I’m not a big believer in business plans or promises.
They are speculative and based on assumptions that people often pull of thin air.
Real life never plays out like a plan, for better or worse.
Nevertheless, it’s interesting to explore some numbers of the type of impact Prodana can make for a practitioner and their page.
For this assumption, I’m gonna assume a flat $100 rate per therapy session, just to keep things simple. This might be more or less tha you typically charge, and you’d need to adjust accordingly.
If 20 friends and family give you just $5 a month, you can offer a free hour of therapy every month, or 12 sessions a year. That’s enough to make a serious impact with a short term therapy modality like CBT or Hypnosis; enough to sponsor a person through an entire life coaching course.
The real impact of Prodana though, comes from past clients who continue to maintain a relationship with you to support you reaching others. Let’s run the numbers of what that might look like over time, for both a part time and full time practitioner.
For simplicity’s sake, we’ll assume you see each client for an average of 12 months, before terminating with them and scheduling a new client into that time slot. And we’ll assume that a full time therapist sees between 15 and 20 clients a week, as recommended by Mind Money Balance (more than that can lead to burnout, we’ll use the upper end of this number for our calculations), and a part-time practitioner sees one a day, or 5 a week.
Now, if each client chooses to make a long term pledge of $20 a month towards your mission, this will total $100 a month from a part time practice and $400 a month for full time practice. That would be the first year. Assuming each year you turned over to new clients, and the past clients continued their supportive relationship with you, you’d be looking at $200 a month total for part time and $800 for full time. By the time five years have passed, you’d be receiving $2,000 a month from a full time practice, from just 100 past clients paying $20 a month.
Now, let’s imagine an even rosier scenario, where clients are willing and able to pay forward the full price of a session even after they finish working with you. This translated to $100 a month, or $25 a week that they put towards others getting the same experience they do. You’re looking at $500 a month from a part time practice and $2,000 a month from full time. Five years in, a full time practice could be seeing $10,000 a month in contributions from 100 clients.
These numbers are obviously pure speculation, and in reality some people can afford to pay more, and many others can afford to pay less. Nonetheless, it’s worth recalling the sustainable infrastructure that the Vipassana Foundation and Vince Horn have made around this type of model, and to appreciate the power of generosity compounded over time.