Melvin Varghese:
Today's podcast session is supported by Upheal. So if you ask a therapist who's doing clinical work what the bane of their existence is, usually progress notes are in the top one to two. I'm not naming any names, but when I was doing clinical work, I remember I had several colleagues who would get so backed up on clinical notes. So they would end up spending their nights and weekends trying just to catch up. Honestly, who wants to do that? And this is where appeal comes in. Appeal is AI powered case notes. Now I know for many of us when we hear the word AI, where there's like a natural skepticism. And honestly, I had that skepticism as well until I got to meet with the appeal team and learn about some of the many ways that they are doing this in a way that is HIPAA compliant and also doesn't sell data to anyone and also protects our clients as well. You can learn more about Upheal and the awesome work that they're doing in the world by going to sellingthecouch.com forward slash upheal.

And upheal is spelled U-P and then H-E-A-L, all one word. And at checkout, be sure to enter the promo code COUCH25 to get 25% off your appeal plan for the first two months.

Hello, hello, welcome to today's session of Selling the Couch. I hope you're doing well, having an incredible day. So just a heads up, this episode, I wrote some outline, like a basic outline on it, but it's not highly scripted. Most of the STC podcasts are not, but this one is especially not super scripted because I just wanted to talk about this big decision we recently made, which was to shut down our nearly 10,000-person Facebook group. Archive it, actually. And I love when entrepreneurs talk about things like this, not just about the successes that they're having in business, but the pivots that they're making, or even the hard decisions that they're making.

So the intent behind this episode is to just pull back the curtain, because I know a lot of times when I hear episodes like this one, I'm really encouraged, and oftentimes I'm also encouraged to take actions that I may be considering. Or if it's something that I'm thinking about, it just gives me more of a holistic understanding of the topic. So just to kind of give you a background on this, I'm recording this in early August of 2024. I made a really hard decision, which was to archive our Facebook community. Just to give you a little bit of background on this, this Facebook community we actually launched in 2015. literally in parallel with the selling the couch podcast.

So it was right around March of 2015. And I remember in the early days of these like Facebook groups, I don't think a ton of them really existed back then. And our community grew. Well, literally in the initial stages, I invited about 30 to 40 of my friends from grad school and practicum and internship and my postdoc. And I was just kind of like, hey, guys, I'm creating this thing called the podcast. And I thought we could create a Facebook group so that we could talk about some of the conversations that we were having on the podcast just as a place to reflect and share and all of those kind of things. What I didn't expect is those 40 members would tell other colleagues and those other colleagues would tell other colleagues. And eventually, in the first several years, and this is very unexpected, but the team at Facebook had actually reached out. And I was invited to become a part of a what's called the super admins group. And so this is some of the top community like communities on Facebook. And And it was just a way to like, you know, connect with other admins to get early access to stuff that were happening and all of these kind of things. And the group grew and grew. And as of the time we archived it, it was right at just a little over 9700 members. And this decision, even though it was like one act, right, of just closing it or sending a note, letting colleagues know that we were archiving it, it was actually a decision that I had been weighing for many years, even stretching back to when the pandemic started. And I kept putting it off mainly because, I mean, it's a lot of energy and time and resources spent to create a community of that size and to maintain it. And honestly, if I'm just being completely honest, I think there's always this part of me that struggles with people-pleasing and I worried a lot about what colleagues would think if I archived that group, whether they would think I was a quitter or some way like have a negative impact on me professionally or on selling the couch or any of those kind of things. And ultimately, what I came to realize is decisions like this, I kept trying to figure out, okay, is there one reason why we should keep the group going? Or is there like one solid reason why we should archive the group?

