Therapy for Entrepreneurs and Business Leaders

If you’re an entrepreneur, founder, executive, or business leader seeking therapy, business coaching, or consultation, I want to offer you more than a list of credentials. I want to give you a real sense of who I am, what I’ve built, what I’ve been through, and why I feel equipped to help. This page is more personal and memoir-like than most professional pages, and that’s intentional. My years as a founder and CEO, along with difficult personal circumstances that shaped some of the biggest decisions of my life, inform the way I work with entrepreneurs and leaders today. Below, I share some of that story, some of the lessons I learned, and how I help business leaders and entrepreneurs.

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My Experience as an Entrepreneur and CEO

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Before selling GoodTherapy.org to EverCommerce in 2018, the company’s website was reaching millions of visitors per month, had thousands of mental health professionals subscribing to its services, and nearly 40 employees and contractors. GoodTherapy.org established itself as a functioning social enterprise, became the primary competitor to Psychology Today, and garnered national brand recognition.

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I had built the company from the ground up, beginning in 2006. I was motivated by a vision to demystify therapy, to protect people from harmful therapists, and to support and promote those therapists who were sensitive to the power imbalance in therapy and worked consciously to provide collaborative and non pathologizing forms of therapy.

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Like many business ideas, this vision was born out of personal experience. In the 1970s, my mom was emotionally, physically, and sexually abused by an infamous therapy cult, shattering the structure of my family and leaving me with emotional wounds that would last half a lifetime.

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When I started GoodTherapy.org, I didn’t have much entrepreneurial or business experience beyond running my own private practice. What I did have, however, was common sense, an ability to put myself in the shoes of others, and the indelible belief that if I worked hard enough, and built a smart, hardworking team, nothing could stop a good idea from succeeding.

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The company grew year after year, to the point where VC brokers were contacting me nearly every week. But I had no interest in ever letting go of the company until 2017, when my mom was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. Overnight, my perspective changed.

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I had already been gearing up to face a huge problem. A number of new competitors had appeared on the scene. One of them was BetterHelp, and it was clear from the amount of advertising they were doing all over radio, TV, print, and the web that they had deep pockets. I knew if I wanted GoodTherapy.org to stay competitive, I’d need investors and would likely have to give up a portion of my ownership and, most likely, full control.

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From the inception of the company, I had remained the sole owner. The only startup funds came out of my pocket: $5,000 I put on a credit card during our first year in business, and another $10,000 my grandma had lent me in our third year. The idea of sharing the risk and having a larger advertising budget were both super appealing, but I just didn’t want to lose creative control. I’ve always been good at collaborating, but have never liked taking orders from others.

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I had a unique perspective as a CEO. In some ways, I was stuck in my C suite, analyzing spreadsheets, creating Excel forecasts, making decisions by some balance between what the P&Ls dictated and the risk I was willing to take, and always looking at creative ways of optimizing our existing revenue stream and expanding into new ones.

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But in other ways, I was totally hands on. Though I had learned over and over again that I couldn’t do everything, that I needed to delegate functions to others, I was still involved in much of the day to day, even leading the cosmetic and structural redesign of the website.

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So given all of this, when I imagined selling shares of my company in exchange for more operating capital, it frightened me. I didn’t want to lose all the control I had. In a lot of ways, I was like a firstborn child who didn’t want to share.

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But when I found out my mom was dying, my priorities changed. I knew her days were limited and I wanted my kids, who were 9 and 11 at the time, and me to get as much time with her as I could. It was time to step down, to let go, take a trust fall, and follow the midlife crisis I suddenly found myself in, wherever it led.

Luckily I didn’t have to shop GoodTherapy.org around. I had already turned down previous offers and new ones were coming out of the woodwork every month. In early 2018, I was contacted by PaySimple, which was already in the process of reorganizing as EverCommerce and becoming a NASDAQ traded company.

We went through a long due diligence process, multiple disclosures to my team, including the dreaded “breaking the news” meeting, and lots of preparation for the big day ahead, when PaySimple would officially take over. The team seemed good. PaySimple had promised to bring resources, increased employment benefits, and promotional opportunities. So by fall 2018, nearly everyone was on board with the sale when the ink dried and the deal closed. The only one not fully prepared for the change was me.

