Two rules, and the rest is detail.

Keep the two practices completely separate. Separate email address, separate phone number, separate records system, separate calendar, separate device where you can manage it. Nothing about your private practice should touch your employer's systems, and nothing about your employed work should touch your practice's. That is a professional boundary before it is a technical one, and the mixing is much easier to prevent than to unwind.

Solve the reachability problem before you list anywhere. The hard part of a practice run alongside a job is not the paperwork. It is that the hours a prospective client phones are precisely the hours you are in someone else's building, in someone else's session, unable to answer and unable to call back. Therapists describe exactly this — inquiries arriving while they were in session at their agency job, and no window afterwards that still felt professional.

If you do nothing else on this page, do this: publish a response time you can actually meet from inside a full working day, and put something in front of your number that says it.

What has to be separate, specifically?

• Phone. Not your employer's line, not your personal cell. A practice number, even a basic one.

• Email. On a domain you own. Never your work address, and never a personal address you also use for the job.

• Records. Entirely separate systems. Your practice notes have nothing to do with your employer's file system, and vice versa.

• Calendar. A separate calendar for practice sessions, even if you have to look at both to book.

• Device, where possible. Not always achievable, but worth aiming at — some employers place conditions on what may be installed on managed devices, and a personal device carrying both employed and practice work is a complication you do not need.

Note the separate case of an employer that provides no phone at all and expects you to contact their clients from your own handset. That is a widely reported situation and it is a different problem from this one — but if you are in it, a practice number does not fix it, and a personal number carrying two employers' clients is the worst of the available arrangements.

What do I need to check with my employer?

This is the part not to improvise.

Employment agreements in this profession sometimes address outside practice, solicitation of the employer's clients, restricted geography, or use of the employer's premises and materials. Read your contract, and if anything in it is ambiguous, get it clarified before you list a profile — not after a client from work has asked to follow you.

The answer lives in a document only you have, so the useful move is to ask rather than to infer permission from silence. A short email to your manager — you intend to open a private practice, here is how you will keep it separate, does the agreement restrict it — costs nothing. If the answer is no, you now have it in writing, which is the version that helps you in eighteen months.

The one rule that is safe to state without reading your contract: do not recruit your employer's clients. It is the fastest way to turn a manageable conversation into a serious one.

How do I handle calls during the day job?

Four things that work, in rough order of effort.

Say when you reply, everywhere. Directory profile, voicemail greeting, email signature. "I return calls Tuesday and Thursday evenings" is a completely acceptable answer, and it converts far better than silence, because a prospective client who knows when to expect you will wait.

Make the first response not require you. A greeting that states your hours and what to do in an emergency, and something that replies to a missed call, both work while you are unavailable. This is the whole reason a practice phone service costs more than a phone line — buy one when the reachability gap is the binding constraint, and not before.

Prefer asynchronous intake. A booking link or an intake form lets someone start the process at eleven at night without needing you. For a practice run around another job, this is worth more than a phone number.

Protect one real window. One predictable block each week where you return calls and messages beats intending to do it whenever there is a gap. Practitioners describe the alternative honestly: by the time the day is done they are exhausted and it feels too late to call back and look professional.

What about clients who need me when I'm at work?

Be explicit at the start, in the consent form and out loud in the first session: when you are reachable, how fast you reply, and what to do if something cannot wait. Name the local crisis service by name.

A part-time practice is not a lesser practice, but it is a practice with narrower availability, and clients handle narrow availability well when it is stated and badly when it is discovered.

The short version

Separate everything. Read your employment agreement before you list a profile. Publish a response time that survives a full working day, and put something in front of your number that says it while you are unavailable. The clients you lose in this arrangement are not lost to your schedule — they are lost to the silence between their call and your callback.

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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