And the reality is decisions like this are often multi-layered. They are complex. And I wanted to use today's episode just to articulate what the major factors are that went into a decision like this. I have six things for you. And just to kind of give you a heads up, I'll just kind of briefly outline them. So one is around caregiving outside of life. Two is around this question of enoughness. Three is really thinking about what is a sustainable social media posting schedule. Four is just the toll that managing a Facebook group takes on one's mental health. It's something that I think a lot of Folks when I've talked to that are admins of Facebook group talk a lot about but I don't think it's like a publicly talked about topic. Five was just realizing again what is my enough when it comes to social media. And then finally, I have a bonus thing around exactly how I think about social media, and that not all channels are created equal, and trying to just think through that. And yeah, so let's dive right in. So the very first thing that I shared with the group is, you know, Both Susan and I are entering a season where we are potentially going to be caregivers for both sets of parents, right, on some level. I think the level of responsibility will really just vary up with the season. Both of our parents are in their 70s and early 80s, and I feel like things are accelerating faster than ever. And I feel like, especially in the last year, I can just tell there's just some things that I'm just kind of reading in between the lines and being like, oh my gosh, this is not what it was like five years ago. There's things they can do and they can't do that, you know, we used to take for granted. And, you know, even just with my own situation, right, parents live in a suburb of Dallas, and I can definitely see a situation where we do spend some extended time, probably in the summers, down in Dallas.

And so essentially, we would have like two home bases, one in Dallas, and then one here in Philly, just to kind of account for this. And so even as I have built STC, at times I felt like, oh my gosh, this is such a slow build out, are you being too overanalyzing stuff? But one of the things I've just realized in the midst of this decision is I'm not making just a decision about business, right, but I'm also making a decision about sustainability and ultimately what is the role of business in my larger family life. And one of the things I've really been working on when I got licensed in 2012, from 2012 to 2015, 2016, I was working five and a half days of clinical work and between doing assessments and therapy, and that didn't include some of the case notes that had to be written. And I knew that I was willing to do that for a season, but it was not a sustainable model and one that I even wanted.

And so over the past several years, I've really been honing in and saying, like, what are the hours that I want to work? What are the days I want to work? What is like my pace and what does success look like for me and my family? And it's been just a lot of work. And I realized that the ultimate, one of the major reasons why I was asking that question, it wasn't really clear in the early stages, but it's because, again, we have aging parents and there's going to be times where we have to take them to doctor's appointments or it might be a surgical procedure or we have to make really hard decisions. and I realized that inevitably emergencies and these situations are going to come up and I just didn't want to drop like STC things and disappear for a season. When I've talked to several friends who are in seasons of caregiving, the one consistent thing that they tell me is, Mel, leave more bandwidth than you think you need. And so I've just been thinking a lot about that, especially as we enter this season. The second reason that we decided to archive the community is, you know, my goal with STC, when I first started it in 2015, I didn't have a background in business or marketing, and I kept learning a lot about online business.

And I, if I'm just being completely honest, I think I was drawn to both the freedom that online business offered, but also the revenue potential that it offered. What I didn't realize is that as businesses grow, there's inevitably more responsibilities that you have. And then at some point, you need to hire a team and manage people and all of these things. And so the question that I've often been asking myself is, do I want the successful version of this? And I thought a lot about the Facebook group, right? It's at 9,700 members. Even though our particular Facebook group has honestly been relatively drama-free, there have been times where things have kind of flared up. And I just kept thinking, man, if we keep growing this also, Like, do I really want the successful version of this? Like, you know, 20, 30, 40,000 people and all of the on the surface? Yeah, it looks like you have a large Facebook group, but all of the back behind the scenes, things that you have to navigate. I just came to realize that at least in this season, I don't think I have the bandwidth for it. The other little nuance of this is my own definition of success has changed over the past years. It went from just focusing on followers or revenue to really focusing on freedom and really being content with limited growth. Limited growth meaning growth that feels good enough for the season of life and the business that I want to build.

