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Megan Walker: Hello and welcome to Market Savvy Conversations. My name is Megan Walker and today our special guest is Kaye Frankcom. Hi Kaye, how are you?
Kaye Frankcom: Good Megan and how are you?
Megan Walker: Very well, thank you. Kaye is a very well-respected and experienced clinical psychologist. I work a lot with Kaye and she has a really interesting story to talk about how she's built up and sold a traditional psychology practice through to having a business with a difference now, which we'll hear about. In the process, Kaye has created two amazing books and we're going to be talking today about the role that those business books have from a business perspective, for those of you who feel like you've got a book in you and the pros and cons of creating this sort of material. Kaye, kick us off. Tell us about your background and how you got started and the practice that you ran before today's current metamorphosis.
Kaye Frankcom: Sure, sure. Basically in terms of talking about books, couple of things to say. First of all, I'm a product of two teachers as parents and their siblings were all teachers. So, there's something in me that has this need to teach. Of course, I've got into training and things like that but I think sometimes if you got a teacher in you, then you've also have a book in you. If I hadn't become a psychologist, I would've gone on and been an English literature academic. I love books. That's the first thing, I am a book lover and I like to talk and I like to teach. Ask my children, I like to lecture as well.
Megan Walker: Free for them.
Kaye Frankcom: I'm not short of an opinion. I think how I came to being interested in the idea of putting a book together was that the practice I set up in Melbourne 25 years ago and sold back in 2017, that practice was an evolutionary process. I didn't start off being the person I am today knowing what I know about business today and what I know about clinical standards and clinical governance and all the things I've got to be known for. I actually had no idea in many respects, like many people. So I really struggled with basic accountancy. Like many, I probably propped the business up for a good five, six, seven years with my own income whilst trying to build a business, recruit people, supervise them, develop my own policies and procedures and so on and so forth. Eventually by the time I got to that point of realizing that a lot of people are doing this, so this is now perhaps about 2012, 13. Medicare comes in for psychology in 2006.
People started going into private practice because of it but it really all started around 2010, the time of the national regulatory scheme that we now know as being AHPRA, and the Psychology Board of Australia for our profession. Any case, so I got going with that whole idea of needing to have policies and procedures that Australian Psychological Society produced a set of private practice standards. I thought to myself, "Oh, see how I go." I had a look and I went, "Er, well there's a few things to fix up here." So, I spent probably a good year with help from my lawyer-in-training daughter who was having a year of uni, just doing policies and procedure, and realizing there was really a dearth of guidance. The APS had some sort of a checklist, but where were the templates, where were the things that we would need? In order to be safe and in order to be able to work in a way that people found that the work we were doing together was quite quality.
At the same time I got very interested in outcome measurement and the idea of how would we know if we were any good as therapists? So, was I any good as a business person? Was I any good as a therapist? These two ideas came together and I guess I started thinking to myself, how do people decide whether they should go into private practice and what do you need to get started? So the first book in 2016 was born, Fit to Practice, and I wrote that with Bruce Stevens and Bill Watts and two others, clinical scientists. Bruce is now retired, Phil is over in the West Australian [inaudible 00:04:46]. So that's where we began.
Megan Walker:
Fantastic. Okay. So tell us about the work you do now. You've sold your practice and what is the day in the life of Kaye Frankcom look like now?
Kaye Frankcom:
Well now it's a lot of people sending me emails and asking questions, as I call it that little conversation, that psychologist, they come very close to you say, just ask you something. Which is really their way of saying, I'm going to ask you something that I'm too embarrassed that I don't know the answer to or I think it's so stupid and dumb that I don't know the answer to it, but I can't ask anybody. And what's really apparent is that everybody's asking the same questions, which is what do I need to do to be safe? What do I need to do to do good work? How do I know what I need in my business? What do I do that's different if I'm in a solo practice situation, running a group practice or I need to scale up to running a group practice or running something bigger.
Is there going to be accreditation? What's the Medicare Better Outcomes Report going to say? Is NDIS going to change? What should I do for recruitment? It's so hard to find good psychologists at the moment and so it goes on. It's just like a tsunami of questions both in the business, clinical governance, therapists trying to deal with therapists and clinicians and then with the actual clients themselves.
Megan Walker:
You've got your coaching services, your supervision.
