You were trained to sit with a person. No one taught you how to open the door.
A course for early-career psychologists building private practice in Australia. Eight modules. Two delivery modes. One honest map of the early years.
If you're reading this, something is already moving.
You have your registration. You have some clinical hours. You know you can do the work. What you do not have is a clear map of how a practice actually runs, and no one in your training thought to provide one. Six years of clinical preparation and not a single hour on ABNs, Medicare provider numbers, or what to say when someone calls to ask your fee.
There is a specific shame that comes with not knowing this. These are not difficult things, but they feel like things you should already understand, and asking feels like it announces something about you. It does not. It announces that your training, like everyone's, stopped at the door of the room and assumed you would figure out the rest.
You might be a fresh graduate sitting on a vague plan to go private eventually, with no first step attached. You might be employed in a community org or group practice, burning through your caseload capacity for a fee that is not yours, waiting for the right moment that keeps not arriving. The fear is usually not the work itself. It is the empty diary, the logistics you have not resolved, and a quiet worry that the clinicians who make it are a different kind of person.
They are not. Private practice fails early clinicians not because they are poor therapists, but because nobody taught them the scaffolding. The scaffolding is learnable in weeks, not years. That is what this course is.
What the course covers
The course begins not with the procedures but with you. Before the fee structure and the referral forms: who you are as a clinician, what you already do well, and where your blind spots are. Eight modules, each building from that foundation outward.
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01
Your Clinical SelfMapping your bright spots and blind spots before the first session. What you already bring, what you tend to miss, and how knowing this shapes the practice you will build.
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02
The FrameSetting fees, appointment structure, and cancellation policy. Who you are informs how you hold the frame, and where you will be tempted to let it slide.
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03
The First AssessmentConducting an initial assessment that is both clinically sound and relationally alive. What you notice, what you miss, and how to hold risk without being ruled by it.
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04
Business and SystemsABN, sole trader structure, professional indemnity, AHPRA compliance, record-keeping, and practice management. The infrastructure that protects the clinical work.
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05
Medicare and Referral PathwaysBetter Access, MHCP, NDIS, EAP, and private referral. Navigating the system without being flattened by it, and how to explain it simply to patients.
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06
Setting FeesThe arithmetic of a fee you can sustain. Fee avoidance is often clinical information. The conversation, and how to have it without apologising.
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07
The Relational DimensionAttachment, dependency, and intensity without institutional containment. What private practice asks of your clinical self that training did not prepare you for.
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08
The Long GameCaseload management, burnout patterns specific to depth work, and building a practice across years that fits who you actually are, not who you thought you would be.
Practical tools alongside the content
Each module combines video content with written material. Work through at your own pace, return to what matters.
Fees letter, cancellation policy, initial assessment framework, clinical biography template. Yours to adapt.
In-browser tool for mapping gross income, tax, superannuation, and take-home across different fee and caseload scenarios.
Fortnightly for 16 weeks. Small group, case-based, with Jackson.
The first three to six months are usually slow.
Slowness is not evidence about your ability. It is evidence about referral pipelines, which take time to build. Every established practice was, at one point, an empty diary. Most practitioners do not talk about this.
"There will be an hour where you sit and know, in the middle of it, that you do not know what to do. This is not a failure. It is the first moment of real clinical work."
Patients will not return after session one. Some because of you, most not because of you. People will cancel, ghost, dispute fees, and take the orientation call and go elsewhere. You will get a referral you should have declined, and you will learn that from having taken it. You will misjudge a fee, a boundary, a letter, a rupture.
The empty hour in the diary is a specific kind of shame. It costs money and it whispers something about your worth. Comparison with peers on social media is corrosive and inaccurate. Isolation is the real occupational hazard of solo practice, not clinical complexity.
This course addresses all of it, without softening it into a motivational block. The section on failing is the most honest part of the course, and it will be the one that tells you whether you are in the right place.
Jackson Hill
I started my first practice before I had a clear name for what I was building. It ran under Bird on the Wing for a couple of years and became Jackson Hill Psychology in 2024. The work is relational and psychodynamic. Small caseload, one room, long-form.
Alongside the clinical work, I lecture into postgraduate psychology programs at Bond University and Griffith University, direct Cosmetic Psychology Australia, and serve as Queensland Clinical Lead at Hemisphere Group.
I built the practice mostly alone, without anyone who had done it to ask. The systems, the fee conversations, the referral relationships, what you say when someone cancels three times in a row: I worked all of it out by doing it wrong first. That cost me real time and real money, and more anxiety than was necessary. It also pulled me away from the clinical work. The hours I spent solving problems I hadn't anticipated were hours I wasn't with people, which is about as far from why most of us got into this as you can get. What it did do was make me resourceful. When there's no one to call, you work it out. But you don't need to start that way.
