Today, we’d like to introduce you to Heidi Vanderweff. Heidi was introduced to us by the brilliant and talented Brooke Latham.
Heidi, can you walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
Kennedy Counseling Collective began 5 years ago as a vision by co-owners, Heidi Vanderwerff and Marjorie Strachman Miller, to run a counseling private practice that was rooted in community and allowed us some balance as working moms. We were new colleagues and friends, and took the leap to build something very different from what we had experienced already in the field! We sought to build a team culture of support and collaborative learning which we see trickles down to the absolute best client care. We also strive to exist as a healthy business on a revitalizing corridor in Washington, D.C. with direct involvement in the neighborhood where we are located through engagement in community events like street festivals and Halloween parades. We started as the two owners seeing clients in a small office and have since expanded to a new 5 office suite (thanks to a city grant!) with a dozen therapists. As a result, as owners we primarily focus our attention on business development and team support. We credit much of our success to the team we have built both within Kennedy Counseling and also around us including our marketing team at Social Canvas.
Please tell us more about your practice.
Kennedy Counseling is different for a group private practice in that we prioritize company culture and team support. We meet several times per month with our entire or subgroups of our team and plan quarterly gatherings to promote connection and wellness. We are also unique in that most of our team members (and our clients) live near our office. We function as the neighborhood counseling office serving children, teens, individuals, and couples right in our community. Our team is diverse in our approaches and experiences that we bring to the therapy process. At Kennedy Counseling, we speak openly about mental health as health, normalizing that everyone can benefit from counseling at some point in their life to increase self-reflection and coping with life’s inevitable stressors. We intentionally engage with the surrounding businesses and nonprofit organizations with sponsorship or volunteering for events to support the neighborhood’s overall health. We are proud to advocate at so many levels–individual clients, organizationally, and as a greater advocate in the community.
So, as we mentioned to our audience earlier, you were introduced to us by Brooke Latham and Social Canvas and we really admire them and what they’ve built. For folks who might not be as familiar, can you tell them a bit about your experience with Social Canvas.
As I mentioned earlier, we credit much of our growth to our external team which includes Brooke and Social Canvas. A fellow business owner recommended them as a good match for our needs, and I’m so thankful she did! For a small business, it was a stretch for us to invest in an integrated marketing approach and trust that we would see a return on our investment. However, the simplicity of having one company to handle our social media, newsletters, SEO, and Google Ads has been invaluable as business owners in a time crunch. As a women-owned business, we also quickly saw that they understood our brand of normalizing therapy so they could find our ideal clients and inform them about our practice. We have also seen an increase in engagement across all of those platforms with our current, former, and potential clients. Since beginning with Social Canvas, we have tripled in team size and clients served! Social Canvas has worked closely with us to learn our voice and audience. We now have a system of brainstorming, content creation, review, and analysis each month that propels us forward with very little time commitment from Kennedy Counseling. Social Canvas brings forward new approaches to drive business to our website and clients to our schedules. We consider our account manager at Social Canvas integral to our team at Kennedy Counseling, often connecting her directly to our team members to bring their individual voices to special features. I recommend Social Canvas to any women-owned business that I come across as they truly will reduce your overwhelm at marketing and have the skills to ensure success in their strategies to bring you more business—a true gift!
Website: www.kennedycounselingcollective.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kennedycounselingcollective/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/kennedy-counseling-collective/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KennedyCounselingCollective/
