The business side of therapy should be as carefully built as the clinical side.
That belief is the whole reason Clay exists.
Clay Consulting 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. And somewhere in the final stretches of the diploma, I kept noticing something. As my cohort approached the end of training, the conversations started to shift — people who were genuinely skilled in the room with clients were quietly anxious about the business side. Not the clinical parts, but the websites, the tax returns, and the question of whether anyone would actually find them. Years of training, quietly bottlenecked by admin.
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 actually feels like to be in the final stretch of a qualification.
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.
George Holloway, Clay FounderWhy ‘Clay’
Clay is made from two elements: earth and water.
Earth is the grounding element — stability, solidity, the thing that holds its shape under pressure. Water is what makes it workable — responsive, moveable, 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 team, one bill, one place
A practice at any stage shouldn't need to piece together its own commercial strategy. We handle the whole picture, from getting you found to figuring out what's holding you back, so you have one team to talk to and one place where everything lives.
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. Clay sets things up and manages the parts that need managing behind the scenes, but the things that are genuinely yours stay yours. 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.
If this sounds like the right fit…
The best way to find out whether Clay's right for you is a short, no-pressure call. We'll tell you honestly whether we think we're the right team to help — and if we're not, we'll usually have a sense of who might be.