Ever wonder how you could run a successful therapy business while living life on the road? In this episode of The Traveling Therapist Podcast, I chat with Dr. Elizabeth Carr, founder and CEO of Kentlands Psychotherapy, about scaling a private practice from anywhere—even an Airstream camper. Elizabeth shares how her practice grew from a solo venture into a thriving team of over 20 clinicians, all while she and her husband embraced a full-time travel lifestyle with their dog Riley and cat Atticus.
She breaks down the mindset shifts, leadership changes, and contingency planning that helped her transition from full-time clinician to full-time CEO. If you're dreaming of scaling your business, creating flexibility, and maybe even selling it one day, this episode is packed with insight.
In this Episode, We Explore…
Connect with Dr. Elizabeth Carr:
Website - https://www.kentlandspsychotherapy.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/KentlandsPsychotherapy/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/KentlandsPsychotherapy/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/drelizabethcarr
Connect with me:
Instagram: @thetravelingtherapist_kym
The Traveling Therapist Membership: www.kymtolson.kartra.com/page/travelingtherapistmembership
Revolutionize Your Private Practice with AI Course: www.kymtolson.kartra.com/page/ai
Signup to learn more about life as a Traveling Therapist: https://www.portablepracticemethod.com/free-training
The Traveling Therapist Facebook Group: www.facebook.com/groups/onlineandtraveling/
Bill Like A Boss Insurance Billing Community: www.kymtolson.kartra.com/page/blab
Subscribe to the Podcast:
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Transcript:
[00:00:00] Kym_: Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Traveling Therapist podcast. Really excited to have our guest today, Dr. Elizabeth Carr is here with us. She has a very cool story and she runs a very cool business. I can't wait to dive into this, to help other traveling therapists learn from her about the model and the life that she's living right now.
[00:00:17] Elizabeth Carr, thank you for being here, and I always love to open up with how did you go from being a traditional therapist to a traveling therapist?
[00:00:26] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: Thank you Kim. So excited to be here. And of course, call me Elizabeth. So I always loved travel. I was one of those, you know, typical the college student that takes the backpack and states at the youth hostels in Europe, one of those kind of people. and so trying to marry my love of psychology with my love of travel.
[00:00:42] I started my career as a Navy psychologist in the hopes of having overseas duty stations.
[00:00:49] Kym_: that is amazing.
[00:00:50] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: luckily I did. So when I when I married my husband who was also on active duty, I was able to co-locate with him to Italy and we spent three years there.
[00:01:00] Kym_: Oh my gosh. dream life. So you were, already a psychologist and then decided to join the Navy after that
[00:01:07] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: the military, pipeline for getting mental health people in is that they will, for psychologists, they will do the internship, the paid internship year on active duty , and they pay really well. However, it could be considered a little bit of a Faustian deal with the devil because you have a three-year obligation, minimum active duty obligation after that internship year where they could send you anywhere including a war zone. It's not for everyone . But at the time I did it we weren't at war with Iraq yet. and I was fortunate I had duty stations in Jacksonville, places like that. And then I co-located with my husband to Italy and it was amazing.
[00:01:42] Kym_: he was also in the military, is that correct? So you guys were able to go together?
[00:01:45] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: so when you're married to another military member, you have priority in duty stations. So I was looking at the billets and everything, and I found one for a GMO medical officer and one for a psychologist that were relatively close to each other in Italy. So we applied for that and we got it.
[00:01:59] Kym_: Oh my gosh. So what part of Italy?
[00:02:01] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: there's a duty station called Gata that he was working at at the time that's uh, for ships as a general medical officer that's a little south of Rome and north of Naples. And I was at the Naples duty station. So we were kind of co-locating in a sense, kind of traveling back and forth.
[00:02:19] I had most of the drive because as a physician he was required to be 20 minutes away from his duty station. So I had the longer commute, but it was totally worth it.