This actually reminds me of a conversation that Ali Abdaal and Sahil Bloom had, I would say a couple of years ago. And one of the things that I believe it was in this conversation that Ali talked about, and both of them have built some figure businesses, and Ali Abdaal is a Cambridge educated physician who became a YouTuber and went full-time on YouTube. And one of the things that Ali talked about is that it's really hard to both create a lifestyle design business and a revenue producing one, i.e. like if you're going to aim for like, you know, 1 million plus or even 500,000 plus, it's really hard to do that and optimize for full freedom. And inevitably, most entrepreneurs have to make decisions about what they want to optimize for. Are they okay with limited growth, but more time, freedom and flexibility? or are they good with maximum revenue, but it comes potentially at the impact of freedom. And I decided to just, again, partly because that first reason around caregiving that I really wanted to build something around just setting up, you know, freedom at the end of the day. Just wanted to take a moment to thank the team over at Upheal for supporting today's podcast session. Upheal is AI-powered case notes. Now, I know for many of us there's a natural skepticism around AI, but the Upheal team actually uses a third party to make sure that all of the software that they're using is HIPAA compliant, GDPR certified, and all of these different things. The very cool thing with this is, now, Upheal might make perfect sense if you're doing telehealth sessions, right? You run the Upheal software in the background and it basically captures the information during therapy sessions and then generates case notes based on how you want them, whether it's SOAP or DAP or any of those other kind of sessions. But you can also use Upheal for in-person sessions as well. You can learn more about Upheel and the awesome work they're doing in the world over at sellingthecouch.com forward slash upheel and be sure to enter the promo code couch and the number 25 all one word for 25% off your Upheel plan for the first two months. This is actually a non-advertised special so be sure to follow that link and check it out.

The third reason I just mentioned is, you know, I have found a really good and sustainable podcast cadence with podcasting, YouTube, LinkedIn, and then our email newsletter. And then we basically take the content of our audio podcast, we turn the video on, so it's on YouTube. We synthesize all of that and then put that into a blog post. I've tried a lot of times to integrate the Facebook group into the flow of this right between these channels. But what I inevitably end up doing is doing like a lot of drive by marketing, which is basically posting without like engaging or posting, but then only have it being able to engage like a day or two later. It's not really a good way to build community. And again, this is stuff that I've just sort of picked up and learned, you know, building both the Facebook group, you know, a couple of years ago, I built Twitter audience to just under 5000 followers. LinkedIn, where I'm really active on, as I record this, we're a little over 3300 followers there. And our YouTube channel is our newest channel, but we are growing. I mean, we've grown from about 100 to about 400, I think 412 as of this morning here in the past year. And so I realized that it's not that sort of drive by marketing. I talk a lot about that in podcast episodes. I see a lot of our colleagues doing this where they will try to post on multiple social media channels, but not actually meaningfully engage. Because I know I sometimes forget this, but part of social media means that there is a social component, right, that you have to engage in. So I just don't want to do the whole drive by marketing.

I actually don't think also from a like a brand perspective, I don't think it's like a great idea, because I would rather be known as somebody that is friendly and affable and engaging on social media versus somebody that's just creating content. The fourth thing that I mentioned is, you know, managing a community, a Facebook group, especially one that I feel like is really anything over a couple thousand. It is. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of emotional bandwidth as well. I remember just even, just to give like an example of this, I remember during like George Floyd and navigating all of that, right, just having to step into leadership in a different way, which it doesn't come naturally to me. And I was so glad and like, and, you know, just humbled to be able to do that. but also at the same time just like how I handle things like there was like a lot of pushback and I inevitably realized that all I can do is do my best and that there's always going to be folks that that push back right and that's just one example but this has happened a few times and I realized that you know managing a Facebook community managing any sort of social media channel right It is about building community. And when I have the privilege and honor to do that, I want to be a good steward of that. I don't want to take just because I built something, I don't ever want to take it for granted. And one thing I realized is, and I shared this, I said, you know, between life, STC, private practice, raising now a six year old, and caregiving, I realize I just don't have the time or the bandwidth like before to lead the community well. And it's irresponsible of me to lead a community for vanity's sake. And in other words, I can't just let this fear of either disappointing people or being like, Oh, yeah, I built a 10,000, almost 10,000 person Facebook. I mean, I can't let that be a badge of honor. Because for me, like leadership is not just about the stuff you've done in the past, right? It's about what you're doing in the moment as well. The fifth reason that I came to was, you know, when I started STC in 2015, my goal was to be everywhere when it came to social media, I heard this little thing about like social media advice, which is like to diversify. And so I tried to be everywhere and I realized, and I think part of it is just my personality. I'm an INFJ on my Myers-Briggs. I like social media, but I need it in like small bursts. And I don't have it on my phone. The only place I really access social media is on my computer, on my desktop. But otherwise, I go about my life. And I've realized that my strategy and my goal with social media has really changed. It's gone from being trying to be everywhere to now doing less but better. And the combo of basically an audio podcast, YouTube, and LinkedIn, along with our email newsletter feels really good and really feels sustained.

