Welcome therapists and group practice owners! I’m Nicole McCance, a psychologist turned business coach for therapists. I built my group practice to 55 therapists and multiple 7-figures, and then I sold it.
You’re about to hear me contradict myself. For years I taught that your therapists should run your free consult calls, and I don’t teach that anymore. After coaching over 1,000 therapists and listening to their struggles, I now believe your consult calls belong to one trained intake coordinator, and your therapists belong in paid sessions. (If your stomach just dropped, stay with me. This is a smaller change than it sounds.)
P.S. Not a huge fan of reading blogs? (I’m more of a podcast girl myself) You can listen to my podcast episode all about this topic by clicking here or watching the video below!
Why I Changed My Advice on Who Does Consult Calls
Private equity firms and big tech have moved into our field with virtual therapy far cheaper than you can offer, so staying ahead matters in a way it didn’t eight years ago. This is what I kept hearing from my members:
- “My therapists just aren’t converting.” Maybe a few do, but not all of them, and there are too many to coach one by one.
- The ones who convert get busy, their availability drops, and the calls shift to the therapists converting the least.
- Clients book with the wrong therapist. Somebody in distress isn’t reading the whole team page, so they show up and ask “do you do EMDR?” when the answer is no.
- Some people book with two or three therapists at once to test them all out. (This happened in my clinic too, so no judgment here.)
So I interviewed coaches and agencies about what’s converting right now, and the answer kept coming back the same. An intake coordinator. I didn’t buy it right away, because we tried it at my clinic and it flopped. Looking back, I don’t think I trained our admin well, so she kept asking to put the therapist on instead.
What Is an Intake Coordinator in a Therapy Practice?
An intake coordinator is one person whose entire job is client acquisition. If cash flow is tight, this is your current admin with a new focus rather than a new hire (and if you do have the cash flow, make this person virtual).
They run every consult call, they run ClinicMonk™ (my CRM for therapy practices), and they match each caller to the right therapist. That last piece is what I underestimated. People are more impatient than they used to be, and they don’t want to read fifteen bios and choose. They want to say “here’s what I need” and have somebody do the matching for them. Keep these calls on the phone, because video mattered more when a therapist was on the other end.
Hot Tip: Your admin was never given the words, which is why this feels hard. Send me a DM on Instagram saying “CONSULT CALL SCRIPT” and I’ll send you my free guide! I’ve updated it for the intake coordinator with the matching questions built in.
3 Reasons Your Therapists Aren't Converting Consult Calls
- They were trained not to sell. Therapists are brainwashed the same way we were, to never feel salesy. Even booking four sessions upfront feels like too big an ask, and all of that shows up on the call.
- Nobody knows the conversion rate. An EHR treats a consult as a first visit, so pulling that number out is complicated, and most owners are asking people to improve a number nobody has ever seen. In ClinicMonk™ it sits on a dashboard.
- The consult call is nobody’s real job. Split across a team, it belongs to no one. One person with one goal checks the ClinicMonk™ pipeline daily and watches their own number.
What to Say When Your Therapists Want to Keep Doing Consults
Ask them why, and you’ll usually hear “I want to see if they fit my schedule” or “I want to see how comfortable I feel.” That’s pickiness, and in my experience you can be picky or you can be busy, but you can’t be both. Those are almost always the therapists with the lowest conversion rate, so go and look!
Here’s how to frame the change for your team:
- The intake coordinator is your gatekeeper, not your replacement.
- Every therapist gets notes in the matching sheet, so any client type that doesn’t suit you is on record.
- You get paid clients back to back, no unpaid consults in between, and your focus becomes retention.
Why Consult Calls Shouldn't Live in Your EHR
Booking inside an EHR means creating a profile with a password, and people abandon that step the same way you check out as a guest when you’re shopping online (I broke that down in my blog on why therapists need a CRM in 2026, not just an EHR).
So ClinicMonk™ keeps your leads somewhere separate until they book, and the follow-up you used to do by hand happens on its own:
- A ClinicMonk™ booking calendar, separate from your EHR, with no profile to create and your coordinator’s face on it.
- Pre-engagement texts and emails before the call, which lifts your show rate.
- An instant text the moment somebody cancels or no-shows.
- Your lead magnet sent automatically after a week with no booking, so they join your email list with permission and you’re the one they’re reading when they’re ready.
- A weekly summary of your leads, bookings and where each one came from.
My admin used to spend three hours a week on follow-ups and spreadsheets, roughly $300 a month of payroll that now runs on its own.
Your Intake Coordinator Is Your Sales Department
Things have changed in 2026, which means we have to pivot. The practices that convert will be the ones running a CRM like ClinicMonk™ with one person who owns client acquisition, because leads stop falling through the cracks when somebody is watching them.
Let your therapists focus on retention and paid client after paid client. They were spread too thin, and they’ll do better work doing what they love.
Want more strategies for growing your therapy practice? Follow me on Instagram and listen to the Business Savvy Therapist podcast for strategies and real talk about scaling a 7-figure group practice without burning out.
