The Business Side of Supervision: Why the PRACTICE Domain Matters as Much as Clinical Skill
Most supervision, understandably, focuses on your clients — case conceptualisation, technique, ethics, your own reactions. All essential. But if you’re building or running a private practice, there’s a second job happening alongside the clinical one: running a small business. That side rarely gets the same attention, and the research suggests that’s a real gap, not just a minor oversight.
The training gap is real, and well documented
A 2013 study in The Professional Counselor found that counsellor training programs rarely include business-related coursework, despite roughly one in seven counsellors working in private practice. The authors noted that accreditation standards don’t require it, and that counsellors-in-training often described wanting something as basic as “entrepreneurship for dummies” just to get a foothold on marketing, budgeting, financial planning and the legal structure of a practice.
In other words: if you’ve felt underprepared for the business side of practice, that’s not a personal shortfall. It’s a genuine, documented hole in how counsellors are trained — which is exactly why I built a dedicated PRACTICE domain into the STEP-UP model, rather than leaving it to come up by chance.
What the PRACTICE domain covers
- Fee-setting, and understanding where you sit in the local market.
- Insurance, policies and procedures, and the paperwork side of running a compliant practice.
- Whether add-on services — EAP work, NDIS (etc.) — make sense for your practice, and what’s involved in taking them on.
- Time management and the realistic administrative load behind a full client diary.
- Referral networks and marketing — the practical side of being found by the clients you want to work with.
- Identifying gaps in your own practice, and where a supervisor with business experience can advocate or point you in a useful direction.
Why it belongs in supervision, not just “somewhere else”
You could, in theory, get business advice from an accountant, a coach, or a Facebook group for private practitioners — and there’s a place for all of that. But your supervisor already has full context on your caseload, your capacity, and your clinical direction, which makes them well placed to connect a business decision (like taking on more EAP referrals, or raising your fees) to what it actually means for your clinical work and your own sustainability. That’s the PRACTICE and self-care (“U”) domains working together, rather than in isolation.
Getting started
If the business side of your practice has been sitting in the “I’ll figure it out eventually” pile, that’s a reasonable thing to bring to supervision — including with me. Get in touch if you’d like to talk about what that could look like.
You can reach me here, or fill in the supervision enquiry form below.