The email newsletter My virtual assistant is able to create, is able to craft a good chunk of it. I'm able to go in and spruce things up. YouTube and the audio podcast is very sustainable at this point because we have an editing team for both of those. And I basically record a audio podcast and now we're recording the video. And that same content is getting posted to both video and, I mean, is getting posted to both audio and YouTube. And so it's not a ton more effort in that the only difference is now I have to submit both of the projects to the various editors. But we're still, you know, we're at just overall a great cadence with it. And then LinkedIn, we started that coming on, gosh, it's going to be to two years in two months, so in November, it'll be two years. And LinkedIn, to be honest, was a platform that I never thought I would actually post on because anytime I logged into LinkedIn, I just kept seeing like people's job updates. And I'm like, okay, so I can like cheer them on and be happy for them. But to actually create content on here, and LinkedIn is significantly changing. I'll do a future episode on LinkedIn and some of the insights we've learned, but LinkedIn I'm very active on. As I record this, we post there five times a week now, and we're really growing quite fast on LinkedIn. And just to even give some numbers, I started in November of two years ago, And we have over 500,000 views of our content. And so it's just been really interesting to see the growth on LinkedIn. Yeah. And I just feel like, I don't know, it's good enough. Right. And I'm in my early forties. My goal in life is not to be social media famous. It is to, you know, expend my creative energy. It's to serve our field. It's to build a sustainable business. But it's definitely not to get social media famous because I know that celebrity comes with its own challenges, especially with regard to safety and privacy, and I'm just not sure that I want to go down that path. Most certainly I don't.

And then the final bonus thing I just wanted to share with you is more around strategy and some of the things that I'm thinking about. So I've been active with selling the couch and active on social media since 2015. And I've tried a bunch of different platforms, Twitter, Instagram, and I think we briefly tried Clubhouse, very briefly. And we also tried Meerkat, not Meerkat, the other one. This is like way back in the day, but what I've generally discovered is there are two types of social media channels. And I think this could be a really good framework for you if you're trying to figure out like what social media channel to post on, especially if you want to use to market your practice and, or if you are diversifying beyond clinical income. So you've got a podcast and you're thinking about sponsors and all of those kinds of things, You want to write a book or launch a course or any of those things. But basically there are two types of social media channels. The first one what I call are discovery platforms. So these have some sort of a built in search feature.

So for example like a Twitter or a LinkedIn or a YouTube where literally you can search for content. The benefit of discovery platforms are that people can find your content online. You could also argue blogging is a discovery platform since you can search for it on Google. The only thing is blogging takes a little bit longer to, it's more sustainable for sure, but it takes a little longer to start up, right? The second type of social media channel is what I call relationship deepening platforms. So these are basically platforms that you create content on where trust is built. So examples include an email list example. Another example is something like a podcast. You know, I get so many really nice messages from colleagues that I've never met. And they're like, you know, Mel, I feel like I know you. I feel like I know your family. I feel like I'm just like so excited for you. Just like really nice messages. And I think part of it is because of the platform, right? People are hearing me and my voice for, you know, 25, 30 minutes at a time, week after week. And I think there's something just with, like, trust and connection.

