There is a specific kind of loneliness that comes with leading a successful group practice.

When we're first starting out, there are countless communities designed to support us. We can find resources about getting our first clients, navigating licensure, setting our fees, and building a caseload. There are workshops, networking events, podcasts, and online communities dedicated to helping clinicians take their first steps into private practice ownership.

But what happens when we've outgrown those spaces? What happens when our practice is established, our team is growing, and our responsibilities start to extend far beyond the therapy room? Many group practice owners discover that success brings a new set of questions—ones that fewer people around them can answer.

The skills that make someone a thoughtful, attuned clinician do not automatically translate into running a million-dollar organization. Running a growing group practice requires an entirely different set of muscles—muscles that grad school and supervision simply didn’t equip us to use. Unless, of course, your training included a module on large-scale decision-making and financial forecasting…in which case, I’m jealous. 

We practice owners often find ourselves trying to learn those skills in isolation, but maybe just maybe, we don’t have to.

The Challenges Change as You Grow Your Practice 

In the early stages of practice ownership, our focus was on establishing a solid foundation by building visibility and attracting clients. As practices grow, those priorities remain, but they become just one piece of a much more complex system.

At the $1M+ level, decisions carry a greater weight. A small inefficiency that once affected a handful of clients can now impact dozens of clinicians, hundreds of sessions, and the overall health of an organization. 

Leaders at this stage are often balancing multiple priorities at once: maintaining healthy profit margins, supporting team retention, strengthening organizational culture, adapting systems, and navigating their own evolving identities as leaders.

The DIY approach that helped build a successful practice can begin to feel limiting because we just simply can’t think up business or leadership strategy from thin air.

Leadership at this level becomes less about having all the answers and more about knowing where to find support and new perspectives when challenges arise. Community soon becomes an essential resource for your practice, aka knowing the right people to call.  But where do we find those people? 

The Transformational Power of Being in the Room

When we think about professional development, it's easy to focus on strategy. We attend workshops to learn new skills. We read books to solve problems. We seek expertise to improve outcomes. But transformation at this stage of leadership is often about much more than acquiring information; it’s about reckoning with leadership as a calling—an existential, vocational, and even spiritual one.

Becoming the leader your practice needs asks you to become someone new, and as therapists we know that identity is developed in the context of relationships. We need to be in rooms with peers at a similar growth stage, who understand the realities of our current season of leadership because they are living it too.

A Room Built for Where You Are Now

If you relate to this, Group Practice Con is for you. 

Group Practice Con 2026 is designed specifically for established group practice owners in the $1M–$5M revenue range. Rather than focusing on early-stage business challenges, the conference centers the realities of leading and growing an established organization.

Taking place September 9th–11th in Chicago, the event offers three days of actionable content, expert-led discussions, and opportunities to connect with peers who are building practices at a similar scale.

For leaders looking for both practical insight and meaningful community, it offers something that can be difficult to find elsewhere: a room full of people who understand exactly where you are.

Early bird tickets are available now at GroupPracticeCon.com. The conference sold out last year.

Image Credit: Ted Lasso

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