[00:02:27] Kym_: That is amazing. And you, and you guys stayed there the whole three years
[00:02:30] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: So we were there three years. First year we were newly married and getting used to living together 'cause we had been separated because of the military, you know, in different places. And then, the second year we were pregnant and the third year we had our child and you know, infants are easy to travel with, so at the time he became one and he was starting to be like, you know, hard to travel with.
[00:02:49] We were traveling back to the US and had our new duty station here in the Maryland area.
[00:02:54] Kym_: And you guys got to stay together, I guess when they transfer you back, you come together as a family unit.
[00:02:58] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: by the time we had our son and we were coming back to the states, the war with Iraq was in full tilt and I did not want to be trying to zoom parent from Iraq. So I resigned my commission as a naval officer and started private practice. That's what started it was really just needing to prioritize my son and being with him and not getting separated from him.
[00:03:24] Like many people, I think I started assuming I was gonna be a solo practitioner and then it kind of grew into something bigger unexpectedly.
[00:03:30] Kym_: Yeah. 'cause I, I wanna dive into all of that too, but I also wanna talk about the other thing that you do. You guys are empty nesters now. Fast forward tell us how you spend your time now.
[00:03:40] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: my husband and my son wanted to get a dog. This is where this whole story hold starts. So we adopt a rescue dog who is just there he is. He's fabulous, but he's a mama's boy. He wants to be mom all the time. And we found that we couldn't keep traveling like we always had and just put him like in a kennel or have a dog sitter or something, because Riley really didn't tolerate that. So we got an Airstream camper.
[00:04:01] Kym_: Wow. I love those things.
[00:04:03] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: We love it so much and so we started organizing most of our travel around the camper and the dog
[00:04:08] I was a camping kid with my parents when I was a kid and, and we had one of the pop-up trailers and so it's been really great for us. And when we travel now, as you know, both leadership and telemedicine makes it possible to do a lot of the work from the road.
[00:04:23] You don't have to be. Locked into your local neighborhood? So we've been traveling more and more and most of our travel is stateside camper based travel.
[00:04:32] Kym_: So is, is hubby retired now or is he
[00:04:34] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: Yeah. So, when I started the practice, which was now 20 years ago, he was uh, doing residency at Walter Reed and he finished his studies in psychiatry and he stayed until retirement.
[00:04:47] then when he retired, really kind of as a favor to me, he joined the practice
[00:04:51] Kym_: That's amazing.
[00:04:52] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: But really because he has other hopes and dreams and things he wants to focus his time on, he also helped recruit a couple of his colleagues who are also prescribers who have now subsequently joined the practice, which makes him have more time to help with leadership and to write.
[00:05:07] He's a, he's a writer and passed the baton really to them for more of the day-to-day med management work.
[00:05:13] Kym_: That is so cool. So you guys are off with this amazing lifestyle running this, remote practice. I don't know if everybody's remote or some are in, in an office or what. I'd love to talk about your model.
[00:05:24] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: yeah, it started as a brick and mortar practice in person . And only because of COVID did it move to being very well temporarily, entirely virtual, and then heavily virtual. I'd say now it's probably 60% in person, 40% virtual, so.
[00:05:40] Kym_: that is really cool. So let's talk about that. 'cause part of your bio and part of what you do is building this entity, this business for scaling and possibly selling it later. And we don't talk about that a lot. I mean, I think a lot of. Therapists, they just build these private practices with willy-nilly systems and don't really think a lot about like the end game.
[00:06:00] Like, okay, what happens when I'm the empty nester and I wanna retire and I wanna travel? How can I scale this thing? So maybe I'm not working in it, but still making income, or how do I plan from the beginning to sell this thing down the road? I'd love to talk about that, just strategy and your thoughts around that and how you're managing it.
[00:06:17] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: one of the things That I found with travel is that as most of your listeners who are traveling therapists can relate to, sometimes it's a challenge to have scheduled appointments around travel.
