Transcript
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Welcome to In the Clinic with Camille. My name is Camille Freeman.
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I am an herbalist and nutritionist, and in this podcast, I share little tips
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and tidbits for other practitioners.
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So today, I am really excited to bring in the first question that has been submitted
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on my brand new podcast website by Oren. Thank you, Oren.
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Before I answer this question, I just want to direct anyone else who's listening
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who might want to submit a question to the website, which is intheclinic.com.
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If you go there, you will see over on the right side, a little rectangular box
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that says, actually, I forget exactly what it says, but something like submit
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a question or submit a question to Camille, something along those lines with
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a little microphone on it.
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If you click there, you will open up a voice recorder and you will have up to
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two minutes to leave a question for me.
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I would absolutely love to answer your question relating to being in practice
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as an herbalist or a nutritionist or something related to those things.
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So if you get a chance, head over to InTheClinic.com and leave me a message.
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To get on to Oren's question, I will admit that I have not gotten my technical
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act together enough to figure out how to actually embed Oren's question into
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the podcast itself. self.
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So instead of doing that, I'm going to summarize what Oren said.
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And hopefully in the future, I'll figure out this technological wizardry and
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get it all sorted. But for right now, let's summarize the question.
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Oren essentially asked me, at what point do you need separate businesses for
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the different types of things that you do?
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And Oren was talking about how many practitioners have different components
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of our work, such as we might be teaching, we might have a clinic,
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some people have apothecaries.
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Oren has been doing some work with Ember Peters in creating programs,
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and they've thought about maybe creating a separate website for a school for that type of work.
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So at what point do you need to separate out some of these things?
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And when can all of your work live under the same umbrella?
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Now, as far as I have been able to think about this, there's really two separate
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questions here, I think, at least two.
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One of them is, at what point, from a legal accounting business perspective,
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do you need to separate things? So do you need separate business entities?
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Do you need separate bank accounts, etc.? So that's one part of the question.
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And then the other part of the question is, even if you do choose to keep everything
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under the same umbrella or different umbrellas, how do you present this in a
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way to your community that isn't confusing,
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it doesn't feel like a bunch of weird things are wedged together,
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and it also doesn't feel like things are so separated that they can't figure
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out all the different things you do. Yep.
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So let's address those two components of the question separately.
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Now, first of all, to talk about the business legal components,
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I would like to again highlight that I am not a lawyer.
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I am not a business professional other than having a business and working with people who do.
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But this is not an area of expertise for me. So I'm only going to pass along my initial thoughts.
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And I would really encourage anybody who's thinking about this to check with
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a lawyer or at least some kind of business accounting type of person in your area of residence.
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It's my understanding that from the perspective of like, do you need an entirely
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different business, that there would be a couple of times when you might want to consider that.
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One of them would be, of course, if you're going to open up a business that
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does something totally different.
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So if you are an herbalist and you decide you also want to open a bookstore
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or, I don't know, start selling garden shears or something like that,
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then you probably would want to have a whole separate LLC or business structure.
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And those would be just basically like having two separate jobs.
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Another time that you might want to think about it is if one portion of something
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that you're doing is more legally risky.
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The whole point of having a business entity or one of the points of having a
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business entity is that you are protecting your personal finances and separating
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them from your business finances when you have an LLC or beyond.
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And if you have a bunch of things that have different levels of risk in the
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same LLC, then they're basically all at the point of risk of the most vulnerable thing.
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So that would be something to consider, something to think about.
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There may be other times for tax purposes, etc., that you might want to think about it.
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But I think for the vast majority of people, it makes sense as much as possible
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to keep what you're doing under one umbrella.
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Because a lot of us are solopreneurs. We don't have a big staff.
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It's harder to do taxes for two different entities than it is one.
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You're going to need to have two sets of business bank accounts and two sets
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of accounting spreadsheets and all that type of stuff is going to be doubled
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if you decide to separate out business entities. Okay, so that's one part of the puzzle.
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The other thing to consider, though, is if you are going into business with someone else.
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So, for example, if Oren and Amber decide they want to have a whole school together
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and they want to have a partnership of some sort,
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then that may make sense because each of them also have their own separate things
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that they're doing that they wouldn't really want to co- what's the word I'm thinking of?