There's also some recent data that came out from ACAS Media, which is kind of an analytics company, and they found that Among all social media platforms, podcasters are the most trusted online media personalities, and then YouTubers are second as well. And so what I realize is, you know, it's really hard to be active on more than one discovery platform. active meaning like not doing the drive by marketing thing without a significant investment of time or needing to outsource it. I'm not at a point where I like one goes folks to like those people to like comment for me on my behalf. I'm not sure if I even want to go down that route. But this is something I realized that a lot of folks on discovery platforms, right, if you're, for example, active on a LinkedIn and a Twitter or an Instagram or whatever it is, right, they will either they have a hard time kind of balancing all of them, or they usually will outsource that. And so you have somebody like commenting on their behalf, And, uh, I, I realize, you know, I've got one discovery platform, which is LinkedIn. And I've got like three at this point and four, if you really count the blog, uh, relationship deepening platforms between, uh, the audio podcasts, YouTube and blogging. Sorry, I meant three. And, and I, I feel like that's a good, oh, an email list. Sorry, that is four. And I feel like that's a good cadence. So one discovery platform in LinkedIn, and then four relationship deep link platforms between an audio podcast, YouTube, email list, and Why do I keep forgetting this fourth one? But I went blogging. And yeah, that's a good cadence. And it feels like that's success. And it feels really nice for my central nervous system. And so what does this mean for the community? And what exactly did I do? So I archived the group. And so this is an option that Facebook does provide for their groups. And that practically means instead of outright deleting it, Because the reality is, yes, you know, we, I founded the group, we had a wonderful admin team that helped moderate things. And so shout out to you guys for, thank you for doing that for all of these years. And, but the reality also is the members created content on there. And so the issue that I had was I was like, you know, it's not doesn't seem fair for me to just delete a group outright because people have like questions and given insights and all of that. So we archived it, which basically means you can search through some of the old posts in the group, but you cannot actually create new posts. The other benefit of this, and I was very transparent with the group, I said, you know, if something ever changes where I feel like I have more bandwidth or anything like that, I can always unarchive the group, which means that, you know, we would be able to like restart the group back up. I don't imagine that I'm about a month, four or five weeks from closing it.

And I feel like it was, it was a really hard decision. I felt a lot of emotions, particularly leading up to it. And then about Two weeks into it, but I think once those emotions settled I felt like recently I've just been feeling like yeah, that was a beautiful season and I felt like and yet it was the right decision to to archive it So what does this practically also mean for me? I am gonna be you know active on a couple of different channels and I would love love love to connect with you there and So first of all, if you're enjoying the audio podcast, consider coming over to YouTube and subscribing as well. You can go to sellingthecouch.com forward slash YouTube or you can just look up Selling the Couch or my name on YouTube and the channel will pull up. It's under my name, Melvin Verghese PhD is the channel. Also find me on LinkedIn. I would love to connect with you there. Again, that's under my name. And that's where I will be focusing much of the energy going forward. So again, if you are a member of our Facebook group, I just sincerely appreciate you being there. You are the ones that made the group what it is. And without it, you know, I wouldn't be able to do any of these things. And so I so appreciate you. And if you are someone that's debating creating a group or just navigating it, navigating owning a group, I hope that today's episode is helpful for you. I went back and forth on this episode. I didn't want to be bashing a Facebook group or any of that. That's not the intent at all. It's more about really asking yourself, what does success look like for me? And then whatever I'm building on, whatever platform I'm building on, Do I want the successful version of what this looks like? Have a great rest of your day and I will see you next time. Bye.

Narrator: Thanks for listening to the Selling the Couch podcast. For more great content and to stay up to date, visit www.sellingthecouch.com.

Melvin Varghese: Hey there, I hope that you enjoyed today's session. Thank you again for taking the time to listen all the way through. If you are a therapist and you're specifically in a season where you're a seasoned therapist and you are wanting to move from clinical to online course income, We actually have a specific mastermind for therapists who are doing this. So this is basically a group of really kind and supportive therapists who are also wildly successful as business owners. We meet together to build and grow and scale our online courses. you can learn more about that mastermind over at sellingthecouch.com forward slash mastermind all one word sellingthecouch.com forward slash mastermind thank you so much for taking the time to listen to today's session

00:00:00 – Introduction to Upheal and Podcast Overview
00:01:35 – Announcement of Facebook Group Decision
00:02:51 – Background on the Facebook Community
00:04:47 – The Decision to Archive the Group
00:06:14 – Reason 1: Caregiving Responsibilities
00:10:32 – Reason 2: Redefining Success and Enoughness
00:13:46 – Reason 3: Sustainable Social Media Strategy
00:17:10 – Reason 4: Mental Health Toll of Community Management
00:19:16 – Reason 5: Shifting Social Media Focus
00:22:05 – Bonus: Social Media Strategy Framework
00:26:53 – Archiving the Group: Practical Steps
00:28:17 – Conclusion and Future Engagement
00:29:21 – Final Thoughts and Mastermind Invitation