[00:06:28] Especially, you know, when we're moving from place to place with a camper and then there's a wreck on the road and you're behind schedule in your drive, and now you're pulling into the campsite, but you have to get into the spot and you have to back in.
[00:06:40] And that can be tricky. And you're like, oh no, you know, I have this appointment starting in 20 minutes and it can be very stressful. So one of the things that I wanted was to move away from such tightly scheduled work responsibilities into more asynchronistic leadership responsibilities.
[00:06:56] Kym_: Yes.
[00:06:57] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: Right. And so you need a certain number of people at your practice in order to justify financially paying yourself to be really pretty much full-time seeing doing leadership things. I used to pay myself like any other clinician, you just to split. Right. So you have to change your business model when you move away from that.
[00:07:16] But I did, and then it turned out that my husband was the one that had this restriction of these scheduled appointments when I had free myself up.
[00:07:23] So then we needed to do the same thing again for him and, transfer his patients to somebody who's here locally, so that he too had that kind of freedom to do it.
[00:07:33] And that's really, I think what's important is If you love seeing patients, you're going to have to figure out how you time it if you're on the road a lot.
[00:07:43] Kym_: absolutely. It happened to me yesterday. We were supposed to be somewhere and we're, I'm going through a tunnel, you know, I'm on a Zoom call with somebody as the passenger. I'm like, it's cutting up. It just, it's so unprofessional, you know? And it's like, it just, the timing didn't work out right. And I was like, oh, I feel so bad, you know, trying to like have this, it was a coaching client, not a.
[00:07:59] Therapy client, but still it, you know, it just, the timing doesn't always work out the internet, you know, it could be very stressful trying to fit everything in. Mm-hmm.
[00:08:08] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: Absolutely we have uh, because the practice is so big now, we have over 20 clinicians. We have. Peer consultation groups for adult therapy, for child therapy, for med management. And I'm in the adult one, and we had appointment to do it, I think it was like two in the afternoon. And at one we're at the camping at our storage facility, backing the trailer in to come home.
[00:08:31] And same thing, right? You know, it's not a patient. I'm trying to do it from the truck and, and it's just stressful and you feel like you have so many balls in the air.
[00:08:39] Kym_: Yeah, I, I totally agree. So how would somebody start that transition? Let's say they are a solo practitioner, maybe they make that decision, okay, I want, I'm hearing Dr. Carr say this, I want to establish a model like this. How do you get started with it? And then when did you decide, okay, I think we have enough income coming in and all of this that I can pull out and just be like administrative and, and managing things and not have to actually pull an income with seeing clients. Like how do you figure that part out?
[00:09:08] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: Yeah. You know, I think part of it is that you have to sit down with an accountant and figure out a different business model. We actually talked with some exit planners about the strength of the business and one of the things he said is, you need to stop thinking about paying yourself as a therapist.
[00:09:26] You need to start thinking about, you know, at the time we had probably, I don't know, maybe 12 or 15 clinicians, we met with them and he said, you need to pay yourself as a business owner and as leader and as a CEO kind of type position. And instead of as a clinician. And that was really kind of hard for me to wrap my mind around, but.
[00:09:45] So important and also because I felt for a while as it grew, and I think anyone with a group practice can relate to this, when you start, you're a clinician and you're seeing people full-time. And as the practice grows at some point, if you don't reduce your caseload, you end up with two full-time jobs,
[00:10:02] Kym_: Yes, I would imagine.
[00:10:03] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: You're the practice owner, full-time job, and then you're seeing patients full-time. And so, something has to give and you can't neglect the business, so you have to cut back on patient care.
[00:10:12] And if you love patient care, you need to project forward and see that coming and figure out when you need to cap your business in terms of hiring new people so that you don't squeeze yourself out of the patient care that you love giving.
