Your priority is always the mental health of your clients. But as a business owner, to reach your goals, you need to have a method for measuring your progress. One way to do this is to track the right KPIs for your mental health practice.
KPIs are industry and company-specific, so it’s important to know which ones will be most beneficial for your business.
In this post, we’ll review some key KPIs for your mental health practice, but first…
What are KPIs?
KPIs (or Key Performance Indicators) are metrics used to measure performance in your business and how efficiently a practice is achieving its business objectives.
You can use them to compare to other mental health practices as a benchmark or against your past data.
KPIs allow you to see where you were and where you are, and make a plan that will get you where you want to be. They allow you to see areas that are going well, where you need to do some work and if you need to make adjustments, like implementing a new policy.
What are the most important KPIs to track?
1. Client satisfaction
To measure client satisfaction, you can ask your existing clients to fill out a quick survey, which could be as simple as how likely they would be to refer you on a scale of 1-10. But make sure to ask what about your practice and service they are happy or unhappy with.
Make it anonymous and let them know that the intention is to improve your services.
If you are able to keep your client’s satisfied, you will have repeat clients that praise your business wherever they go and likely generate many referrals for your business.
How to improve:
Incentivize clients to actually fill out the survey and then listen to what they have to say. There will always be areas you cannot change, such as your rates, but always be continually improving your business where you can.
2. Client retention
Client retention is the ability to retain clients over the long-term and generate recurring revenue from existing clients. This is important because generating revenue from existing clients is considerably less expensive than acquiring new clients.
Client retention is important but tricky to calculate in the context of a mental health private practice. It is best calculated using the number of sessions your client attends divided by the number of sessions initially recommended by you expressed as a percentage.
How to improve:
Reach out to clients who did not finish their sessions to find out why. They may not have understood the benefit of attending all sessions or maybe they couldn’t find appointment times in your schedule. This presents areas to improve in to help those clients.
3. Employee utilization rate
Employee utilization rate is measured by the amount of time your team spends working with clients (the thing that brings in revenue) vs. the total amount of time your employees are available to work.
But an employee utilization rate of 100% isn’t always the goal because that may indicate your team is spread too thin and could lead to burn out. It also doesn’t include time training and improving their skills.
How to improve:
If your utilization rate is consistently well below 100%, it may indicate that you do not have enough clients for the amount of employees, so increasing your marketing efforts would be beneficial. You can always look first to your existing clients and ask for referrals if they know of anyone who could benefit from your services.
If your utilization rate is consistently at 100%, you may need to consider hiring.
4. Cancellation Rate
Your cancellation rate is the percentage of clients that cancel their appointment outside of your cancellation policy or clients that just don’t show up at all.
Calculate your cancellation rate by taking your cancellations/no-shows for a certain time period divided by total appointments as a percentage.
How to improve:
Cancellations are a frustration for many service providers and can significantly affect your service and bottom line.
If no shows and cancelltions become an issue, it may indicate the need to charge for no shows to reduce the frequency and have it not affect your profit.
5. Client Acquisition Cost
To calculate client acquisition cost, figure out how much you spend on marketing activities (including any referral incentives) and how many new clients that generated. Divide marketing expenses by new clients in a given time period to see how much it takes to acquire a new client.
How to improve:
Make sure that you are clear on your target market and that you are marketing in the right places to reach that group.
In order to reduce marketing costs, you can also look at implementing inexpensive or free options, such as social media and automate your marketing as much as possible.
Focus on Your Clients
These KPIs will help you spot areas of improvement so you can build plans to better your business and measure progress towards your goals. But they can be time consuming to keep on top of.
That’s why it’s good to have an accounting partner, such as Leichter CPA. We’ll manage your accounting and financials while you concentrate on the mental health of your clients.