The closing meeting was virtual, a Zoom call with me, my counsel, and 10 others from PaySimple. I attended from my office, alone, overlooking Percival Creek in Olympia. When the final document was signed and the CEO and CFO of PaySimple thanked me and logged off, tears pretty much exploded out of me.

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Letting Go

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I had spent 12 years of my life building and caring for a company like it was a living, breathing entity, like it was my child. At the time of the sale, it felt like I was abandoning my own child, and it hurt. What would become of her? I also wasn’t totally sure who I was now that I wasn’t the owner of the company. Sure, I now had a decent amount of stock in EverCommerce, a sizable payout, and they had urged me to stay on as the new “president” of GoodTherapy.org, to keep driving the company toward a shared vision, or at least a vision I thought we had shared.

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It turned out that my expectations about what would become of GoodTherapy.org, my team, and the increased marketing budget that would flow into the company were just expectations. One disappointment after another, along with the reality that my mom was getting worse every month, could no longer be swept under the rug. I had put GoodTherapy.org on the market so I could step away and tend to my mom, but my loyalty to my team members and my inability to let go of my emotional ownership kept me on longer than I had originally planned. Only a few months after the sale, I hit a wall. I couldn’t keep doing it and I resigned my position.

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Looking back, there’s a part of me that wishes I was still running GoodTherapy.org, still responsible for growing the company, striving to reach its vision for mental health. I loved the creativity of the job, I loved the mission, I loved the team, and it gave my life a bit of purpose. But I found other things to live for. Most importantly, it gave me and my mom time to continue healing our relationship and growing closer, time I wouldn’t have had if I had kept working.

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I will forever regret that GoodTherapy.org team members, the amazing people the company took care of, eventually lost that security. That was the worst part of the sale. The team splintered. Some left for state jobs, and others were later cut as downsizing ensued after I left. That’s the tragic part of letting go of control and selling a company. Even though it wasn’t my decision to let people go, I still felt responsible.

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All of that experience shaped me profoundly. It taught me not only about business, leadership, pressure, risk, delegation, grief, and letting go, but also about what business ownership and leadership can stir up inside a person. It is a large part of why I feel equipped to help other entrepreneurs and business leaders, both with the inner challenges they face and with the external demands of leading and growing something important.

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Lessons of a CEO

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I learned a lot of lessons over the years, and, well, I’m still learning. Building and leading a company asked more of me than I could have anticipated, not just professionally, but personally. Some lessons came through success, others through stress, mistakes, conflict, disappointment, and having to face my own limitations. That’s part of the journey. Growth as a leader, and really as a person, is ongoing. We never really get it wrong in any final sense, because even our missteps become part of what teaches us. And we never really get it done, because each new stage of life and leadership asks something new of us.

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Here are a handful of the things running a company taught me, sometimes the hard way:

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• How to rely on and delegate to others

• The importance of consulting with experts

• How to hire and contract with people who are more knowledgeable

• How to use a position of power to benefit others

• Healthy leadership

• How to create a supportive, friendly, and motivated team

• How to deal with the occasional difficult employee and workplace drama

• The importance of doing my own therapy to address limitations, fears, and resistance

• How the law of attraction impacts progress

• How to balance priorities

• How to assess risk

• How to make decisions

• How not to operate in a vacuum
   

Therapy for Entrepreneurs and Business Leaders
 

Entrepreneurs and business leaders face external challenges and internal ones. Anxiety, tremendous responsibility, burnout, perfectionism, conflict avoidance, fear of failure, indecision, people pleasing, difficulty delegating, imposter syndrome, harsh self criticism, and chronic overwork can all quietly interfere with one’s general happiness as well as leadership and decision making. Some leaders become too controlling. Some are too passive. Some get stuck in loops of doubt or overanalysis. Some are highly capable externally but feel chronically burdened, lonely, or internally driven in ways that take a toll over time. Therapy and inner work can help address and transform the parts of you, the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, that may be interfering with reaching your goals, your relationships, your wellbeing, and your capacity to lead with greater clarity and steadiness.

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If you are an entrepreneur or business leader who wants support, whether around the internal challenges and barriers to healthy self leadership or the practical realities of running and growing a business, I’d be glad to explore whether working together feels like a fit.