[00:10:26] Kym_: Yes. Oh my gosh, that's such a good point. Oh, so do you still do any patient care at all or is it, are you totally advent at this point?
[00:10:34] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: I do. And I find that, it's important. It's part of my identity. I love doing it, but I could scratch that itch with two to four appointments a a week. It doesn't have to be 25 appointments a week so.
[00:10:45] Kym_: I'm, I'm totally in that place now myself. I've got three clients I see, see like maybe once a month, and part of me is like, I'm so busy with the other businesses, you know, Like, I probably shouldn't be seeing them anymore. 'cause like financially it probably doesn't even make sense 'cause I could be spending that time another way.
[00:10:59] But I really do have that struggle, like, okay, I'm the traveling therapist, you know, I still need to be a therapist. And I still like just this handful, like doing that clinical work. You know, it's, it's really been a struggle to figure out like, okay, do I just retire? Or, you know, and I know you can always come back into it too, but it's, been a struggle for me too, just hearing you talk about it.
[00:11:18] It's kind of bringing all that stuff up. I was thinking about it this week.
[00:11:20] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: of course you could come back, but think about the details of that, right? Because. Stop seeing people entirely. You're probably not gonna wanna keep doing continuing education and paying to your liability insurance and your licensure renewal. You're not gonna wanna do all that. But if you let all of that lapse, then you're gonna have to go to the work of reactivating it if you wanna see, and then are you gonna go to all that work to see one or two people?
[00:11:42] So I think that's something that we just all have to kind of grapple with.
[00:11:46] Kym_: Yes. And then the thought of like. my license after all that work.
[00:11:50] It's like, oh my gosh. I don't think I've, yeah, I don't think I would ever like go of it at this point. I say that now, but yeah, I hear you not seeing clients. It's like, okay, I've still gotta do all these requirements and meet licensure requirements and it, it's a lot to think about really that transition piece.
[00:12:05] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: Yeah, I don't think there's a right or wrong answer. I think it's just that you need to think about all those variables when you grapple with it. I know for myself, because I'm a group practice owner and I spend a lot of my time in leadership giving my clinicians feedback when they have ethical concerns it's important to me to keep my license active even if I weren't seeing any patients.
[00:12:25] But since I have to keep it active anyway as a group practice owner , Then I might as well see a few people as well, since I enjoy it and I can make the time for it.
[00:12:32] Kym_: Yeah. No, I love that. I think that's, all of these questions are just so important to ask yourself, especially if you're trying to do the traveling therapist lifestyle, you know, trying to figure out what, what is that model gonna look like for me so I can actually enjoy my life when I'm on the road.
[00:12:45] You know, I've, I've ended up in places and maybe been outside and exploring it for like two hours in a whole week, you know, and it's like what sometimes we'll be like, what are we doing? So I have to really consciously make an effort to, be present in these places and not overbook myself.
[00:12:59] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: I find that for when you're a traveling camping therapist, it's best if Russ and I book our appointments in the morning before we start moving.
[00:13:09] you have control over that and you don't have to worry about an accident on the highway that you didn't expect that derails your schedule. So, I think we finally cracked the code on, we need to get up in the morning, see people stop, and then pack up the camper and get on the road and do everything else.
[00:13:25] Kym_: Yeah. Now, does it work the same way for your husband with licensure and everything? Can he be located anywhere? 'cause I know for therapists, you know, we have to be mindful of licensing rules and I just, how does that work for physicians for Psychiatrists?
[00:13:36] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: Our clients have to physically be in the state of Maryland. You know, the interesting thing for us just as an aside, is that we're in the DC metro area.
[00:13:42] We have clients that, live in Maryland and work in DC and really, technically, they should get in their car and drive five minutes over the border and then do their appointment from their car during their lunch hour if they work in dc which is ridiculous and insane.
[00:13:58] but really that's how the law is written. And so, when you're near dc, Maryland, and Virginia, we, we grapple with these things all the time.
