starting your private practice
for the therapist who's ready to build something and wants to build it right the first time.
Most therapists start a private practice the same way: by accident, by necessity, or by watching a colleague do it and thinking it looked possible. You take a few clients on the side, figure out the paperwork as it comes up, and hope the referrals keep arriving. Some of that works. A lot of it creates problems that are much harder to fix later than they would have been to avoid at the beginning.
Starting a practice right from the start isn’t about having a perfect plan. It’s about knowing which questions to ask, in which order, before you build anything so you’re not spending the next three years undoing decisions you made when you didn’t know what you were deciding.
THE CHALLENGE
what makes starting a practice harder than it looks
Graduate programs teach clinical skills. They don’t teach you how to write a bio that actually sounds like you, how to set a fee without apologizing for it, how to build a website that brings in the right clients, or how to structure your practice so it’s sustainable from the beginning rather than something you have to rebuild once it gets busy.
Most therapists piece this together from blog posts, colleagues, and trial and error. Which means most therapists make the same avoidable mistakes, usually in the same order.
What tends to happen looks like this:
You start with a broad niche because narrowing down feels like turning clients away. A year in, you’re seeing everyone and not doing your best work with any of them.
You set your fees based on what you think clients can afford rather than what you need to make the practice sustainable. Six months in, you’re overworked and underpaid and not sure how to get out of it.
You build a website before you’re clear on who you serve, so it ends up generic. It doesn’t bring in clients. You don’t know why.
You say yes to clients who aren’t a good fit because the caseload isn’t full yet. A year later, the caseload is full of wrong-fit clients and you’re stuck.
None of these are inevitable. They’re just what happens when you build in the wrong order.
WHO THIS IS FOR
therapists at the beginning
This is for therapists who are about to start a private practice, who have just started and want to course-correct before the problems compound, or who are thinking about it seriously enough to want to understand what they’re getting into before they commit.
It’s also for therapists who are starting over: repositioning after years of a practice that worked but no longer fits, or rebuilding after a career transition that brought them back to clinical work.
For first-generation, Asian American, and queer clinicians especially, starting a practice often means building something without a model to follow — nobody in your family has done this, the generic advice doesn’t account for the communities you serve, and the invisible beliefs about what you’re allowed to charge, ask for, or build are often working against you before you’ve even started. That’s a different kind of starting point, and this work accounts for it.
WHAT WE WORK ON
what starting right actually involves
Starting a practice isn’t a single decision. It’s a sequence of decisions, each one building on the last, and the order matters more than most people realize.
The first thing we get clear on is your clinical identity, what you actually believe about how change happens, who you do your best work with, and what lens you bring to your work. This sounds philosophical but it’s foundational. Everything downstream of it — your niche, your bio, your marketing — is harder to get right without it.
From there we work on positioning: who exactly you serve, how you talk about it, and what makes your approach distinct from every other therapist’s website. This connects directly to finding your niche, which is often where starting practitioners spend the most time and the most energy going in circles.
Then fees: what to charge, how to structure your services, and how to have the conversations about money that most therapists were never taught to have. This connects to setting your fees, which has as much to do with mindset as it does with numbers.
Then the practical infrastructure: the business setup, the systems, the platforms, the processes that need to be in place before clients arrive. Not exciting, but foundational.
And then visibility: the website, the directories, the referral pipeline. How to make sure the right people can find you. This connects to marketing your practice.
The whole sequence mirrors the six-module structure of the visible practice course, for therapists who want to work through it self-directed.
HOW I WORK
what working together looks like
This isn’t a program with predetermined steps you move through regardless of where you are. It’s tailored to what you’re actually building and what’s actually in the way.
Some clinicians come in with a clear sense of who they want to serve and need help with the business and marketing side. Others come in knowing they want to go into private practice and needing to start from the clinical identity question first. We start where you are.
I’m direct so if your positioning isn’t working, I’ll tell you why. If your fee is too low, I’ll say so. If something you’ve built is going to create a problem six months from now, I’d rather name it now than watch you spend the next year fixing it.
I also bring my own experience into the room. I built a practice from nothing, as a first-generation queer Asian American woman, without a map. I know what the generic advice misses, and I know which parts of building something actually matter.
meet your private practice consultant
hi, i'm kristie
a licensed therapist, consultant, and founder of Uncover Mental Health Counseling.
I didn’t start my practice with a plan. I started it by not knowing how to say no, telling myself it was temporary, and then watching the pandemic close every other option. In the first year I made close to half a million dollars. I also made every avoidable mistake in the book, often more than once.
What I bring to this work isn’t a theory about how private practice is supposed to work. It’s the actual experience of building one without a map — and ten years of watching what happens when therapists build in the right order versus the wrong one.
WHAT CHANGES
what's different after this work
The practice you build when you’ve thought carefully about the foundation is different from the practice you build by accident. Not just in how it looks, but in how it feels to be in it.
The niche fits. You know exactly who you’re for and who you’re not for, and that clarity shows up in how you talk about your work, who reaches out, and how full your caseload gets.
The fees make sense. You’re not apologizing for them, discounting them reflexively, or quietly resentful about the gap between what you charge and what you’re worth.
The marketing isn’t a source of dread. Because it’s coming from a clear identity rather than a template, it doesn’t feel like performing. It feels like telling the truth about who you are and who you help.
And the practice grows with you, because it was built around who you actually are rather than a generic version of what a therapist’s practice is supposed to look like.
fees
investment
Different challenges require different levels of support. Whether you’re just starting to think through the foundation or facing a specific decision that needs focused attention, there are multiple ways we can work together.
consulting session (45 minutes) Ongoing consulting to work through the decisions of starting a practice in sequence, with support and real-time feedback at each stage.
consulting intensive (90 minutes) An extended session to go deeper on a specific part of the foundation: your clinical identity, your positioning, your fees, or your early marketing strategy.
VIP sprint (3 hours) A focused deep-dive to work through the full starting-your-practice framework in one intensive block, leaving with a clear foundation and a concrete plan.
session
$375
45 minutes
intensive
$750
90 minutes
vip sprint
$1500
180 minutes
new here or not sure what you need?
i offer a free 15 minute chat to talk through what you’re looking for and figure out whether this is a good fit.
FAQs
do I need to be fully licensed to work with you on starting a practice?
Yes. This consulting is for licensed therapists. If you’re pre-licensed and thinking ahead, the free resources page is a good place to start, and the visible practice course will be available when you’re ready.
I've already started my practice and made some of the mistakes you're describing. is it too late to course-correct?
No. Many people come to this work after starting rather than before. The earlier the better, but there’s no point at which the foundation can’t be revisited. Sometimes the most efficient work happens when you already know what isn’t working.
how is this different from the other consulting sub-pages?
Starting your practice covers the full foundation: clinical identity, niche, fees, infrastructure, and early marketing, in sequence. The other pages (finding your niche, setting your fees, marketing your practice, filling your caseload) go deeper on specific stages for therapists who have already started and are working on a particular area.
do you work with therapists outside New York?
Yes. Consulting isn’t a clinical service, so there’s no geographic restriction. I work with therapists anywhere.
what's the difference between this and the visible practice course?
The course covers the same ground self-directed, at your own pace. Consulting is one-on-one, tailored to your specific practice, and includes real-time feedback on what you’re building. Some therapists do both.