Hello Jane community, đź’™
If you were able to make it to our conversation with Kendall, you’ll know just how inspiring it was to hear her story and learn from her experience. If you couldn’t make it, you get to enjoy it for the first time right now (lucky 🦆)! As Ali mentions in the session, feel free to treat this like a podcast and do your laundry (or whatever has been lingering on your to-do list) while you listen.
- Meet Our Hosts
- Takeaways from Kendall’s Story
- Keep the Conversation Going
- More Jane Webinars!
- Webinar Transcript
Before we dive in, let’s introduce our hosts
Kendall is a mental health practitioner and the owner of Vancouver Wellness Studio— a space she created to foster community and whole-person wellness. In this session, she shared her insights into wellness, business, and community building.
Ali is a co-founder of Jane and owner of a multidisciplinary clinic herself, and she loved delving into Kendall’s story. She’s happiest when she gets to spend time with our amazing community and learn from all of your diverse experiences.
Takeaways from Kendall’s Story
There were so many great takeaways from this conversation; choosing just a few to share has been so hard! Here are some of our favourites.
Start by understanding those you hope to serve.
Kendall’s desire to bring a collaborative, multidisciplinary care team under one roof stemmed from her own challenges as a patient. As someone living with a chronic illness, she found having to gather practitioners, re-tell stories, and constantly advocate for herself was exhausting when the process was supposed to be healing. So she built the kind of care experience that she wanted for herself. The kind that wraps clients up in care and support.
Addressing the challenges of finding and retaining practitioners.
Building your business with a clear vision of your mission and your values is something both Ali and Kendall suggest as an important factor in both attracting and retaining practitioners. Your values should feature heavily throughout your hiring process: in your job descriptions, your interviews, and your onboarding. They should also be emphasized in your public-facing communications. In doing this, you’ll attract practitioners who connect with those values and are therefore more likely to stay long-term.
Here are some examples of how Kendall and the Jane Team do this in their job postings:
- Kendall shared her posting for a Clinic Coordinator Role, as well as her New Hire Template.
- You can check out how we do this here at Jane too!
Bringing your team into the hiring and interview process can also be helpful in ensuring the new hire is a good fit for your group. When it comes to retention, it’s important to work at building and maintaining collaboration. Being transparent on how your organization is run (pay structure, plans for the future, etc.) also fosters a positive work environment.
Finally, try to end employment relationships on a good note; you never know if your professional lives may align again in the future.
Develop a transparent pay structure for practitioners.
Deciding if your organization will be independent contractors, a collection of businesses, or employees of a single business will depend on a lot of factors. Here are a few things that Kendall learned as she worked through this process:
- Having her practitioners as employees of a single business created a much more collaborative environment.
- It’s important to develop a very transparent pay structure with growth incentives built in. Her practitioners are paid per session and as their caseload increases, so does their rate of pay per session.
- She also emphasizes the importance of paying your practitioners for their admin time: paperwork, meetings, marketing/networking. All of these things are vital for running and growing the business as a whole, so staff should be compensated for them.
Collaboration and team-building require dedicated time and effort.
The earlier you establish methods of fostering collaboration and team-building, the better. Trying to introduce something new is incredibly challenging, but if you can start with measures in place, they’re often well received. That means getting ~~really~~ intentional about building these into your business model when you first start thinking about creating a team. Here’s a snapshot of Vancouver Wellness Studio’s weekly team meeting structure:
90-minute meetings take place every Wednesday at lunchtime. The theme of the meeting rotates weekly.
🗓️ Week 1: Coordination of care for clients who have consented. They try to bake this into their sessions every week, as needed.
🗓️ Week 2: Marketing and networking planning
🗓️ Week 3: Practitioner in-service to share knowledge and deepen the group’s understanding of what each practitioner can help with.
🗓️ Week 4: Personal and professional support. This one also gets baked into most weekly meetings.
Phew, and those were just a few of the highlights! If you’ve enjoyed these, you’ll absolutely love listening to Kendall and Ali really dig into the ideas above.
Want to keep the conversation going?
You can join Kendall’s Facebook community group called Wellness Center Creators to ask questions and learn from people just like you! While you’re at it, you can head over to the Jane Community Forum to chat all things Jane.
Join Kendall for her live, interactive workshop!
“The Wellness Center Creators Business Planning Workshop is designed specifically for health and wellness providers and wellness practice owners. Whether you are dreaming of creating your business or in the process of expanding, this experiential workshop weaves in wellness business education and leads you through each step of your business plan!” - Kendall Hagensen
Wellness Center Creators Business Planning Workshop Intensive - Live
🗓️ July 27th
⏰ 1:30-4:30 pm PDT
🖥️ via Zoom
For the pre-recorded webinar version of the workshop, you can register here.
*Note prices for Kendall’s workshops are in USD
If you have any further questions, you can reach out to Kendall at [email protected]
If you’re a big fan of webinars…
Same! Check out some of the other webinars we’ve hosted. We cover topics from Intake Forms to Ratings and Reviews, Smart Charting to Client Retention, and lots in between. Enjoy!
Extra, extra, read all about it! If reading works better for you, you can check out the transcript from the webinar right here.