Kaye Frankcom:
I have.
Megan Walker:
And Fit to Practice, just touch on that book that you just held up. What does a person gain from that book? What does it cover A to B?
Kaye Frankcom:
Well, the thing to say about this book and why I like it. One, it's 25 bucks, it's a steal. And even though we wrote it six years ago, it's probably as relevant now as it was then. it basically goes into things like how do we get where we are now? How would you know if you could set up a private practice and what would you need to think about? It goes into managing the pressures of private practice. How do we implement outcome measurement? What are some of the things you need to look out for in terms of report writing, dealing with difficult clients, difficult clinicians, record keeping, all sorts of stuff. I guess it's sort of at a basic level would allow somebody to set up practice and feel pretty confident if that they'd read this and they followed most of what is in it, that they were probably on the way to hopefully some level of success. It was a baseline sort of story where there was not a lot of others writing in that space and there still isn't.
Megan Walker:
Yeah. Did it then morph into the online course that you've got?
Kaye Frankcom:
That's right.
Megan Walker:
Tell us about that.
Kaye Frankcom:
The online course is called the same name and it's obviously on my website. But then what happened was I realized, this is all very well but it's pretty dry and it's not a big book but still you have to plow through it. And we did write it in a conversational way, but some people prefer to get their information visually. Four 20 minute webinars professionally video recorded, and four workbooks. Again in those domains, clinical practice, business practice, clinical governance, and just an overall model of care, how you actually put the whole thing together. That was sort of my, I guess I talked to myself, that the book, that the original book really needed that book into it so that people could interact with the material and look at their own practices. When they look at the workbooks, there's all these templates and I guess everything from what should a treatment plan template look like through to what is a business plan and how can you complete that?
Because most people do not complete business plans. They do what I did originally, which is just hang on a shingle and get started. But look at one level, there's not necessarily that much wrong with that, but of course you're just making mistakes and errors and you're just learning really fast when basically I feel like saying, well we've got actually here the story of how to get started without you having to reinvent the wheel. Why would you pay somebody 25 bucks for that and going to the online course and your CPD is just about done for the year, [inaudible 00:09:16] surely. That just was my idea back then. But of course on the journey, Megan, I met along the way some colleagues. I'm now talking about Aaron Frost, Daryl Chow and Nathan Castle and RaeLynn Alvarez Wicklein who are my co-authors. I thought to myself, yes, thank you, wouldn't it be fun to write a book with a committee.
Megan Walker:
A committee.
Kaye Frankcom:
I must have been out of my mind. They very kindly accepted me as a benevolent, benevolent dictator editor/lead author. I cracked the whip a bit through COVID. They all had, were homeschooling and doing God knows what running their practices. But between us we managed to write a 340 page book, spend an absolute God knows how much money on printing it because printing costs has gone up so much over COVID and delivered it in October this year. But we're very proud of it. We think it's a really unique piece of work and we're getting a lot of good positive feedback.
Megan Walker:
Fantastic. And it's called Creating Impact. What can we learn in this Kaye, tell us?
Kaye Frankcom:
Well the main thing I think is that it's basically saying, a lot of people say to me, oh, that's all very well, but I'm a solo practitioner. I don't know that I need to know all this stuff. I said, you probably need to know it more than actually group practices need to know it because you don't have an admin person who can go and look up stuff for you. You probably don't. So it's really important that you have practitioners talking to you, practitioner to practitioner. The book, it basically has, I would say it's three generations of psychologists. There's people like myself, I'm obviously the oldest of the group then RaeLynn's slightly younger than me and then Aaron and Daryl are around the same age and then Nathan is an early career psychologist. So we basically got the whole gamut of people in different life stages, different states and operating different business models. Aaron's got a very large one, one of the largest group practices probably in Australia, RaeLynn's just started a group practice having worked on her own for a very long time.
Nathan's starting a practice in regional Victoria and Daryl Chow is of course our world expert. He's our international jet setter, working a lot with Scott Miller and people like that. He has an appointment also in the University of Singapore and he's probably one of the world leaders in publishing around deliberate practice and outcome measurements. So it felt to me like I had the band, we got the band together and we went on the road and such is what came from that. I think it's a good story, it has interesting case studies from each of our experiences. Everything from how Nathan evaluated his own practice and not doing anything terribly high tech, basically just setting up if you're like a scientist practitioner model in his own practice where he actually wanted to evaluate his own capabilities and see who we work best with and be able to look at the data, not make a guess.
