Awarepreneurs interview - Lauren Howard

Hi and welcome to AwarePreneurs, the world's longest running social entrepreneur podcast. My name is Paul Zelizer and I'm your host. If you could take a moment and hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps our guests help more social entrepreneurs and it costs you nothing. Thank you so much. Today our guest is Lauren Howard, also known as L2, and our topic is vetting investors as much as they vet you. Lauren L2 Howard is a telehealth program operator, mental health advocate and women's champion who believes above all that isolation lies. It's not just you and help is available. She is the CEO of LB Health, a virtual mental health treatment program that supports people recovering from burnout, toxic work environments and trauma, while also providing full spectrum mental health care with an emphasis on accessibility and lower cost options.

Lauren is also the CEO of L2, a digital platform and community boldly calling BS on outdated ideas of professionalism for women and inviting them to join team Difficult as they redefine what leadership and success can look like across our companies and consulting work. L2 uses technology, storytelling and care to build space spaces where people can heal, tell the truth about what they're going through, and do work that feels more human and sustainable. L2, welcome to AwarePreneurs.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm looking forward to this. You're doing such amazing work. And let's go back to the beginning. Give us a sense of the origin story of LB Health and L2, and was there a moment when you realized you really needed to build something that didn't exist yet?

Yeah, I mean, the origin story is really my kind of origin story. Some would say my villain origin story, depending on how you look at it. But my background has been in behavioral health administration for most of my career. I ran a practice starting right out of college. It was my dad's practice and he was an incredible psychiatrist and the world's worst business person and never should have been allowed to run a business. And I think honestly, watching him be really bad at business made me really good at business. And so we complemented each other really well. But I, like, didn't.

I had no idea what I was doing. Not to say we ever did anything that was improper or not compliant, but I didn't know what red tape to look for, so I didn't look. And that meant that we built a lot of innovative programs that other people probably would have been like, well, you can't do that. And when you ask why it would be like, well, that's just not the way we do things. But the real reason for it was never based in science or evidence based medicine or, you know, making good decisions for people. It was always just the way it's always been done, which has, which has always been like, just really abrasive to me. Like, just because that's the way it's always been done doesn't mean that's the way we should always do it. My dad passed away in 2016 and I moved on to another job that was a really, really incredible experience in education and startups and business and how to do things a little bit differently than how I had done them previously.

And also a really excellent education in burnout and toxic work environments. And I eventually left that role pretty unceremoniously without a plan in place, which is very much unlike me. Usually my control issues are way too substantial to allow that to happen. But I was so burned out that it just didn't matter. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered. I was to the point where I could, I physically couldn't do more. And from there, from that experience, just kind of started talking on the Internet about some of these things that I had experienced without.

I didn't have a plan. I don't know why I did it. To this day, it is pretty like against who I was then. I was pretty private and really didn't want any eyes on me ever. And really expected that people would be kind of mortified that I was sharing such personal stuff. And instead they said, wait a minute, that happened to you? Because that happened to me too. And I thought it was just me. And I was like, okay, well if it's you and it's me and it seems like it's all of us, then maybe it is all of us and we're not talking about it.

And that led to us having kind of really tough conversations about what it meant to work in today's corporate environment, what it meant to be called difficult as a woman in the workplace, how workplaces were not built for the way a lot of our brains worked. And I don't think I realized we were having these conversations at the time, but once you start getting into them, and especially in hindsight, we were really talking about neurodivergence. We were really talking about people who do not fit a neurotypical mold and who get penalized for it, despite being high achievers, despite being really good at their jobs. And so fast forward several years of having these conversations and running practices for my, you know, for our partners and it kind of smacked me in the face one day. I was like, why am I not running my own practice? This is what I do. Really just punched me in the head one day, and I was like, oh, this is Billy. This is what we're supposed to be doing. That was about 18 months ago.

And now we operate in all 50 states. And we have programs that literally only exist within our practice because we built them using incredible, really exceptional clinicians who built innovative programs that work within the evidence space, but still kind of push the boundaries of what we traditionally see in the types of care that we're delivering. And we try to do it as affordably as possible, because people who can afford to pay $400 an hour to talk to a psychiatrist are not looking for somebody like me. They're good. They have care. It has been a wild ride of 18 months, but not one that I'm unhappy with by any means. One that keeps me up at night and one that is responsible for a lot of these additional gray hairs, but certainly one that has not been what I expected, and that. That is not a complaint.

