Growing With a Shrinking Firm

Great moments in business history: The year is 1972. Len Jacoby and Stephen Meyers, old friends from UCLA Law School, see the need for low-cost, mass-market legal services. Today, Jacoby & Meyers has 122 offices and 300 lawyers.

The year now is 1992. A savvy California entrepreneur, noting that all his friends have psychotherapists, sees the need for low-cost, mass-market counseling services. Soon Shrinks R Us brings therapy to the masses.

Sound far-fetched? That’s only because, for some strange reason, it doesn’t already exist.

But it’s got to be California’s next great money-making venture. Just as Jacoby & Meyers started and flourished here, so might a chain of reasonably priced counseling offices aimed at Californians with run-of-the-mill neuroses and a few dollars in their pockets.

“I think there’s a crying need for it,” says Jacoby, who was even approached once about putting therapists in his firm’s offices for clients stressed out by debts and divorce.

The idea isn’t as sacrilegious as it seems. Mental illness is a serious matter, of course, and requires medical treatment. But a great proportion of people seeking counseling aren’t sick. They just need somebody to talk to.

That’s the key. When Dr. Byram Karasu, professor of psychiatry at New York’s Albert Einstein School of Medicine, surveyed psychotherapeutic techniques for the American Psychiatric Assn., he found that technique isn’t nearly as important as “a therapeutic relationship” between patient and therapist.

There’s no reason this can’t be systematized. Thousands of “therapists” with no more than a master’s degree, if that, are already working in California, where “practically anybody who says he’s a therapist can hang up a shingle,” according to spokesman John Blamphin of the American Psychiatric Assn.

There are other good reasons to start Shrinks R Us here. Californians love chain stores, and they love therapy. A Mutual of Omaha study of its medical insurance claims in fiscal 1991 found that Californians had 45% more therapy sessions per capita than all Americans.

“In California,” one eminent Westside psychiatrist says, “half the population is treating the other half.”

Maybe psychotherapy doesn’t carry as great a stigma here. Maybe mobile Californians are far from home, baffled by choices and lack someone to talk to for free. But at prices that can exceed $125 for a 45- or 50-minute session, many can’t afford professional help.

Enter Shrinks R Us, the first affordable network of fully licensed counselors devoted exclusively to helping what the cognoscenti like to call “the worried well.”

Marketing will be crucial to the Shrinks R Us concept. Television is perfect.

Scene: A traditional psychotherapist’s office, where a bearded, monocled psychiatrist nods and says, “Mmm hmmm. Zo. I zee.” (His accent is vaudeville Viennese.) Voiceover: “At Shrinks R Us, we don’t just grunt.”

Cut to a modern office where an attractive, concerned-looking Shrinks R Us therapist faces a new client. “Why don’t you tell me all about it?” she says sympathetically. “We’ve got plenty of time.”

It’s transference at first sight. Voiceover: “At Shrinks R Us, every hour has 60 minutes, and our bills won’t give you phobias.”

Naturally, they’ll need to establish their bona fides. Scene: the forest primeval. A group of men and women covered in skins hunker down around a fire. A woolly looking therapist right out of a Koren cartoon urges them to bay at the moon, which they desultorily do. “You have to release the inhibitions,” he says. “Release them! Release them!”

Voiceover: “At Shrinks R Us, group therapy never resembles a wolf pack.”

Jacoby & Meyers at first faced enormous opposition from the state’s legal establishment, and the same syndrome among therapists could give Shrinks R Us a bad case of arrested development.

“I don’t know if we should promote this kind of storefront treatment of brain diseases,” worries Dr. Richard Shadoan, president of the California Psychiatric Assn.

But that’s the beauty of Shrinks R Us. It will rigorously screen out anyone really sick, serving instead only those who’ve lost a loved one, say, or gone bust in business or feel vaguely unfulfilled. They’ll be regular folks, in other words, beset by life’s usual slings and arrows.

“It’s not insane or ridiculous,” Karasu says. “The only question is how profitable it will be.”

As with Marriott or McDonald’s, the customers can count on consistency. The chain’s therapists will have at least a master’s degree and will undergo extensive psychological testing and several weeks of proprietary Shrinks R Us training. Basically, they’ll learn to be nice, pay attention and say sensible things. And of course, they’ll strive to make themselves liability-proof.

“I think there’s a lot of money to be made, because nothing like it exists now,” says John Klein, associate editor of Psychotherapy Finances, a newsletter.

In the years ahead, stress is likely to be a growth industry in California. Aerospace and defense seem on the brink of a long-term slump, real estate prices will probably be flat for several years and many analysts say California’s best is behind it.

As a result, Shrinks R Us will make a fortune. It can also do a lot of good. In business, what more can you ask?