flow isn't working exactly right, and you go back and just edit when you like, run into this tool does a lot of really cool things. So yeah, you can edit it anytime, of course, and update things. One of the things I like the most about it is how to be doing a webinar with them soon. So I'll tell people about that. Yeah, but you can create your SOPs, and then you can share them with your team, and then you can whiz them on them, and then you can verify that they completed them. You can do all kinds of cool stuff. Yeah, it's worth checking out. Awesome. That is really cool in SOP, I always forget the space for standard operating procedure. I always forget I'll say that because people ask me sometimes, what is SOP, ah, yeah, standard operating procedure, how you do things? Basically, so much for taking the time today. Absolutely. This is a blast. And put all the information in the show notes, and I'll talk to you soon. Okay, bye for now.