Three things change at once, and none of them are clinical.

Your phone becomes a front desk. A call to the practice is no longer a call to you. It has to be routed, and somebody who is not you has to be able to answer it, see it, and act on it. This is the single biggest operational difference and the one most people underestimate.

Your records stop being only yours. Another clinician is now creating records inside your practice, and questions of who holds them, who can see them, and what happens if that clinician leaves become real. These are College questions before they are software questions.

Most of your tools stop fitting. Nearly everything a solo practitioner picks is built around one person with one login. Adding a second person is often not a setting — it is a different product, sometimes at a different price, occasionally from a different company.

The part that does not change is the work. People bracing for a transformation usually find the sessions are identical and the admin is unrecognisable.

What has to be decided before anything else

Two questions, and everything downstream follows from them.

Whose clients are they? Are people coming to the practice and being allocated, or coming to a named clinician? That determines how the phone is answered, what the website says, who follows up on an inquiry, and what happens to a caseload if someone leaves.

Who holds the record? Not a preference, and something your College expects settled in writing. What a supervision agreement should cover includes "clarification regarding who has ultimate responsibility for clients (e.g., is the supervisee treating their own clients, the supervisor's clients, clients of an agency or clinic?)" (CRPO 4.1).

The answer decides the rest of it. Retention is written as the duty of whoever is the custodian of the record (CRPO 5.1), so if that is you, records an associate created are still yours to keep and to produce years after they leave. They can live in more than one system, provided "each location must reference the other locations" (CPBAO 9.4) — which is what makes a separate phone or messaging system workable rather than a problem.

Get those two settled before you buy software, because the software you need is different in each case.

What happens to the phone

This is where the day-to-day pain lands.

As a solo practitioner, a practice line is a personal boundary tool — it exists so that clients are not calling your own phone. In a group, the same line has a completely different job: it is a shared front door, and the requirements change accordingly.

The things that suddenly matter:

• More than one person can see the same messages, so a client is not answered twice or not at all

• Calls can be routed to the right clinician, or to whoever is covering

• Coverage is visible — who is on today, who is away, where an inquiry goes

• Somebody who is not a clinician can handle scheduling without seeing clinical content

• A record of who replied to what exists, because in a group "I thought you had answered that" is a real failure mode

A single-practitioner line does none of this, and generally cannot be made to. This is worth checking early rather than discovering during your associate's first week.

What your current tooling probably can't do

Assume, until proven otherwise, that each of these needs replacing or upgrading:

The phone line. Almost every product aimed at solo practitioners assumes one person, one number, one inbox.

The scheduling and records system. Some scale to multiple clinicians gracefully; some scale expensively; some do not scale at all.

The email setup. A practice with several people needs addresses that survive someone leaving, and a way to hand over a mailbox.

The website. A single-practitioner site with your face on it says something different once there are three of you.

Practitioners moving into a group consistently report the cost as the migration, not the subscription. Time, retraining, and the period where two systems are running — that is what the change actually costs, and it is worth sequencing deliberately rather than doing all of it in the month you hire someone.

What about employment status?

It changes your obligations substantially, and it is not settled by what you call it. "The facts of the working relationship as a whole decide the employment status", and "workers and payers can choose how they set up their affairs; however, the employment status they choose must reflect their working relationship" (Canada Revenue Agency). If either side is unsure, either can ask for a ruling rather than guessing — and an accountant or an employment lawyer is the other route.

Profession-specific obligations sit on top of it, and one of them shapes the phone rather than the paperwork. Registrants "are expected to inform clients if they are required to practise with clinical supervision", and to tell them "that they may contact the clinical supervisor directly to ask questions or express concerns about services provided by the supervisee" (CRPO 4.2). That belongs in your intake wording and in what the person answering the phone says.

Advertising, titles and whose name appears on what are profession-specific, and they belong on your own College's site rather than in a summary of it.

Sequencing that works

Roughly in this order, because each step makes the next one cheaper:

1. Settle whose clients they are and who holds the records.

2. Get professional advice on the employment arrangement and the College obligations.

3. Choose the shared systems — records, scheduling, phone, email — and migrate yourself onto them first, while you are still the only user.

4. Run your own practice on the new setup for a while. Every problem you find now is a problem your associate never has.

5. Then hire.

The most common ordering mistake is hiring first and building the infrastructure around the new person while they are trying to see clients. That is how a group practice ends up with two parallel ways of doing everything.

The honest caution

A group practice is a different business, not a bigger version of the same one. The revenue is less than proportional to the headcount, the admin is more than proportional, and the thing you are now doing for a living includes management.

Plenty of practitioners try it and go back to solo, and that is a legitimate outcome rather than a failure. If the reason you are growing is that you cannot answer the phone during sessions, it is worth checking whether that specific problem has a smaller solution before you take on a payroll.

The short version

Decide whose clients they are and who holds the records first — those are College questions and they determine everything else. Expect to replace the phone line and probably the records system, because solo tools are built for one login. Migrate yourself onto the new setup before anyone else joins. And be honest about whether you want to run a practice or manage one.

About Rivet

Rivet is a Canadian practice line built for therapists — a separate number for calls, texts and voicemail, with video sessions and clinical tools in the same place. Your data stays in Canada, and transcription runs on Rivet's own hardware rather than a third-party AI service.

One plan, $65 CAD a month, everything included. Fourteen-day trial, no card.

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