[00:14:05] Kym_: I know, no, I, I'm licensed in Virginia, but I had a client, her sister lived in North Carolina, right across the border, and sometimes she would hop on a call and say she was at her sister's house, and I'd be like, I can't see you if you're at your sister's house. That's not, you know, that's violating my licensure laws and regulations. So she would have to get in the car, cross back over and call me back.
[00:14:25] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:14:26] Kym_: Or I'd be like, you know, I don't wanna know where you are. You're not supposed to say that. I shouldn't say that on this, like, publicly, but sometimes it's like, oh, I, mm, I didn't hear that at all. So, cause it's, it is a really arbitrary, regulation I
[00:14:39] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: Well the funny thing is sometimes I think we think about it because people are too far away. Like, what if they had a crisis? But the reality is I could see a patient, telemedicine wise, four hours away in the state of Maryland, but not 20 minutes away in dc. it can't be about that. It's not about distance.
[00:14:58] Kym_: Exactly. so I guess right now what you're doing or what you've been doing over time is setting this business up to eventually be able to sell it. Is that sort of the mindset somebody should have when they're going into this?
[00:15:11] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: I think probably most people should, because if you're growing something I. Uh, Of substance it can be part of your legacy and part of your retirement plan. For me, my biggest priority really, in terms of making it potentially sellable is that I wanted to survive. Me, both of my parents ended up needing assisted living in their early seventies.
[00:15:33] Kym_: Yes.
[00:15:34] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: passing in their mid seventies. and I feel really proud of what we have grown here. And I want the clinicians to have job security, and I don't want the whole practice to crumble just because someday I need assisted living. And so, how do I think that's going to work? can we build something that runs itself well enough that it could be like a collective?
[00:15:55] Does it need to be one person that, that is officially buying the business and in charge? Do I need to find another clinician that has a values aligned similar practice that wants to buy? Nearby and expand. But I want the practice to stay alive, the clients to keep getting services, the clinicians to keep having a job.
[00:16:13] And so all of that is tied into this question of exit planning.
[00:16:18] Kym_: Yeah, so these are all just major decision points I guess, that maybe you do with an exit planning company strategist that helps you with this decided each step along the way. Do I, do I wanna just totally be out of it when I'm 75 and in assisted living and you know, not have to run anything, but still have like income coming in, like trying to make decisions around that.
[00:16:37] Mm-hmm.
[00:16:37] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: Right, right, right. 'cause you know, probably the practice is not gonna keep funneling money towards you in perpetuity if you have dementia. But but I do think there is this question about how can we have a softened landing and how do we make sure there's. I've been working with an attorney now about this question of continuity planning, which is Russ and I were in a bad car accident about a year and a half ago, and it just reminds you that life is fairly tenuous and you never know what could happen and you wanna have things in place.
[00:17:09] If I were in a coma for three months what would we need to have set up so that the business doesn't kind of crash and burn with that pocket of of lack of. Usual leadership and just like when you have kids, then you need to make a plan for, if we weren't here, who's gonna take our child and take care.
[00:17:25] You have to do that, I think for your practice too, when you get to a certain size.
[00:17:29] Kym_: That's amazing. So I'm assuming there's attorneys that really even specialize in that sort of thing, getting everything set up for you in the backend.
[00:17:36] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: Yeah.
[00:17:37] Kym_: Wow, that's so much to think about. Yeah. But I'm glad there's experts out there that can help you with it too, to figure it out. Now with your practice, with you having such a remote lifestyle and, running this business from an Airstream, sometimes, what do your clinicians do?
[00:17:51] Do, are your clinicians in an office mostly? Are they telehealth and, you know, just curious what you allow as the leadership for the clinician's flexibility and that sort of thing, and how you make those decisions. Yeah.
[00:18:03] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: When COVID was tailing off. We had people who were dying to get back in the office, particularly people that saw kids people that do couples therapy, people that just get bored being at home all the time. That just really loved the energy of being with a client in the room in the same space.