This course is the thing I didn't have. I'm eight years into private practice now. It covers what I needed to know in the first four of them, and what I learned, at some cost, by not knowing it.
Jackson Hill · Clinical Psychologist · Miami, Gold Coast
- MPsych Clinical
- BPsych (Hons)
- AHPRA Registered · APS Member
- Postgrad Lecturer, Bond + Griffith
- Director, Cosmetic Psychology Australia
- Queensland Clinical Lead, Hemisphere Group
Online or in person
The online course is complete on its own. The cohort tier adds two full days in the room together, which is a different kind of learning.
- Eight self-paced modules with video and written content
- Full template and document library
- Income calculator
- Lifetime access to all materials
- Work at your own pace, revisit what matters
- Everything in Online
- Fortnightly live sessions over 16 weeks
- Small group, case-based, with Jackson present
- In person cohort to follow
Full refund within 7 days · 50% refund days 8–14 · No refund after day 14
Before you register
No. The registrar year is a good time to do this. You are earning, you have supervision infrastructure around you, and the question of where you work after registration is already live. Doing this course during the registrar year means you begin independent practice with the scaffolding already in place rather than building it under pressure.
Yes, on both counts. The course is self-paced and designed to be done alongside existing work. Many of the modules are most useful at exactly this stage: you can plan the structure of a practice and make contact with referrers while you are still employed. The transition is less frightening when the groundwork is already laid.
The course is relevant to all AHPRA-registered psychologists building private practice: general registration, clinical endorsement, and provisionally registered psychologists working toward general registration. The Medicare rebate system works differently depending on your registration level, and the course covers both positions.
An accountant who works with allied health clients is not a luxury. The course teaches you what to ask them, what records to keep, and how to make the most of the relationship. It does not replace the relationship.
Not necessarily. Most one-to-one clinical psychology services are GST-free under Australian law. You are required to register once your taxable turnover reaches the ATO threshold. GST-free clinical income does not count toward that threshold, but supervision fees, reports, and course income can. Whether you need to register depends on the mix of your income streams. Your accountant is the authority for your specific circumstances.
This varies, and anyone who gives you a confident number is guessing. Most practices take three to twelve months to reach a sustainable caseload. The variables include your location, referral network, fee point, and how clearly you have positioned yourself. The course covers what to do during the slow months rather than spiralling into them.
You don't need to be. I very rarely post on social media myself. For me it's more about having a presence, being findable, than it is a genuine referral strategy.
The referral pathways that have actually worked for me are word of mouth, my website, and targeting no more than three GPs whose patient population fits what I do. That last one is more effective than most clinicians expect, and it does not involve bringing lunch to a practice, dropping off sushi platters, or showing up to awkward meet-and-greet evenings. The course covers how to build real GP relationships in a way that is straightforward, honest, and specific to the kind of work you do.
On social media: the course touches on what matters if you're going to have a presence at all, what tends to make sense professionally, and what to avoid. It does not go into detail about what to post, mostly because I don't think of content strategy as something I want to encourage as a primary referral approach.
No. The course covers Australian private practice broadly. Medicare, AHPRA, ABN registration, GST, and the relational content are nationally consistent. Where content is state-specific it is flagged as such.
Not at the start. A professional email address on your own domain is a legitimate and sufficient beginning. Clinical messaging platforms become useful once referral volume justifies them, and some practices will prefer them. The course covers when to invest in them and what the trade-offs are.
The answer is wider than most people expect and narrower than most people fear. The course walks through a realistic budget covering room rent, practice management software, professional indemnity insurance, AHPRA registration, and website. The income calculator helps you model what your specific situation looks like.
No. This course does not address your clinical work with individual clients. Supervision is non-negotiable infrastructure for private practice, not remediation. This course addresses what supervision rarely touches: the business, the referral network, the systems, and the relational demands of working alone.
No. This course is written by a clinician whose orientation is depth work, for clinicians whose orientation is similar. The business content exists to protect the clinical work. A practice with a poorly held frame, an unsustainable fee, and no referral network cannot do good psychotherapy. The scaffolding is in service of the room, not the other way around.
If a payment doesn't go through, I'll reach out and we'll have a conversation about it. Not a system notification: an actual conversation, about money, about what happened, about what's going on. That conversation is one you'll have often in your own practice. Having it here, on the receiving end of it, is useful preparation.
Yes. All downloadable templates, frameworks, and documents are yours permanently. They are not locked to the course platform. Download them at any point and adapt them to your practice.
Tell me you're interested
Enrolment opens late September 2026. Register below and I'll be in touch directly when the course goes live, along with any early access details.
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