So this message has really resonated. I mean, when I was looking on LinkedIn, you personally have something like 95,000 plus people connected on LinkedIn. Right? There's. It really. It really engaged a certain audience. And one of the things that you're known for, we read it in your bio, was this idea that isolation lies. Tell us a little bit about that. It feels like you found some language that were really resonating with the people you wanted to engage.

Does that feel like a fair assessment?

Yeah, it's literally on my shirt.

Oh, there we go. I couldn't see that with your hair. Okay. Yeah.

That's what a lot of our company swag says. And it. It really was. It was the core of what I went through and what became very evident to me as I was coming out on the other side of it. I spent several years in a. In a place that was all shades of gray because. And I don't mean shades of gray and that it was gray area. I meant the world had no color in it.

There was no color. There was no light. There was no vibrancy. It was just the best it was going to get. This has to be a fine. This has to be enough. I had a paycheck. I had a job.

I used to say to myself all the time, you're an adult, sometimes those things are not exciting. Sometimes it's. Sometimes you're not going to be happy, and that's okay. You're not, you know, life isn't a fairy tale. Grow up. I used to say things like that to myself all the time and thinking that I was somehow doing myself or my family a disservice by having aspirations behind or beyond the very, very, you know, limited scope of what life seemed to have to offer. I, I was really negative about my perception of myself, about my skills. I felt very small.

I felt like this. I was as lucky to have this job as they were to have me. And the fact that I have a job is, Is, you know, impressive all on its own because who would want to hire me? And I never talk to anybody else about it because I just assumed that I was the only person who was ever going through this. And that's, that's by design. So when you're isolated, when you don't build community, it begets more isolation. You're not going to fight back against what's in front of you because there's no other. You're not getting any other messaging that something could be better. Isolation begets more isolation.

It likes itself. It wants more of itself. And so you only get more isolated until something breaks that, that kind of hold it has on you. And mine was, you know, every. I would probably think about leaving my job every couple of hours, and it was always, nope, can't do that. Nope, that'll be bad for me. Nope, that'd be bad for my family. And it was, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Until one day it was yes. And then as soon as it was yes, there was nothing else in the world. I could not exist there anymore. I couldn't get through another moment. I don't know what broke the glass, aside from this very insidious little thought that, like, if this is the best it's going to get, I've got to find something else. But again, never saying that to anybody else, never looking for any kind of community and commonality in that, because I just assumed this was just me. Nobody else was talking about it. Nobody else was bringing this to my attention.

And it wasn't until for some reason, again, to this day, I have no idea why that I just decided to say something about it on the LinkedIn box with no real goal. I didn't. I wasn't trying to get a job. I was. I don't know what I was trying to do. I just had this, like, potential energy that I had to get out of my body and got literally hundreds, if not thousands of responses of by and large women saying, I'm either In the same place. I just got out of the same place. I thought it was just me.

Over and over and over, I thought it was just me. And that's how I felt. And so it really emerged out of that, which is that we were all isolated. We were all put in environments that were designed to isolate us because the more isolated we were, we weren't going to have conversations about it. We weren't going to touch, develop this idea that we deserved better. Because if it's just us, then we're the problem. The environments were created for that reason. And so that's how we ended up saying this all the time, which is, you know, if you think you can't reach out, if you think you can't ask for help because you're the only one, isolation lies.

It tells you it's just you, and it is almost never just you.

Very powerful. And I, many of our listeners know this. I don't know if we talked about alarm before we hit record. I don't think so. My, my first career was in community mental health. I have a master's in community mental health. I think now that was a while ago. I've been doing social entrepreneurship for 18 years.

But I think I can say with some degree of authority or at least informed opinion that this intersection of mental health and women and work culture, that's not what most clinicians are thinking about. Is that fair to say?

Yeah. I mean, yes and no. I think, I think the really tough thing about it, and I get this a lot from the clinicians, I'm not a clinician personally, but I work with tons of them every day. And I think they are becoming more aware of what's happening in corporate America and how it is creating these very unsustainable environments and how people are reacting to it. Because it is very, very hard to treat patients or to create meaningful progress or help patients make meaningful progress in a world that you can do nothing about. And I say this all the time. Do we have a mental health crisis or do we have a capitalism crisis? Do we have a world that is just impossible to live in? If you can't pay your bills despite the fact that you're working 60 hours a week, if your boss is never happy because your goals are or are unreachable, if the rent keeps going up despite the fact that you haven't gotten a raise in four years and you're going to get evicted because of it, what interventions do we use for that, aside from giving people a place to, to talk about it out Loud and say, you're right, this isn't right. We shouldn't be doing this to people.

