Ep 68 | Entering 2026!

Welcome back to the Empower LEP podcast. I'm your host, Janna Parker. I'm a licensed educational psychologist. I'm a group practice owner and I am the owner and a mentor at Empower LEP. We are entering 2026 and I thought this was as good a time as any to revisit the podcast that I have not recorded on in quite a while. It's been several months and yeah, I've taken a hiatus. There wasn't any warning. I know. I've had several requests to bring it back and I'm not quite sure if I'm going to be fully bringing it back, but we'll see. We'll see. Yeah, if you've missed me, I have missed you. I really, really enjoyed doing the podcast and I've just been taking a break and seeing what kinds of things I want to continue doing and if I want the podcast to be in the same format, if I want it to be at the same cadence and it really just needs to take a break. So I'm back at least for right now. I wanted to revisit this year or not revisit, but visit. I don't know. Think about this year 2025. We are rounding it out right now. It's December 27th and I had quite a year. I just listened back to a recording that I did in 2024 in September as we were coming into the new school year in September. And then I listened to the recording that I did at the end of 2024 beginning of 2025 and just it's really enlightening for me to see the progression of my practice and of empower LEP as I've gone through the years. So let's just, I don't know, we're going to just take a minute, do a solo episode and reflect on this year like I did last year at this time and think about what's coming up and what plans are for 2026. For those of you who've never listened to this before, I run a group practice in San Jose, California and Campbell. And I have been a practicing LEP since 2013. I was in schools until 2022 full time, but I announced entering 2026, right? So I have now been though in private practice since 2013 recently. I worked for another company until 2020 and so that was a good, you know, six and a half years that I did private practice learning from others and doing the practice of the educational psychologist without worrying about the business aspect of being an educational psychologist. And then I, at that point, you know, after almost seven years, I started my own practice. Okay, so I started my practice while I was working full time as a school psychologist and program specialist. I started my practice January 1st, 2020. So in a couple of days, I have my six year anniversary, six years. So I started solo practice, just me. I've gone through some employees. I've had a pretty good retention rate of employees and I'm currently sitting at 15 of us. So throughout 2020, I think in 2024, when I recorded at the very beginning of 2025, I had about 13 employees. And now we're at 15. Throughout this year, we've had, you know, couple of staff changes, but generally speaking, I've had quite a bit of staff for quite a bit of time. And, yeah, we're 15 strong. So I have, my admin has been on staff now for over a year. Oh my god, I have not picked up my phone since December 15th, 2024. Hallelujah. That has been the biggest game changer for this year. I've had the same admin. So I haven't had to deal with that turnover that I dealt with so much in the years prior. So that has been a huge win. And I have, there are five of us educational psychologists, one clinical psych, two SLPs and six special educators, slash specialized educators. And we're just like the strongest team right now. I'm so grateful for them. I'll say it a million times. And what have, what I've really realized as a group practice owner in this year, especially is, I mean, it was important before. And I said this last year, but I'll say it again, even more so. My focus and my responsibility to these people who work for me is of utmost importance. They are the lifeline, the blood of mind bad design, which is my company. So my focus has been on what can I do in my practice to ensure that they will be supported and I can retain my staff so that we can continue to be a stellar community based resource and provider. And I am creating a place where my staff feel supported and that they want to stay. So that's really where I've been focused and where I'm going to continue to focus. And it's why other areas I've had to, you know, pause or stop or change. So I just wanted to take you through a couple of those growing pains I've had this year because I think for any of you listening or considering doing something like this, these are just important things for you to know. Very transparent in the way that I share and the things that I share and I try to be humble and I've definitely made mistakes along the way, you know, and learned from so many experiences. And I try to bring that learning curve to you as the audience if you are thinking about doing something outside of the schools and in private practice. In the past six years that I have been in private practice, I mean this LEP world has just exploded and I'm so happy that people are finding their footing in the private practice world. I also continue to stand as a resource to people who are doing that. I have a group practice but most people who go out into private practice or do private work are not going to be group practice owners. Most are individual individual practice owners and whatever it