Scaling Tele-Counselling Service

Photo by Dylan Ferreira on Unsplash

For the past 2 years, I’ve been starting up and growing Potensia with my co-founders Violy Purnamasari and triska. It’s a platform that connects people to career counsellors who are licensed and trained psychologist so they can consult about their career. It’s like Betterhelp for career.

In this post I would share some of the business and product aspects of such “tele-counselling” service which I learned from growing Potensia. You might find this post useful if you want to know what tele-counselling business is like, or if you’re looking for a reference to tackle a product scalability issue, or if you want to practice counselling and want to see the present and future of this space.

In recent years, there has been a shift in the counselling space. Because of geographical friendliness and lower price, a growing number of clients move from face-to-face counselling to online “tele-counselling” via text, voice, or video call.

This pose some important questions for tele-counselling providers:

How big can they scale and what would be the fundamental challenge in getting there?

So in this post, we will try to:

1. Estimate how big can a tele-counselling service scale;
2. Present the fundamental challenge in getting there; and then
3. Present product strategies to tackle the challenge.

The Potential Size of a Tele-Counselling Service

We can get an estimate in a few steps:

1. Pick one or more counselling specialties we’d like to cover. In this post we’ll pick one to make it easy.
2. Find the demographics which that specialty can serve.
3. Estimate the size of such demographics in a population. In this post we will scope for a population of 1 country.
4. Estimate the market size by taking into account obtainable population and counselling fee.

Picking A Specialty

There are several specialties we can choose to cover. Some of them are mental health, marriage / family, education, and career / guidance. Because we want to demonstrate potential size, we’re gonna choose career counselling because of the wide range of demographics that it can cover.

To get some more context: what is career counselling? It’s where we talk to a psychologist about career navigation, motivation, following interest, strategizing for a raise / promotion, working relationship, preparing for retirement and other psychological career matters.

Demographics

A person typically goes through several phases of career development:

1. Exploration: typical age range 15–25;
2. Establishment / early-career: typical age range 26–35;
3. Mid-career: typical age range 36–45;
4. Late-career: typical age range 46–55; and
5. Decline: typical age range 55–65.

Each phase has different topics that a career counsellor can help with. For example in exploration phase the common topic is discovering interests and in establishment it’s improving working relationship with peers. A tele-counselling service focusing on career is able to cover all phases of career development.

Population

So how many people in one population does our target demographics make up for?

Let’s take Indonesia as a reference as it’s a country with a rapidly growing middle-class where a part of the workforce has started to become aware of the benefit of career counselling.

Indonesian workforce personas

Assuming everyone aged 15–65 (the start and end range in our demographics) in Indonesia has a career, we are already covering 68% of the total population. That’s roughly 183,600,000 individuals.

Potential Market Size

If everyone in our targeted population does one session of tele-counselling with the fee of $15 (a reasonable tele-counselling price in Indonesia), our market size would be:

183600000 * 15 = $2.7B

We call this the total addressable market (TAM).

In reality we won’t be able to hit everyone in our targeted population. Some people in the population might not need career counselling. In researching for Potensia we did a survey to see how many people need career counselling. This survey from 150 people of various ages shows that 83% feels like they need an expert’s help in navigating career. If we only able to address 83% of the total market, our market size would be:

0.83 * $2.7B = $2.2B

We call this the serviceable addressable market (SAM).

There’s also a factor of preferred medium to conduct counselling. Some people might prefer offline over online counselling. The same survey shows that 50% prefers online over offline. If we only able to obtain 50% of the addressable market, our market size would be:

0.5 * $2.2B = $1.1B

We call this the serviceable obtainable market (SOM). Below is a diagram of our TAM, SAM, and SOM combined.

So we know that our estimated market size is at $1.1B. Let’s now look at what the fundamental challenge is to get there.

The Fundamental Challenge at Scale

The core of the business of a counselling service is the counsellors, sometimes referred to as “providers”. The availability and quality of the counsellors will make or break a counselling service provider. Even with limited or scattered tech and tools, a counselling service can still run if there are quality counsellors available. This applies to tele-counselling as well.

This means that the fundamental challenge at scale would be to sustain the availability and the quality of the counsellors.

Now let’s take a closer look at the fundamental challenge that we will face.

If we convert our SOM of $1.1B into the number of 1-hour counselling sessions with $15 fee per session we’ll have:

$1.1B / $15 = 73,333,333 session hours

To acquire the entire SOM we need to provide 73,333,333 session hours. How many counsellors do we need to do that within a certain timeframe?

A counsellor can work with a tele-counselling service provider either full-time or part-time. Let’s say full-time counsellors do 40 hours a week (160 hours a month) and part-time counsellors do 10 hours a week (40 hours a month). Here’s a breakdown of the number of counsellors needed in various timeframes:

If we want to acquire the SOM within 2 years — which is a typical timeframe of a startup funding runway — we need roughly 19097 full-time counsellors or roughly 76388 part-time counsellors. In reality we will have a combination of full-time and part-time counsellors.