[00:18:21] And so, I was glad that we had always kept our fiscal space open, even during COVID . And and really I think a lot of people. Wanted to shut them down because they hated to spend the money on it. But my feeling was, well, we're forging the same rates so we can pay rent. We don't need to shut it down.
[00:18:37] we kept it open the whole time. The space paid for and, and even when it wasn't occupied and now we have very, very few people who are entirely virtual and they're very part-time. The majority of our clinicians use space in the office. Some of them have like, oh, I come into the office on Tuesday, Thursday, but on Wednesday mornings I'm doing me telemedicine from home.
[00:19:00] So there's a lot of people kind of hybrid
[00:19:02] Kym_: So do they manage those schedules on their own? Deciding where they'll be and when they'll be there and,
[00:19:07] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: what I've found when I talk to other group practice owners is when you have a physical space it's really like you're running a bed and breakfast in a way because you have each room and you have to have like a spreadsheet. And each tab on the spreadsheet is the different room. Each room has a name.
[00:19:19] This is called the California room that I'm in right now. and so we have blocks of recurring reservations for each therapist. For when they have that room dedicated for them. And my goal as a practice owner is to have each room fully occupied as much as possible seven days a week.
[00:19:37] Kym_: Oh, that's amazing. Okay.
[00:19:38] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: And so if you, if you're one of those people that works Tuesday, Thursday at the office, but Wednesday from home, you have a Tuesday Thursday reservation, and then you can see people virtually anytime you want outside the office
[00:19:48] Kym_: Yeah, that is, that is so much management. It's great. Are any of them international? Any of your clinicians outside of the country?
[00:19:54] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: No. In fact, we don't even have anyone that's outside the state right now. Usually People will move to another state and I've tried to persuade them to keep their Maryland license active and, and stay with the virtual clients that they have. But I think oftentimes when people need to move at least it's been my experience that our turnover of clinicians in-state is extremely low and.
[00:20:14] The turnover of clinicians that move out of state is extremely high, and I think for us it's just that they're having a fresh start and they're going to a new place and they wanna just, you know, see what that future holds for them and, and not tied back to their, their last chapter of their life. I.
[00:20:30] Kym_: Yeah. That's amazing. So what is, what is your exit strategy now? What have you guys decided on? Based on your lifestyle and all that, are you gonna try to stay forever? Do you, do you have a plan to retire? Just curious, like how people structure these things.
[00:20:44] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: So for me right now, I would like to get us to a place where each time I give away a piece of what I'm doing, I'm creating job for someone else.
[00:20:53] Kym_: Hmm. Oh, that's a mindset shift. That's
[00:20:56] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: Okay. And, and so for example, there was a time when I was the one that answered all the prospective patient phone calls and I thought I was really good at it and I didn't wanna give it to anyone else, but I eventually, I did. And I was doing that after seeing patients all day long, returning a lot of phone calls between seven and nine at night.
[00:21:13] And that's term strategy.
[00:21:16] What I had to think, because I think sometimes we can be a little bit cheap in this profession we don't wanna pay anybody for anything. Is I said to myself, I want to buy my freedom. I wanna pay someone else to return these phone calls in the daytime so that I can have my evenings back.
[00:21:31] And that's completely worth it to me.
[00:21:33] And when you start thinking in terms of I'm a job creator, rather than, oh, I don't wanna spend this money, I think it's a shift that's really healthy.
[00:21:40] Kym_: And I love hearing you say that you're buying your freedom back. that's a great way to look at it. It really is. And I was just talking to somebody before this, doing a different interview and she runs a group practice too, and she was saying like having somebody live to answer the phone calls during the day helps with conversion rates so much with just getting people booked and scheduled, so.
[00:21:59] That's an important factor too. It's like if you can't be available for these roles at the best time, it's probably not the best choice for your business. Yeah.