And so I think. I do think we're getting to a place where clinicians are much more aware of. Not that they have historically been aware, but I don't think you can extricate a lot of socioeconomic stuff from the mental health stuff anymore. We have created a world that is basically unlivable for people, and then we ask them why they're depressed, as if there's not a fully explainable reason right there. And that's not to say that, you know, we know that depression is an illness, or mental illness in general are illnesses, and they have physiologic reasons that don't necessarily have anything to do with environment, but environment does matter. And if we are putting people in unsustainable environments all the time, what are clinicians supposed to do?

Did you just outline what Paul's a social entrepreneur, coach and podcaster are not a clinician anymore. You literally just described my journey.

Exactly.

Yeah. So you. You get on LinkedIn, you start maybe other platforms, you start talking about this, and you get inundated. You said literally hundreds, thousands of people, mostly women, are reaching out, saying, this is my story, too. And out of this comes these two companies, LB Health being one of them. Tell us about LB Health first, and then we'll talk about L2. Like, what is LB Health? What was the. What was the way in which you wanted to be helpful 18 months ago, if that is indeed when you launched it?

So we did launch 18 months ago. So we. We started mostly because we were three years having. Three years into having this conversation, and I personally felt like nothing was getting better. I felt like we had not created an environment where anything could get better. And so we started looking. We started. I personally needed to look at this idea of how we improve.

How do I stop laying on the couch on Saturdays and say, talking about it isn't enough. We have to do something? And so we started. We started looking at what does it mean to actually make measurable improvements? How do we change this? And I didn't see anybody in the space that was talking about the intersection between workplace difficulties and mental health. And I talked to our now chief clinical officer and said, like, hey, is this something that we need to actually address? Is there. Is there something here? And she said, there's definitely something here, because this is most of what I do all day at my job. This is most of what we talk about. Then it became about, okay, how. How do we do this? How do we present this, how do we make this accessible? And we did it through a number of ways.

We did it through general mental health treatment. We did it through support groups which are non clinical but have almost clinical outcomes. When you just give people who need to scream a place to scream, that's safe among people who completely understand them. And that was a lot of what we focused on initially was how do we create the voids that people need? And that was really our goal. And now we're 18 months in, and we've gone through a number of different iterations of that, but it all goes back to the same thing. How do we create places where people belong, where they're comfortable saying the things out loud that they've been always. That they've always been told are too weird or too uncomfortable or too off the beaten path. And it's changed a lot, but it's still the same mission.

So what does it look like on the ground as a venture? Like, how many people are you serving? You said all 50 states. I think I heard these, you know, like, how many clinicians, how many clients? Is it insurance reimbursable? All the things a social entrepreneur might want to know when their head is shaking. Like, this is a really cool mission.

How does it work?

Yeah. So we are in all 50 states. Not all of our programs are in all 50 states, but we have at least one program in all 50 states. And we will, we will close that gap very quickly. All of our services are reimbursed by insurance, with the exception of group programs, which are priced at $20 per person, regardless of the service. So $20 per visit per person. We designed those with the idea that everybody has $20 at some point, or I won't say everybody. Most people have $20 at some point.

And so if they have $20 at some point, they can come to a session, they can sit with people who understand them, they can get the support that they need or the support that will help them through whatever this rough patch is. We try to do everything we can to, to give things, you know, to reduce, even reduce costs. Beyond that, when we can, we have payment plans available for that reason. You know, how do we ensure any way that we can make things as accessible as possible? We have, I want to say, about 30 clinicians right now. We have seen about 1800 patients in a number of different capacities. We have seen people from all walks of life, from all states, from all different areas, with. For every different type of program that we offer. And our goal is, again, to make something available in a world where a lot of people just have nothing.

Just have absolutely nothing. And sometimes when we say nothing, the realities of that are deceptive. So you would think that we're talking about people who have no access to healthcare whatsoever. Insurance. They have no. And that is some of it. But the people that we are really talking, not really talking about, but the people that we see who are often in some of the tightest jams, are people who really, really need intervention, who have insurance, but their deductibles are so high that it basically precludes them from getting access to their own health insurance. And they can't afford $400 a month for mental health care.