is that you do is okay whether you work for somebody else, whether you are an individual practice owner, whether you are a group practice owner, it's all good. I always and will continue to hope that people are just inspired to do something that's going to help fill their bucket with the skills that they have whether or not it's in the school system or outside of it. What I'll tell you as a group practice owner, especially this year, like as my as my practice has grown, I find myself in much more of the business development day to day than I do in the client facing clinical practice day to day. That doesn't mean that I'm not doing as much clinical work because I'm still supporting my staff who are doing a lot more of the evaluations but I am doing a lot of that consultative work on case consultations and report writing and thing and like troubleshooting things like that. I have only done 13 assessments myself this year. I mean I was doing that's probably half about half of what I did the year before, maybe a little bit less than half of what I did the year before. These are like fully evaluations. I do do other stuff but full evaluation. So I only took 13 cases this year. I was supposed to have more but I ended up actually pushing them to some of my other staff because with staff I have this responsibility of making sure that they have enough business to feel like they are making a good wage. So while you can make more money, I don't even want to say more money. You can make money in private practice but you have to go get all that business. So a lot of my time now since I have so many psychologists doing assessment, a lot of my time now is spent making sure we get the business and it's been nice not answering my own phone because then I have fewer people asking for me which is also kind of sad because I'm like oh they don't want me anymore but that just goes to show that it's not just they're not just coming to mind by design for me. They're coming to mind by design because we take care of it. have built a reputation in our community as being a reputable company and provider, whether it's for private practice, assessments or for independent educational evaluations with school districts, we have the credibility and the kind of as a company we're reputable. So that's been really exciting. Also, you know, I do misclank care a little bit, but I still make sure that I get my fill. And I'm hoping to do a little bit more in next year, but we'll see. We'll see in 2026. Okay, so I did 13 cases. I have a networking tracker, where I keep track of every individual that I network with over the years. Sometimes people who are repete, don't get onto this list, but I did 90 direct networking meetings. Some of those people, I met at an event. Also, I met several other people at those events, but I did, they didn't make it onto my tracker. I try to get everybody on there, but sometimes there are just too many, it didn't happen. But I did get 90 people onto my networking tracker, which means I was either meeting somebody at an event, scheduling a professional meeting, whether it was in person or on a Zoom. I was having somebody meet in my office. I was going and visiting somewhere. So that's a lot of getting out in the community and making sure I'm staying connected to people. I also am open, well, I opened a new office, so a second location. So I know in 2024, I was talking about how I was expanding my Campbell location, which I did do. And we are still here. And it has been amazing. And then I wasn't necessarily looking to expand to another area right away. I was going to focus 2025 in Campbell, but the circumstance kind of fell into my lap where a colleague of mine wanted to share a space down in Morgan Hill, which is about 30 minutes from where I am. And I thought, she said, do you want to share a space with me? I thought, yeah, sure, why? Why not? Why not? Right? So we started down there. We have the same staff, so it's not like I had to hire additional staff for there. But I have hired some additional staff along the way. And we're kind of splitting time between the Campbell and Morgan Hill. So if somebody wants to be seen in Morgan Hill, they can. And we're starting to build intervention resources out in Morgan Hill, because one of the problems that we've had in Campbell is if we do an assessment for somebody who lives farther out that way, they're not going to come here for intervention, right? We do reading, writing, math, and executive function support. They're not going to come here for that. So I wanted to be able to provide support there, because there really are very few resources to support kids down in that area. And so, so yeah, we started there in about September. And we are now taking over more space in the same building just right across the hall. So we'll have the ability to have kind of more of what I have in this space, which is more of a community. So we have a couple, we have seven offices and a large waiting room. So we can see each other like staff can see each other. We can see families and kids as they come in and out. We're going to have something similar over there on a smaller scale, but at least it won't be just like one room. So I'm very excited about that. It's literally happening right now. And that was another thing where I was like, do I really want to do this right