PRIVATE PRACTICE SUCCESS STORY
Tayler Garzarek wasn’t just burned out. She was questioning whether she even wanted to be an SLP anymore.
She was constantly thinking about the IEPs she needed to write. Wondering how she was going to fit six students into her speech closet. Doing work she believed in, inside a system that was slowly squeezing the joy out of it. “I didn’t think I wanted to be an SLP anymore,” she later said. “I realized it wasn’t the work – it was the system.”
That distinction between the work and the system around it changed everything.
The number that almost stopped her
Tayler knew what she wanted: a neurodiversity-affirming children’s practice built around her family, her values, and the kind of specialized clinical work she’d spent years training to do. Natural Language Acquisition. Gestalt Language Processing. AAC. Feeding therapy. She had the skills. She had the vision.
What she had trouble shaking was the cost of getting started.
She was a military spouse and a mother of two – someone with zero margin for a bet that didn’t pay off. So she did what a lot of talented clinicians do: she sat with the decision, weighed it carefully, and ran the numbers. She knew that landing even a handful of private pay clients could cover the cost of the program. The math pointed in one direction. She enrolled in The Start Your Private Practice Program and stopped waiting.
Building Chatterbox from scratch
Tayler launched Chatterbox Children’s Therapy in Mary Esther, Florida. She wasn’t starting over clinically, she had years of specialized training and a clear picture of the families she most wanted to serve. What she needed was a business structure to hold it all together, and a step-by-step system to build it without guessing.
She found her first clients through free social media marketing no ad budget required. From there, the practice grew to include in-clinic sessions, on-site services at local daycares, and telehealth across the state of Florida. Three different service models. One practice. Built entirely by her.
A year later
Twelve months in, every metric that mattered had moved. Her practice grew. Her income grew. And the flexibility she’d been chasing – the ability to make intentional choices about her schedule instead of reacting to someone else’s – grew right along with it.
For a military family that can’t always plan around one person’s job, owning her own practice doesn’t just mean more money. It means more control over a life that requires it.
“I’m happy to be an SLP again.”
That’s what Tayler said. Not “I’m making more money” – though she is. Not “I have a flexible schedule” – though she has that too. The first thing she said was that she found her joy again.
That’s the shift private practice makes for a lot of clinicians. Not a career change. A career save.
Tayler’s story isn’t about having it all figured out before you start. It’s about being honest with yourself about what you want and making a deliberate choice to back your own goals instead of waiting for the fear to go away first. The fear didn’t disappear before she enrolled. She enrolled anyway.
If you’ve been sitting on this idea longer than you’d like to admit, the free training at [StartYourPrivatePractice.com/webinar] is your first step.