Is it possible to hire that many counsellors? Do we have a shortage?

To estimate that we need to look at the qualification for a counsellor. For a counselling service focusing on career, a counsellor can come from industrial/organizational psychology background (I/O psychology for short) or educational psychology. A graduate from I/O or educational psychology degree is trained and licensed to practice career counselling.

There are around 10 well-accredited universities in Indonesia with I/O and educational psychology degree with 10 to 20 graduates each degree each year. If we were able to hire all 20 graduates from year 2008 to 2018 (10 years) as full-time counsellors, we would have:

10 universities * (20 I/O grads each year + 20 edu grads each year) * 10 years = 4000 full-time counsellors

We can see that even if we are able to hire and retain all counsellors full-time we would only be able to acquire SOM within 10 years. This would mean that we have to hire from the 400 new graduates every year if we want to accelerate the acquisition.

There’s likely to be a shortage of counsellors we can get onboard which will affect the amount of time to reach a target amount in the market.

Now that we know what the challenge is, let’s look at some of the ways we can try to tackle it.

Product Strategy

So we want to avoid the shortage of counsellors, work around it, or to still benefit even when having a shortage. Here are some solutions that I’m trying to apply in Potensia to tackle this shortage challenge.

Group counselling

Group counselling is a common practice in some specialties. Some clinical practices offer group counselling for clients with common issues such as addiction and trauma.

If one counsellor can handle multiple clients in one session, we can reduce the number of counsellors needed. The potential issues with group counselling is that some clients in one group might need more care and session time than the others. Group counselling might need to be longer or cheaper than 1:1 counselling.

Here’s a breakdown of the number of counsellors needed in various timeframes if some of the hours of the counsellors are allocated for group counselling, assuming all group sessions are at full capacity:

Allocating half of counsellors time for counselling for group of 5 significantly reduces the amount of counsellors needed.

Client triaging

Triaging means to provide care towards those who are most in need of immediate care, and who benefit most from it. Practically it means to provide different level of services to different level of severities.

In the context of career tele-counselling, we can:

1. First provide a large repository of contents focusing on improving career.
2. Then for the next level we can provide an online psychometric test related to career which might give some insights for clients with non-severe career issues. This test could be cheaper than counselling or free.
3. If a client think those are not enough then he/she can try to book a group counselling session.
4. Finally if it’s still not enough a client can try 1:1 counselling session.

A free career psychometric test from Potensia

Providing different levels of service will take some of the load from counsellors which will in turn enable them to take more clients with severe issues. Making the service more accessible will also accelerate growth.

The downside of differentiating levels and price is that we will have some clients paying less per “session” and the faster growth might not be enough to cover the loss from the possible “full” revenue if we don’t do it.

White-labelling the tech

If there are a lot of tele-counselling providers, we can benefit from providing the tech for tele-counselling platform. The platform can provide tele-counselling related features such as:

1. Chat / voice / video call platform;
2. Counselling sessions scheduling system;
3. Payment;
4. Counsellors and clients account creation; and
5. Content management system (e.g to post resources about career counselling or to create online psychometric tests);

Future tele-counselling providers will benefit from being able to setup a good tele-counselling platform with minimum effort. For us the platform provider, we don’t profit directly from charging clients for the sessions but we get the smaller piece of the pie by charging the tele-counsellors for every session paid by a client or by charging by how many clients onboarded into the platform. With this platform, we scale as the number of tele-counselling providers scale.

A good example for this is Quenza. It provides tools for coaches, therapists, mental health practiotioners, and other counsellors to craft a personalized online care for their signed-up clients. However, Quenza is an example platform targeted for individual counsellors not tele-counselling providers who will onboard multiple counsellors and clients into their platform.

Quenza’s personalised online care builder

Conclusion

Every tele-counselling service will likely to face a shortage of counsellors. We can try to tackle this challenge by providing group counselling, providing different levels of service, and white-labelling the tech.

In this post we only cover the fundamental challenge of growing tele-counselling service but there are other challenges we might face once we are able to scale such as retaining our counsellors. How do we keep our counsellors happy so they stay with us? How do we prevent clients from contacting counsellors directly instead of going through our service? Those are interesting problems to discuss as well but that’s for another post. :)

For me personally, despite the challenges it has been an amazing experience working in this space. I feel like we’re fighting a good fight. Hearing testimonials from our clients who has various issues in their career saying that they felt relief and inspired after counselling through Potensia has made my life feel meaningful.

I hope you enjoy this post and find it useful. If you do please consider giving this post a round of applause or sharing it. If you’d like to have a discussion feel free to post a comment. :)