And that's a fully insured person. And so that was who we were really building for, was this employed group of people who are gainfully employed, who are working really hard, and who still have considerable barriers to care based on access, based on where they live, based on transportation, and sometimes based on their own insurance.

So love what you're designing there. And that's LB Health. Tell us a little bit about L2. That's another separate entity. What is that all about? And how did the two play together or not play together?

Yeah. So there's a huge amount of overlap. The missions are very similar. L2 is not a clinical entity. It's more of a consulting entity. We really work with other organizations to implement what we have done at scale. On the LP Health side, it is heavily focused on. It's really the organization where I go run my mouth.

I'll be honest. That's really. That's where most of the math running comes out of. Not that we don't do it on both sides, but so we really focus heavily on, you know, nothing we do is proprietary. I mean, we have lots of things that we built ourselves, but we don't keep them a secret. We don't gatekeep them. If you want help implementing it on your. In your practice, like, tell me where to show up and I'll do it.

Because we need more good care out there, not less. And so that's really where where the two organizations intersect is we do a lot of advocacy work, we do a lot of education work, and we will also go into other organizations who might have nearly the same mission or goal and teach them how to do what we already do, because we need more people doing it.

Beautiful. And my understanding is these two entities, up until now, they've been bootstrapped, right?

Yep. We are fully bootstrapped, 100% up until.

Now, as our, as our title said. So we're about to get more information there. I didn't mean to interrupt, but yeah, that's about to change, right?

Yeah, I think depending on how I feel when I wake up in the morning. Some days I'm like, yeah, it's absolutely going to change. And other days I'm like, I don't know, maybe we can make it the way that we're going. And it's, yes, we are probably going to move toward funding. We are, we are going to have to because we have the ability to offer occupational therapy to people throughout the entire country and nobody else is doing that. And to do it at the scale that it deserves to be done at, we're going to need funding to do it. We can't, you know, we can't bootstrap that from the back of my car like I would like to. So that's, you know, that's terrifying because we are, I am highly bootstrapped.

My mentality is very bootstrapped. It is, don't, don't buy it until you have money in your pocket. Don't invest in it unless that's, unless it's funds that are readily available. And that's pretty scary to me. So that said, we have started conversations on what it looks like to bring in an outside investor, which again, very scary. And figure out how we do that without losing kind of our dedication to our core values and our very, very mission aligned goals. And you know, is there such a thing as an investor who is mission aligned? We're going to find out. We're going to find out.

But that's really, you know, it's not, it's not like a lot of companies where you go out and you say what you need to say and you shake all the hands and you kiss all the babies and hope at the end of the day that they give you money, regardless whether you agree with them or not. We have a lot of people to protect and if we take outside money from people who are not going to be invested in protecting those people, like what we do is not going to work. And so we have to be really careful and we're really scared about it, but we're ready.

I so appreciate your trans and your transparency, Lauren. It's just such a big question for a lot of our type of listeners because our listeners are so impact focused. I really appreciate that. So, so in a moment I want to come back and ask you more about that. You built this thing. 30 clinicians, 1800 clients, all 50 states consulting with other people, teaching them how to work with this population in this way. And now you're looking at scaling and it's really scary. We want to hear your thinking about values and how you vet people who are considering investing in your company.

Before we do that, I want to take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsor.

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Welcome back everybody. I'm here with Lauren Howard and we're talking about L2 and how neurodivergent and mental health and providing care, particularly to women, can be done at scale. And the awesome work that Lauren and her team are doing to think about how to scale it even more through investment. And right before the break, Lauren, we were saying you're looking, you're, you're peering over the edge of like becoming an investor backed company. And, and it's scary and I really appreciate you naming that. And the big fear is, if I understand it, is that well I'll tell a story. A very, a clean tech company that I know the founder quite well got pushed out because investor, the, the CEO of this company and the founder or the co founder got pushed out because investors had a different vision of where this company should go and how quickly it should get there. So this is not a random fear.