now? But it's in the same building. So I thought, well, if I, if we have to move, like, because at some point really soon, I'm sure we're going to grow out of just having one space. So if we grow into this second space, I'd like to stay in that same space rather than having to move somewhere else completely. So we are expanding in Morgan Hill. Speaking of my staff, I, eight of us got Orton Gillingham trained over the summer. So that's like over half of my staff. So we did that training for a week. It was amazing. We loved doing dyslexia assessment. And so the more we can know about literacy and Orton Gillingham based instruction, the better. So that was really great. Almost all of my psychologists went. So I felt very, very thrilled to have a team that was invested like that. So that was great. And then speaking of like supporting my staff, because I've had staff with me now for a certain amount of time, like if you have an employee, you have to offer a retirement plan. And so everybody has had a retirement plan, but it's been through the state, through CalSavers. And but because I had a different retirement plan and people have been with my practice for a long time now, I needed to shift to something different to support them and support myself because I'd like to save for my retirement too. So I went through this big process and I'm offering a 401k for employees who are eligible. So I have a couple of employees who are eligible for this 401k for 2026. And I just remember like going through this process of like learning about 401k plans and retirement and how these things work and you know, the company match and you know, profit sharing and all these different words and things that I didn't know anything about. And I learned about them because I am offering this plan and I have a financial advisor who has helped me through this whole process who has been so amazing because I would not have been able to do it myself. But at the end of the call with the plan provider, whatever, I just was like, you know, if my dad could see me on this call, like I felt like for real adult, you know, making decisions about my company's retirement plan. It was crazy. It was crazy. So that's what I'm doing. I'm offering a 401k to those who are eligible and it feels empowering. It feels really good to be able to say to my staff like, I've got you, you know, and like I want to provide, you know, despite the fact that like you have to provide something like, I want to provide something that's going to support my employees as they move into their futures. You know, I really have always wanted mine by design to be a place where my staff could come and feel like they were really able to come and work and do their best work, do the work that they want to do and also feel supported financially and not scared that they don't know where their next paycheck is coming from. So those things have been really important to me. And so in doing those kinds of things and really focusing on the like my company culture and the well-being of my staff, I've had to make other decisions that where I've had to pull back resources that I was previously spending. So like in 2024, I went like all out on Empower LEP, I spent a lot of money, you know, just because I can't I can't do all the things myself, but like financially and the time that it was taking me was holding me away from where I knew that my focus probably really didn't need to be which was with like my actual staff. So like I'm over here trying to support all of you to be an empowered LEP, but my I have to have the time to like be pouring into my own staff, right? Because that's like that's where my like real real company is not Empower LEP is a real company. And by the way, that's one of the things that I did in 2025 was I separated out mine by design and Empower LEP because Empower LEP is a consulting company. And so one of the things that my attorney advised me and I thought this was true was that like I should not be, I should have different businesses because I'm not using my LEP license to be a consultant to other LEPs, right? So I wanted to separate those out for that reason among others. And so now they are separate businesses, but I really wanted to focus just more of my time and resources on mine by design because like it, things have been flow in business, right? So you have to have, and I think I talked about this in my in my September 2024 solo episode, you have to have like a healthy profit margin in order to be prepared for anything that comes. And so I mean, I know already like two reputable companies that are going out of business in 2026. And it's scary out there you guys. So in order for me to ensure that mine by design is thriving, I had to make decisions that were going to make it so that I was spending less money on some things so that I could have more of a profit margin so that I can do things like offer for a 1K so that we can expand into Morgan Hill. So that I have a cushion for if things went awry and I had, you know, like all the money that's in the business is really there to support and continue to fund the business. And if I don't have that and something were to happen, like I have to keep this business afloat for the people who were here. So those are like the kinds of things that I've been thinking in my mind and the kind, like some of the