Then we've got through me writing about leadership and culture, RaeLynn wrote about some of her experiences of trying to implement outcome measurement in a large non profit. Aaron Frost writes about the whole business of digital health and digital transformation, which of course is really important. Supervision, deliberate practice, clinical standards, business planning, everything is in there. Everything that you wished somebody taught you in your masters or in your training, we went and sort of got the latest stuff on it and we put it all together and sieved it through our own experiences and then put it in the book.
I think the main thing I keep getting back from people to say it's a surprisingly easy read and I suppose that's good because we didn't mean it to be a textbook that you put on the shelf. We wanted to be something that you dip into and dip out of and get a lot out of and at the moment you can buy also the ebook is thrown in as a bonus if people are interested. You can use it with your staff, you can give it away as a Christmas present to somebody. You can do what you like with it, it's really an all purposeful book.
Megan Walker:
I'm very grateful to have a copy in my hands, relatively hot off the press and I have started reading it and as a layperson I can follow it. So you not over anyone's heads either, which is hard to do.
Kaye Frankcom:
It is.
Megan Walker:
It is, any idiot can overwhelm someone.
Kaye Frankcom:
Yeah.
Megan Walker:
And Kaye I wanted to... Oh sorry.
Kaye Frankcom:
Yeah, that's all right. Go on.
Megan Walker:
I wanted to ask you as well, for people listening, you and I have been working together on that course creation side and a lot of people who will be listening to this will be wanting to create courses for other health professionals, for their peers and also write books for their peers. What's your thoughts on the crafting the book process, the getting started, the idea, the writing, the editing, what comes, what's the sequence?
Kaye Frankcom:
Well, I think the difference is all of us want to write the book or write the course rather than think about how are we actually going to get the message out there. Isn't that the case? You and I have seen this, I've seen it in myself. I'd have to say that with my online course, the Fit to Practice course, I basically had it written before I did the training with yourself and when I looked at it I went, "Oh, that's why that didn't work." I think really understanding how you engage with the market that you and the readership that you are looking for, the people who you want, whether it's a general community or fellow professionals. I mean there's only 45,000 psychologists in Australia. It's not the most massive market you ever came across. I think it's also thinking about, is that as far as you want to go, do you want to collaborate with other people who are interested in a certain area of practice or some particular presentation that is your particular specialty?
I think I'd be thinking about how can I actually work with others because I'd say that being able to share a project like this is actually a lot more fun and enjoyable and it also than doing it on your own because I think it actually allows you to not be second guessing as much as psychologists tend to be because we are cautious of all devils. And you not saying to yourself, [inaudible 00:16:22] perhaps I should go and check the literature again. You can get yourself into a business where you're second guessing your own opinion. I think having either fellow authors or fellow contributors with you or if you don't want to do that, I would really suggest you try and have your own, what I call personal board of directors. So people whose opinion you trust and who have the capacity to challenge you, to put an alternative view, who also will support you when you're feeling a bit like you've got in the doldrums with it.
As I did plenty of times over COVID thought this book's not going to happen or I think of each of the authors in turn and think how I wanted to strangle them because they weren't doing whatever it was I wanted them to do and they weren't responding to my emails. Then a few weeks ago [inaudible 00:17:16] the email that comes saying, oh the wife's had COVID and the kids have COVID. Then I feel like a really nasty person that I've been thinking all these frustrating thoughts about them. I think it is about having people on your team, whether the team is an in-house team, all in the team together writing a book like we did or whether they're people who are in the tent with you, backing you up, supporting you, you may have to pay some of those people to do that. Again, sometimes Allied Health people, we can be a bit shortsighted in the payment department. We don't realize that we expect people to pay us for our services and we probably have to pay for theirs.
