Bilingual Speech Pathologist Considers a New Niche: Angela’s Success Story 

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Sure enough, on the second to last session with my client, I mentioned to the parent that I would be leaving the practice. Without hesitation at all, the parent asked if I would be willing to travel to their home to continue treating the child. I did my best to keep my most interested yet professional face on. I told her I would let her know the following week my availability and rate and come up with a contract for us. Within a week, I decided to make my rate $90. I wanted it to be $100 as I knew that the parent had been paying even more than this out of pocket at the private practice (and this family was from a wealthy suburb) but I felt this amount was fair (since it was my first and I still wasn’t that confident in myself). 

I stayed with this family for a year and a half. We parted ways after we decided the home setting was no longer the best place for treatment. After this, I have had a few clients here and there find me from the ASHA registry. 

I had to get an idea what the ballpark figure was for speech and language evaluations. I remembered when I was at the private practice that they charged at least $500-$800 for comprehensive evaluations that included reading and writing skills. In a hospital, this number could be as high as $1300!! In my particular case, I had never performed a bilingual evaluation, there would be no standardized instrument for me to use so I felt my evaluation was somehow less valuable than one based on standardized scores. On top of that, I only speak Mandarin conversationally. I have never really studied the language. And yet on the other hand, these people were all begging me to do this evaluation because they were unable to find anyone else. I proposed $450 and they accepted without hesitation. And so I did the evaluation and as far as I know, all parties have been extremely satisfied with my services.

A funny thing happened a week later. I received my second request for a bilingual Mandarin evaluation. No kidding!! Another school system was looking for a child who recently moved from China and they found me on the ASHA registry. 

Here’s the interesting thing about this story. They contacted me and gave me their rate: $60 an hour, not exceeding 6 hours. Well, I had charged $450 for my last eval and I easily spent over 6 hours for interviewing, observation, testing, and writeup. There was no way I was going to do this for $360. I sat on the e-mail for 4 days before gathering enough courage to call them back and begin my negotiation for price. I told them I usually did not charge an hourly rate, that I typically needed 90-120 minutes for the evaluation and 90-120 minutes for the writeup. They asked me my flat rate and I told them $500. You won’t believe what the SPED director told me. “That sounds just fine. You could be charging more for your service. We have been looking for someone with your skills for a long time. Perhaps next year you can increase your rate.”

Ha! I think I will 🙂