As somebody who you know is swimming in the world and talking to and advising and coaching and consulting with investor backed companies all the time, I I commend you for being wide eyed and not going into it in a Pollyanna way. You know, rainbows and unicorn is not a good strategy to go into the investment conversation. Right. So tell us a little bit about that conversation that you and your team are having. Okay. It is time to be at least more, a more serious look at investment. Right. And we want to do it in a very eyes wide open and values based way.

What are some of those conversations sounding like? And what are some of the values that you would want to communicate to an investor to ensure that somebody who's not a good fit would like go screaming in the other direction? And I think that's a positive outcome, not a negative outcome. Right.

I am a huge believer in letting people self select out. I think they do you a huge amount of favor, a huge favor when they do that on your behalf. And a lot of people get offended by the idea of somebody not wanting to work with them. And I am completely the opposite. Like, please know in advance what exactly, you know, who exactly I need you to be. So I, you know, I think there is, I think it goes back to the same thing that we've always done, which is we can't be someone we're not in order to secure funding. And I say this a lot, running a good practice, often on paper, not on paper, often in theory, looks like running a bad business. And that's not the case.

You can do well, you can run a successful business by running a good practice. You just have to know where the balance is and how to strike that balance. So there is, there is a huge, there is a disparity there that we have to be aware of. And we also have to be aware of. We absolutely have to be aware of. I think we've made it this far by being unabashedly ourselves by delivering care in exactly the way that we have always intended to deliver care. And I think we can't hide that from our investors. And I think the instinct is to create this very sanitized version of what we do and how we do it in order to get the money.

And I think that's a really high cost to pay to get the money because then our, you know, our patients are going to suffer from that. So there is this aspect of vetting our investors as hard as they're vetting us and not. And not just taking every dollar that's offered to us across the board. And that again, that is the harder way to do it. It would be way easier to just shut up and show them the numbers and hope that it's good enough. But we, our company doesn't exist without our story. And we have to be able to tell it. And if we can't tell it, then there's no value to the money.

Yeah. So one thing I'm hearing is to be sure that any potential investors understand your story and your culture, the culture of the organization that got you to this. Like, wow, a lot of people are paying attention and it's really resonating with people because you weren't saying the same thing as everybody else. And by definition, that meant, you know, you're swimming a little bit outside of the box in terms of how you're thinking about these issues and the interventions and the services you're providing. They're not the same as every mental health center on every street corner in America.

Right.

Or anywhere else in the world. They're different. And it's really important that investors understand those differences. And if they are going to invest, they're in alignment with those differences. Is that fair to say?

Yeah, absolutely. And then more than that, like somebody who's incredibly buttoned up and, and is going to want all numbers, all the time is going to hate working with me. Not to say that we don't have numbers, not to say that we don't know where our finances are. And we're, you know, we're, again, we're really good at the business side of things, but they're going to hate working with me because that's not all that we care about. We care about the outcomes. We care about delivering exceptional care. We care about that maybe more than we care about the finances. And that's usually why the finances end up working.

And so that is going to be a really, really unhappy investor. And that's not fair to them either, especially if they want the sanitized version of what we do. What we do is ugly. It has to be, because we're often fighting for care that insurance companies don't want to deliver or don't believe is vital. And so it's ugly and it's messy and it's complicated. And, you know, we absolutely to heavily focus on making sure it's the right fit, making sure we're working with people who want to work with us. Because on days like there are going to be days where it seems like the entire sky is falling and we have to be on the same page when those days happen. And it.

Because if not, it immediately becomes a blame game. Well, if you guys had or if you cared more about or if that's not the way this business works, there are days where it's like, I don't know why this insurance company is holding up $50,000 in claims. And I fought with them 10 times. And an investor has to understand that that is the nature of this beast and that it likely has nothing to do with anything that we did because this is a game that gets played day in and day out and we'll get the $50,000, but it's going to take a fight, a fight we shouldn't have to fight. And it almost never has anything to do with us.

Yeah, so there's the culture of the, the clientele and the relationship you have with your clientele. There's an understanding of the mental health business and particularly insurance. And you know, it's. Yeah, it's, it's a, it's such an inefficient system. And this is baked in that whether it's a, it doesn't really matter whether it's like a dentist or, you know, a nurse practitioner doing, you know, just, well, being care or a mental health clinician, to say no as often as you can makes your insurance company more profitable. It's just, that's just how it works. It's part of the game. And so there's some education.