reasons why I've had to make different decisions about, you know, the production of the podcast and my marketing efforts and things like that. So you probably have noticed that obviously I haven't done podcasting in quite a while, actually just because of the production and also that I've been doing less marketing and it's really because I've been really considering where I need to spend my time and my resources and my own focus and energy. So those have been really important decisions to make and things to kind of like internally go like, "Janna, you literally can't do everything all the time." So I've had to be with that and sit with that and the word of 2025 for myself was simplify in my word for 2026's focus. So I really, really need to focus in 2026 and I think I'm in a very good place to do that. So I'm really trying so like I've kind of simplified kind of reigned in where I'm putting my focus and now I'm really going to focus on those things. So yeah, I've had to be really strategic about that. Some other things that I did this year that I just want to celebrate is I took because I wasn't busy enough. I took a job with Riverside Insights and I have been training school districts on the Woodcock Johnson 5 and I've done over 20 trainings since August all over mostly Northern California and that has been really enlightening. I opening for me and I've really enjoyed it. So I really love training and I really love assessment. And so becoming a Riverside Insights trainer for the WJ5 has given me a lot of insight into that assessment tool and it made me better for my own assessments as well as for my like to support my staff. It's also put me in front of so many educators and so it's like being in private practice it is I don't like have as much of a pulse on schools anymore in school employees. So this has been a way for me besides us doing IEEs. This has been a way for me to just like really just still be with people who are working in schools which I really love. And so I've enjoyed supporting school psychologists and administrators and special educators on learning how to use this assessment tool and yeah I don't have to make up my own content which is really nice. And it's yeah just gotten me in front of a lot of people. What's really cool is when I'm somewhere and they're like oh I listened to your podcast. Oh my god. So that's been fun. I did a couple other trainings this year. I did cast in the spring. I did cast in the summer. I did cast in the fall and I did NASP in the spring. And next year as we come into 2026 I'm going to be at NASP. I'll be doing that and I'll be doing the, oh what's it called. The California Association of Speech and Language Pathologists and then also one for SELPA administrators. And so that should be interesting because I'm talking about something new. But I love giving trainings and originally I was thinking that Empower LAP was going to be like a platform for continuing education and things like that and for business development. And while I really wanted it to be that I realized that like I like doing live trainings and I love doing live mentoring. And I said that last year and I'm going to say it again now that through Empower LAP and like developing this platform I've really had to think about what is the most rewarding thing for me to do and where I want to focus and spend my time and it's really with mentorship. I have never left a mentorship meeting with somebody not being like this has been so helpful. And like I love being helpful. And we did group for a while. We did it up through like close to the end of 2025. But what started happening, like full transparency, what started happening is like the people in the group were great but like people wouldn't always show up. So then sometimes we would just like it was just very hard to coordinate. So if people didn't show up they still got the recording but it was hard to kind of continue the momentum. And that was like hours out of mine and Meredith's time that we were setting aside to help and support people and it just felt like it needed a break. But I have done a lot of one-on-one coaching and that has been just like so rewarding for me. I think really rewarding for the people who participate in it. And so if you're thinking about doing that, like mentorship is really just whatever it is that you need. And so it's really just time dedicated to helping you solve whatever problems you're at because people have all the same questions but people are at different points in their LEP journey. And so I specialize anywhere from like I'm just starting out my business and I need to figure stuff out on the foundational level to higher level. You know, I'm like well into my business and I'm trying to figure out other things that happen a couple of years in or employees or benefits or HR or things like that because I've been there. I've done a lot of that at this point after six years. And then I also do a lot on report writing. You know, like in case consultation because being an LEP is not just like, oh, I'm a school psychologist and now all of a sudden I'm in private practice and I know what I'm doing. But people have all kinds of questions about cases and report writing and using the DSM and what's different about an IEE versus a private assessment. Like things are different. And the place to ask it is not