[00:22:06] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: It's, it's one of those penny wise pound foolish predicaments, right? Where you, you think you don't wanna pay someone to answer the phone? And how many of those prospective clients found somebody else before seven at night?
[00:22:16] Kym_: Exactly. And then it's like you have a responsibility to keep your clinicians full and all of that, so I'm sure that factors into it too. Yeah.
[00:22:22] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: Absolutely when I think about what is my leadership responsibility right now, it's primarily keeping everybody else as full as they wanna be. To the best of my ability. I.
[00:22:31] Kym_: Oh, I love that. Yeah. And I would imagine being, the owner and the leadership, being able to look at those statistics too, to know like, I've gotta keep this amount full if I want to live this lifestyle or run the business a certain way. I would imagine I, I don't run a group practice, but I would imagine that factors into it too, a lot.
[00:22:46] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: So, for example, there's a neighborhood newspaper that runs an advice column that we've been writing for more than 15 years. and so at the bottom it says, if you have a question, it's like a Dear Abby kind of thing, right? you have a question, you know, write us, but no one ever sends in questions.
[00:23:00] So we usually pull from questions that our own clients are asking us, or dilemmas that we see here at the practice. As for inspiration, for the ideas. and I find myself saying, okay, who needs to get full? Who has some openings and what are they good at? And then we reverse engineer the idea of what we're gonna talk about in the advice column based on who has openings.
[00:23:18] So this person has done CBTI training for insomnia. So we're gonna ask a question about insomnia,
[00:23:26] Kym_: That's perfect.
[00:23:27] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: profile that person. And when my husband is driving and pulling the camper, we have a very strong hotspot in our Ford F-150. I am. Passenger seat writing advice columns.
[00:23:37] Kym_: That's amazing.
[00:23:39] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: Yeah.
[00:23:40] Kym_: That's so smart. And it's so amazing that you two could do this together, you know, that, that you're able to run this business and, you know, have different roles like that. And then be able to travel too, the love of travel, be able to fulfill that as well.
[00:23:51] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: absolutely. Absolutely.
[00:23:53] Kym_: so talking about that and keeping everything full and, the way you manage your employees and your, and the building and everything that you have your offices in, what is the strategy down the road?
[00:24:02] Will you guys eventually try to sell this thing or will you just, is that not decided? Is that something you decide later? Like, I'm just curious about that process for people. I.
[00:24:12] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: Well, right now I'm, I'm really, really loving and enjoying my role, so I'm not in any hurry at all to sell. And I think the way it's evolving, I could do it into my late sixties, early seventies.
[00:24:26] so right now that's my plan, but, you know, someday I can't, I'm gonna be 80 or old, 90 or dead or something, and someday I can't do it anymore.
[00:24:33] And so I still am thinking in terms of what do I need to put in place. You know, I'm, I'm in my late fifties now, and so part of the question is I have about you know, maybe a, 15 year landing strip to figure out what we need to do to keep it going. I'd love to see this practice, you know, be around for 200 years.
[00:24:53] Right. what do I need to do to, tip the balance of likelihood that that could actually happen?
[00:24:58] Kym_: Yeah, and thinking, thinking of it like that, a legacy, I mean, 200 years or more. Yeah. how amazing is that?
[00:25:04] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: We purchased the building that we're in
[00:25:06] Kym_: Oh, you did? That's amazing.
[00:25:08] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: Yeah. And you know, because like many of us, you're in a building that has the tube lighting in the ceiling and you'd hate it. So you just never turn them on and you have lamps. And you're not gonna fix that because you're not gonna pay to fix somebody else's building.
[00:25:20] purchasing this building made it possible for us to do those kind of upgrades that I'd always wanted to do. But that means that we, not kentland psychotherapy, but my husband and I own this building. And that means that if we were killed in a car accident or something, then my son would be inheriting this building.