Either potential investors need to understand that already or they need to be willing to be, to learn about this specific industry and to be okay with that. Okay. I understand large chunks of money. And it doesn't really matter whether you're a lifestyle medicine business or dental practice. That's the medical world in the US with the insurance system we have. And I would say mental health care, it's probably even more prominent than if you were a dentist or a nurse practitioner because it's, you can't necessarily, you know, do a blood test and prove that somebody has this thing and that this antibiotic is going to fix it. Right.

So denial rates, denial rates in mental health care are substantially higher than the rest of the. Yeah. Rest of the medical population. And, and I don't even know that those are valid denials. I think that's the thing. I think there is this entire culture of deny and see what happens, see if they'll fight it, see if they'll argue with it.

Right.

And unfortunately for them, I argue with it every time and I'm often very successful, but I think there are a lot of places that don't. And so the, the small amount of bureaucracy that is created by this, this, it's probably not that small, but by this philosophy, which is not a good philosophy, is supported by the fact that, you know, if. If it's only happening 20% of the time and they get away with it 80% of the time, that saves them a lot of money.

Exactly. That $50,000 goes in their pocket. Right. If they could. If they. If they would have paid at time 11, and you gave up after 10, which would be a pretty reasonable human day. Like, oh, my Gosh, I've called 10 times. I'm done.

Right. And you walk away from 50,000. They pocket the $50,000 that they denied. Right. So you. There has to be an understanding in any investor. This is just how this game is played, and they have to be okay with that. You'll do your best.

Sounds like you get better. You know, you're better at fighting with the insurance company to payment than most. But there's going to be an element of that that's unpredictable and baked into the system. And if they can't live with that, they probably shouldn't do this investment. Is that fair to say?

Yeah, exactly. Cool.

And then how would you talk to them? Okay, let's say there's an investor, right. And they're aligned with the mission. They understand the culture. They love it. They're, like, good with a little bit of a rogue brand. That's. They're excited about that. They see your impact.

They're thrilled by it. They understand the sector. How would you talk to them about the, you know, questions investors would have? What are the terms? What's the, you know, how much are you asking for? How long is this investment? Like, how would you. When it's ready to have that conversation, what would it sound like?

Really good question. And I think we're so new in this process, and I'm still kind of in disbelief that we're even having it, that there are. There are probably a lot of things we haven't pushed on yet. But I think, you know, I. I think the understanding of how much of the company we're giving away to somebody who is not actively working within the company, like, that might be as important as the. Or it definitely is as important as the kind of personality fit aspect, because we. We have built something really special. We have built something that really doesn't exist anywhere else.

And as far as I'm concerned, it should be owned by my employees as much as possible. And we're going to have to give something to. To investors. But if we think, you know, if somebody thinks they're going to give us six months of Runway and that's going to result in 50% of our company. That's, that's, that's more incentive for us to bootstrap. And so I think the, the reality of being heavily focused on making sure our employees have, seek in what we're building, that they know that this is their company, that if they continue to do exemplary work, which they already do, that, that they are building something that will be of benefit to them and that we're not going to give away the house to the deep pockets. Now the other side of that, and this is really, truly important, the other side of that is that, you know, the employees also want paychecks and funding is probably what's going to support their paychecks. So there's that and that balance is, is a little bit difficult to strike.

But I think, you know, conversation number one is what, what percentage are you willing to invest for what equity stakeholders is your bare minimum? Not saying that we will go with the bare minimum, but what is the bare minimum? Because if they're going to come back with what basically amounts to an acquisition or pretty close to it, then we probably don't need to have that conversation any further. You know, my staff deserve to own as much as another large stakeholder, at least with them as a, as a body of owners. And if we can't facilitate that because we've deluded things so strongly for an investor, I don't think that's going to work.

Love what you're saying there, Lauren. Really appreciate again, just your transparency and the opportunity to have a real world conversation because a lot of our listeners have gotten to this point. Everybody's making different decisions, but it's a really poignant moment. And one question I would ask you personally is, as somebody who's bootstrapped and didn't think you'd be here in this conversation about investment, but now you are because you care about both the clientele and your people want paychecks and you want to grow and you want to scale and you're like, this is going to be hard to do without some outside investment here. What does it look like for you as an entrepreneur? What is it asked of you maybe as a better. How have you needed to grow from that person of like, no, I'm never taking outside investment to deep breath. I think it's time to have this conversation. We may or may not with any particular investor, or maybe we don't find the ideal investor, but it's time for us to have this conversation in a mature way.