a Facebook group. You know, if people ask questions in a Facebook group, like you're not going to get answers that are going to be like very thoughtful and more than like a couple of sentences. Like maybe, but if you're not having a back and forth conversation, I find it very difficult to give good advice or guidance in a Facebook group or on a Facebook post. But I am happy to do that one on one. You know, so those have been the kind of work through Empower LEP that I really love to do and I will continue to do it. So you can get that on the Empower LEP website and just sign up for time with me. So that's probably where I'm going to continue to focus Empower LEP is really just kind of on the mentorship front and potentially doing some podcasting still because I just love it. And yeah, I mean, so as I come into 2026, I am incredibly grateful for the year that I've just had. The relationships I've built with fellow LEPs, with people who have helped me in business, with my amazing staff, the things that I have learned, the things that I continue to learn. You know, if you, again, like I said this at the beginning, but when you have a practice that's like growing and I did, I wasn't, I wasn't going for revenue growth this year. I did grow in revenue. So this is my second year as a seven figure business and the revenue did grow, but what was more important was the profit margin growing because that helps with the stability and the financial health of the business. That is where I'm going to continue to hone my efforts for 2026. I'm, you know, empowering my administrative staff with a front office revamp through move forward virtual assistance. And so that I think is going to be really helpful for her. Like, whatever, I feel like whatever I can do to support the people who are working for me to help me. help them feel more confident in the work that they're doing every day, that's what I want to do. That's the kind of boss I want to be and that I am. I feel like I'm living it. One of my staff, I mean, I've had so many things, it's like when you're the boss of like people, things happen in people's lives and I was just talking to one of my stuff about this because so many of my staff this year have had some kind of like big life event that has happened for them. So many and I remember working in schools and when a big life event would happen and I don't have children of my own but I know a lot of people who have children and when something happens with their kids they feel like guilty about having to miss work to take care of something with their children. When something happened with my dog or if something happens with a parent or if just, you know, you get really sick, right? If something happens and you work in a school, I remember always feeling like there was guilt or like bosses have compassion fatigue where they just, they're like thinking like, well, how are we going to cover this more than how like, how am I going to focus on supporting this person? And so as a boss who has been having things happen in my employees' lives, to be able to like support them and recognize that they're going through something and and then have them say to me, thank you. That has been probably one of the most rewarding things that has happened all year is just feeling like my staff know that I am supporting them. That has felt amazing to me because I really am, I really do care. Yeah, I mean, that's been phenomenal for me. We're going to have our holiday party coming up on January instead of in December so that people feel nice and rested and ready to kind of like celebrate a new year. We did that last year and it worked out really well. And yeah, I mean, I'm just like looking forward to continuing to really focus on the things that are important for me in my primary business and you know, keep empowering LAP running and make it available for you to take advantage of and also just know that like I'm here for you if you need me and I love love love doing mentorship. And like at this point, I feel really confident that I can help people. I mean, I have felt it kind of like the whole way but like initially, I felt like I was kind of still like newer in business helping people who are newer in business. Now I feel like I am older in business and can still really help people newer in business and people who are more experienced. So yeah, I have definitely felt tremendous growth through all this. So yeah, that's it. I'm just like happy to be on here and talking to your ear off. And if you have any like thoughts, suggestions of things that you know, if you want to see more of the podcast, let me know if you want certain things on the podcast, let me know. I'm kind of open and we'll see. We'll see if I continue to do this. I'm going to actually try to just like produce this in an easy way. And if it's easy enough, then I don't see why I can't keep doing it. I'm thinking about doing some solo business episodes that are more focused and shorter as we move into 2026. Let me know what you think about that. You can always email me at [email protected]. You can also, if you want a faster response, email [email protected] because I check that more frequently. You are all wonderful. I really hope that everybody has a fantastic end of 2025 and beginning of 2026. And I am here for you if you need me and I will talk to you soon.