The business side of therapy should be as carefully built as the clinical side.
That belief is the whole reason Clay exists.
Clay Consulting Group is a marketing and business consultancy built specifically for therapists, counsellors, and therapy organisations, founded by George Holloway. It started from inside the profession, with a simple observation about how unsupported therapists are the moment they step into private practice. Everything we do follows from that.
How Clay Started
For over a decade I've worked in sales, marketing and commercial strategy: media sales first, then eventually progressing to senior marketing and growth roles at Amazon. The work I found most satisfying was always the same: connecting with people, helping a business understand their target audience and core offering, and building the infrastructure to reach them. At Amazon that meant working at scale; before that, it meant learning to earn people's trust and build genuine, long-lasting relationships.
This deep curiosity in people eventually led me to re-train as a psychotherapist at CCPE. Along the way, in conversations with colleagues, supervisors and peers from other training institutes, I kept hearing a similar theme. Therapists who are genuinely skilled in the room with clients often find the business side the harder part to get started with: the websites, the tax returns, and the question of whether anyone will actually find them. It's simply not what clinical training is designed to cover.
I'd spent years solving almost exactly that problem for other businesses. The positioning, the setup, the unglamorous decisions about tools and money. And I knew the therapy world from the inside: the placements, the supervision hours, what it feels like to sit in the therapist's chair, and what it's like to actually be with a client.
Clay is what I built when I married these two passions together. The work I enjoy most is working closely with people, understanding what's actually in the way, and fixing it. That's what this is.
Why ‘Clay’
Earth is the grounding element, representing stability, solidity, the thing that holds its shape under pressure. Water is what makes it workable by being responsive, moveable and able to take form without cracking.
Together they make something durable enough to last, but always open to being reshaped. That felt like the right description for what a well-run practice should be, and ultimately what we're trying to help build.
How we work
A few principles that shape everything Clay does, gathered here so they're easy to hold us to.
One point of contact, start to finish
A practice at any stage shouldn't need to piece together its own commercial strategy. Whether it's a single session, a full Growth Strategy or hands-on project work, you deal with George directly, from the first call to the last piece of work. No hand-offs, no account managers.
You're a clinician first, not a customer
Clay's job is to fade into the background of your working week. We don't want you thinking about us; we want you thinking about your clients. If a tool, a process, or a meeting starts pulling you out of clinical headspace, it's failing at its job, and we treat it that way.
Honesty over upsell, every time
We say what we'd actually recommend, including the things not worth doing and the things you don't need from us. The day we start selling something for the sake of selling it is the day Clay stops being useful. We'd rather lose a small piece of revenue than tell you something we don't believe.
Your practice, in your name
Your domain, your client records, your payment account, all in your name from day one. When Clay sets something up for you, the accounts and logins are yours, and it's handed over so you can run it without us. No lock-in. No surprises. Nothing held hostage if you ever move on.
They're the standards we hold ourselves to; and the ones we'd invite you to hold us to.
Not sure what's right for you?
That's fine. Most people aren't, until they talk it through. A short call costs nothing and tells you which path makes sense, or whether it's a bit of both.
Let's talk it through