Guide
The Pathway
A free, no-login guide to building a private counselling practice, from your first decisions after qualifying to getting clients and running the day to day.
Training teaches you to counsel. It rarely teaches you to run the business that lets you counsel, which is why so many good practitioners stall in the gap between qualifying and seeing their first private client.
This is the guide that fills that gap. It’s free, there’s no login, and nothing here is gated behind an email address. Work through it in order if you’re just starting, or jump to the stage you’re stuck on if you’re already going.
Wherever you are, there’s a rung here for you. Some readers qualified last month and haven’t the faintest idea what to do first. Some have a handful of clients and need the practice to actually pay. Some have run a full diary for years and are thinking about what comes next. The Pathway is built for all three.
The seven stages
1. Qualified, now what The first decisions once the certificate is in your hand, and the order to make them in.
2. Foundations: registration, insurance, ICO, supervision, DBS The handful of things that need to be in place before you see a paying client, explained plainly with the current costs.
3. Money: banking, fees, tax What to charge, how to hold the money properly, and what the taxman expects.
4. Premises: home, rented rooms, online Where you’ll actually see people, and the real economics of each option.
5. Getting clients How people find you and decide to trust you: naming your practice, your website, directories, your Google Business Profile, referrals and EAP work.
6. Running the practice: contracts, notes, GDPR, diary, boundaries The day to day that keeps the work safe, legal and sustainable.
7. Growing What to do once the diary fills, and how to build something that lasts.
The numbers, in one place
Private practice in the UK: key statistics Verified figures on how many practitioners there are, what they earn, what clients pay and what it costs to start, each one sourced and dated. Free to cite.
Start where you are
If you’ve just qualified, begin at stage one and take it in order. If you already have clients and want more of them, go straight to Getting clients. If a single question brought you here, use it to find your stage and start there.
You don’t have to do it all at once. You do have to sort your foundations before you take money from anyone.
Try the tool: Work through everything here as a tickable setup checklist that saves your progress in your browser.