[00:25:39] And if the business were to suddenly dissolve, he would have a building with no tenants to deal with.
[00:25:46] and obviously I wouldn't want that. So this is all part of legacy planning and exit planning is we have to think ahead for those kind of possibilities and make a plan for everything.
[00:25:56] Kym_: Wow, that's so smart. And who do you, I mean, what is the name of the professional that you hire to help with this? Like what type of attorney is that? Or,
[00:26:03] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:26:03] Kym_: strategist. Like who are these people?
[00:26:06] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: I work with a man named Michael Gottlieb, who's an attorney in Maryland. Momentum, he's fabulous, and he is working on developing a package of, documents that you will need. I think he said it's gonna be about eight to 10 documents that you need for this contingency. Planning, not even exit planning, but just like, what if an emergency, what do you need to do?
[00:26:28] That kind of planning. And I, I'm really excited to work with him and to get that all. Uh. Buttoned up. I also worked with a couple of men named Corian Pat with Exit Readiness. They have a podcast too on this idea of, of exit planning and, and they're the ones that came and helped me think about things like, how do you pay yourself?
[00:26:49] Differently than paying yourself as a clinician, how do you, how do you make that shift when you're no longer paying yourself based on a portion of your direct patient care?
[00:26:57] And I think those two businesses together really make that perfect package to get everything lined up, buttoned up the way you need it to be when you have a larger size group practice, and you have to do this legacy planning.
[00:27:12] Kym_: So interesting. Yeah. I might have to reach out to them and have them come on and be a guest as well. I
[00:27:17] I feel like people listening are probably like, oh my gosh, what do I do? Like occasionally I'll see somebody post you know, will planning on Facebook or something and I'm like, oh my gosh, I haven't thought about any of this.
[00:27:27] Like, what happens to all this money in these businesses? I run, like, I have not done any planning run any of that. 'cause I just, you know, I'm just stuck in the, in the moment, in the real time. Instead of this planning, you're really making me reconsider what I'm doing.
[00:27:41] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: Most of the classes that we take, the ethics classes that we take for licensure renewal. Talk about how if you are deceased, how will your former clients find their charts? And that's important, but that's the tip of the iceberg of, of the big picture, of all the things you need to think about. and because so many of them are more financial rather than ethical it's not gonna be covered in ethics class.
[00:28:01] You have to go somewhere else to get that help, guidance and information.
[00:28:05] Kym_: Yeah. Oh my gosh. That's so helpful.
[00:28:07] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: Yeah. I'll give this information so you can put these, these,
[00:28:10] Kym_: I would love that. Thank you. We could put it down in the bottom for people. Yeah, that'd be amazing. Thank you. I appreciate that. Well, thanks for taking the time today to come and share all of this with us. Super helpful and inspiring too to hear what, what you all have built and how you're living your life around it.
[00:28:25] It's amazing.
[00:28:26] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: Thank you. It was a lot of fun to talk to you. I really appreciate being here today.
[00:28:29] Kym_: And how do people reach out to you? Do you work with people that consulting if,
[00:28:32] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: a little bit. You know, there's a lot of people that this is their full-time gig and, and it's not for me at all. But I have had people occasionally reach out and do some one-on-one consultation hours. Oftentimes people can just pick my brain and, and two or three appointments and get a lot of value out of it.
[00:28:48] So. I'm happy to do that if people reach out talk and see if we're a good fit. And our website is kentland psychotherapy.com. I'm sure you'll have those in the show notes too, and that's probably the best way for people to find me. And also, I love to connect with people, so, find me on LinkedIn and let's connect on LinkedIn too.
[00:29:04] That's a great way. And then if anybody is connected with me on LinkedIn, then they can use the messaging system there to message me directly.
[00:29:09] Kym_: Amazing. Thank you so much. Thanks for taking the time today.
[00:29:13] Dr. Elizabeth Carr: Thank you.