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They wouldn't necessarily want to be partners for all of their clinical work
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or teaching herb walks or things like that, but really just be these certain
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programs that they want to teach together,
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but they don't want to have one person who's doing it and just paying the other
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through their business.
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So in that case, maybe it does make sense to have a separate business entity
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for the school, and then they would each have their own kind of private practice,
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private business entities for whatever else that they're doing,
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however they want to structure that. So that's something that I would think about.
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And that way, again, you have when you go into a formal partnership with somebody,
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you come up with guidance and rules for okay, what happens? How are we going to split the money?
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What happens if one of us decides to step back or moves away from this business?
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You know, all of that just kind of gets hammered out in the beginning.
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And that seems like it makes a lot of sense.
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Again, I am not a lawyer. I am not a business expert. So run that by someone
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else. But that's something that would be on my mind if I were in that situation.
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The next thing, though, which I think is perhaps more what Oren was getting
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at, is around how do you present what you're doing?
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And at what point do you need to separate things out so that maybe there's a
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whole separate website for the school or a certain type of thing you're doing?
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And other things can all live together under one website.
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So how do you think about community facing descriptions of the different facets of your work?
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And again, I don't think there's necessarily a right or a wrong answer here.
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But what I would use as a screening tool is essentially anything that follows
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the same mission and values could live in the same sphere, in the same website.
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So for example, if your mission and values is about connecting people with plants
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or connecting people with the nature or their bodies or whatever it is,
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and you do that by teaching herb walks, leading herb walks in the community
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and seeing clients one-on-one and teaching classes about how to make salves or whatever it is,
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then all three of those things, while they are different and some people may
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only be interested in one component of them,
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they could all live in the same place because they all work together to the same end.
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And I think that that would be okay.
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If you have some part of what you're doing that doesn't really align in terms
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of mission and values with the other parts of what you're doing,
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then I think it may make sense to separate it out.
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I do want to, again, just warn you that as soon as you separate something out,
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you're adding an immense amount of complexity to your business because then
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what you have is, oh, maybe you have a separate website, maybe you have a separate
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email address, maybe you have a separate email list or social media accounts
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or whatever it is. It just starts to get really tricky.
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So if I had to go down on the favor of wedging a little bit too much under the
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same umbrella or being too eager to split things off,
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I would err on the side of putting a little bit too much under one umbrella
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just for the sake of your own mental health,
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trying to keep up with everything and manage it all because it just gets more complex.
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That being said, if there is something that you're doing that seems like it
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really is only relevant,
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people might be interested in only that one thing and really,
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really probably not the rest of what you're doing, you could have a very simple
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second website or second email list or something like that.
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What's probably going to happen, though, is one of the two is going to wither
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a little bit because, again, you only have so much attention.
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So just think really carefully about that. I'll give you an example,
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which is that right now, as many of you know, I am writing a book about newsletters.
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And while the book about newsletters is for herbalists and nutritionists,
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which is what most of what I do is for, those are who the people for whom I
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do most of my work, the newsletter book is going to be a little bit more broad.
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It's really for anybody who's looking for more one-on-one clients.
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And therefore, I am going to have a separate website for the newsletter book.
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It'll be linked to from my main website, but I am going to separate it out because
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I think that there will be interest from people who may or may not really want
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to be hearing all my things about upcoming continuing education classes for
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nutritionists if they're like,
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well, I'm a copywriter, so I don't care about the nervous system deep dive or
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whatever else. So I am going to do that.
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And I probably will, again, have a very, very basic website for the book and
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maybe a very, very simple newsletter that does not go out as frequently as my main one.
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So that's the plan there. But I probably would not try to start a whole separate
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newsletter business and split myself right down the middle trying to do a bunch
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of newsletter content, this, that, and the other, aside from potentially just
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around the promotion of my book.
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So anyway, I hope that is helpful. Orin, if you have follow-up questions or
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any other thoughts, please let me know.
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And if anybody else wants to chime in, you can use the voicemail feature on intheclinic.com.
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All right, thanks for listening. Have a great day.
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All right, before I leave you, also just want to remind you that I write a newsletter
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for practitioners. It comes out every Thursday.
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And I just share little tips, tricks, recommendations, that type of thing that
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might be helpful in your work as you build and grow your clinical practice.
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So if you want to sign up for that, you can go to camillefreeman.com and put
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your name in and you will get the newsletter next Thursday.
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All right, thank you so much for listening and I'll talk to you soon.