But you can come to arrangements with people, you can obviously have them acknowledged in whatever it is you do. I've just spent some time probably over the last couple years helping two regional psychologists putting together a policy and procedures manual for solo practitioners, I'm so excited that they finally got it there. I've been paid for some of the work I've done, but I've done heaps of stuff with them with I didn't get done before and it's because I believe in it. I believe that they need to deliver this product because the market needs it. I'm hoping I'd be able to say to them, don't do what I do, watch the course and then go, "Digital marketing, how's that work again?" Because really you need to think about how you [inaudible 00:18:41] with the audience early on and have a plan and consider that as almost like another book if you like.
Megan Walker:
Yeah. Amazing. So Kaye, how can people get in touch with you? Where can they buy the book? First of all, purchasing Creating Impact and also Fit to Practice.
Kaye Frankcom:
Fit to Practice is only purchased from Australian, sorry, Australian Academic Press on their website. Creating Impact has its own website because we've self-published it, now that is a whole other story. Creatingimpact.com.au. You can just purchase it straight off the website. Please do and as I say, get your bonus e-book as well.
Megan Walker:
Absolutely. And it allows Kaye to do other amazing work for remote people.
Kaye Frankcom:
I do. Look, I just hope that people get something out of it. We've had some people write to us and obviously dispute some of our views. Very happy to hear that. But I guess I'd say get yourself a decent publisher. You don't have to have one who is the publisher, like a publishing house. But editing is really important and be prepared for the idea that a 340 page book will cost you 25 grand to print because paper in Australia is very expensive.
Megan Walker:
Expensive. And how did you find your publisher?
Kaye Frankcom:
Our publisher is a woman called Jackie Lane and she's thebookadvisor.com.au and she does business books. There's a number of others around and if it were me, I would go and interview some of these people and just see who's interested in your kind of book. They don't necessarily have to know anything about a health book, they just have to know how to self-published. I think it's an evolving market where some of them now could help you to not just publish it and print it yourselves and distribute it yourselves, but actually to make a connection with your booktopia's and book depository and so forth without giving them 75% of the profit, which is what you would be paying if you published it through them. So this is the reason, some of the issues to think about is it can cost quite a lot of money to actually publish a book, not just the printing, but imagine you're paying something like an advisor like Jackie Lane and other people, graphics people, proofreaders, et cetera and it's all a quite expensive exercise and we've racked up a debt as a result.
Well, I don't have it [inaudible 00:21:18] group and whether we, hopefully we'll break even, but it's yet to be seen. I think it is about thinking about what's going to happen to the end product. Because a lot of us get into the weeds. We get involved in putting our program together, our online course, our book, or whatever it is because it's where our passion lies. But you need somebody who's a realist to say that's going to cost X, how are we going to find the money for that? I think I just sort of plowed on racking up, as I say, quite a substantial debt, but I'm in a different stage of life to many people. I'm able to do that, but I couldn't recommend it as an approach. I think it's better to have a plan and to spend some time learning how to be this thing called a book publishing person or an online course publishing person. And like most things, if you pay for it's probably going to be of value. Do courses, speak to people, spend time on it, it won't be wasted.
Megan Walker:
Yeah, absolutely. And a couple of keynote presentations Kaye, that's all you're away from, two presentations away from a lovely payback there.
Kaye Frankcom:
I hope so. I hope so.
Megan Walker:
Buy Kaye's book and visit kayfrankcom.com, looking for a paid consult or supervision or coaching.
Kaye Frankcom:
Sure.
Megan Walker:
Fantastic. Always so good to talk to. Any final thoughts before we wrap up?
Kaye Frankcom:
I think the great thing to say about any of these products, if you've got one in you, is that when you get towards the end of your career, and I've still got a few years left in me I hope.
Megan Walker:
Many.
Kaye Frankcom:
But when you do get to the later stages of your career, it's really a great feeling to say, I did that. I got my thoughts and my ideas out there and people really engage with it. And really you can do a lot of things, but to change the world in terms of your own profession and to give something back to a profession, the [inaudible 00:23:32] gave me so much. It's a pretty good feeling and you can't really buy that and you can't make it happen. You've got to actually do the work to get there and then hopefully you get to sit back and relax at some point. Could you tell me where that point is, Megan please?
Megan Walker:
With your wonderful legacy. Absolutely, Kaye, it's coming. All right. Thanks so much Kaye. Really appreciate your insights as always. Details below where you can get in touch with Kaye are below and we'll talk to you soon. Thanks Kaye.
Kaye Frankcom: Thanks everyone.
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