Like how have you As a founder had to grow and change and mature to have that conversation when you didn't think you'd be here at certain points in the journey.

I won't say that it required me to compromise on my beliefs because I. I don't think it's a compromise. I think it's. It's not compromised in the negative sense of the word. Like, I'm not giving up a part of my ethics to make this decision, but I think it did require a hard look at what. What we want to build and what grow. What we want to build and what growth looks like for us. What does growth look like for us in this environment? How do we deliver? How do we provide services? And are we bottlenecked by some of these convictions that may amount to unfair judgments of some people out there? Like not every VC or not every private equity person is going to have bad intentions.

Do some of them. And it's not even bad intentions. I just think the intentions different than ours. Do some of them. Absolutely. But is there a likelihood that we can find a person? Yeah, maybe that person may exist. And so some of it was, you know, I say this to people all the time. Don't be the no.

If, you know, if you're the one saying no, then it's a no. Whereas if you give something an opportunity to be a yes, you could be surprised by it. And then if it's a no anyway, that's what it was before, so what does it matter? That's what you said to yourself, so might as well give it a shot. And so there was some of that. But then also, you know, hoping and crossing our fingers that we may run into people who will surprise us. And we are regularly surprised by people in a good way. So I'm hoping that we will be surprised in that way. And then also, like, how do we.

What is the right thing to do for these people who have entrusted me with their careers? Is the right thing to do to keep driving myself crazy trying to make payroll every month? Is that the right thing? Is the right thing to do to create a world that is easier for me so that we can have more hands on deck and then all these big innovative projects can actually be realized because we have the capacity to do it, maybe. And so accepting that the vision and also accepting that the landscape, the climate that we're in right now is not the climate we were in when we started, we could not have. If you had told me 18 months ago that I was going to spend the majority of my time protecting my Patients from their insurance companies. I would have been like, why? That's never been an issue that we have before, but now I don't know what people are going to do with records. I don't know. Like, I don't know who's up to what. I don't know. There's so much, I don't know.

There's so much I feel like we have to protect our patients from. And also there are so many more people who are scared to get care now. And so, you know, the climate changed and I think we had to change with it and we're going to have to change with it. And so is this again, is this where I thought we'd be? No. Am I mad about it? No. Am I scared about it? Definitely. Are we going to keep seeing what comes up and figure out what the right way to go is? Yeah, because that's the only option we have.

You mentioned some of those big projects and having the resources to do it. So let's play the what if game. You get a nice infusion of capital from an awesome investor who's totally values the line, loves what you're doing, understands the context, writes you big check. And now it's five years from now. What is LB Health look like?

I think LB Health has created a world where we have changed how people perceive occupational therapy and how it is integrated into care models, behavioral health care models nationwide. I think we start a real conversation about how occupational therapy as a behavioral health discipline is always how it was supposed to be used. We have kind of, for lack of a better term, bastardized it into what it is now. And it's considered mostly a physical health discipline. That's not a criticism of the clinicians by any means. It's very much an infrastructure issue. And I think if we have done what we really can to make a mark, it is to introduce the idea of long term innovative care models for neurodivergent adults beyond getting a diagnosis and a high five. And I hope that we can deliver that across the country in ways that it's never been done before.

Not because it hasn't existed, but just because this population has been largely overlooked. There's this idea that if you get to 18 and you're autistic, you're probably fine. You got there, it's fine, you're fine, it's not a big deal. That's not incorrect. Just because you survived it doesn't mean that you're fine. If we could make a dent into how the world looks at these programs, how we deliver how we integrate multi pronged care models and how we, how we treat behavioral health as an integrated care team as opposed to a couple of diagnoses and somebody who you talk to once a week, which again, not a criticism of the modalities because highly supportive of them. That's really the goal is your, your neurodivergence path or your, your understanding of your own neurodiversions should come with more than a high five and we want to do them more than a high five.

When I could hang out with you all day and I know you're busy, so are our listeners. So as we start to wind down, if there was something you were hoping we were going to get to and we haven't gotten to it yet, or there's something you want to leave our social entrepreneur listeners with as we say goodbye, what would that be?

Well, I'll say it this way. I work a lot more than I should. I work way more hours than I should. But it is because the second I stop working within the confines of what I can control and start paying attention to what's happening outside, I just get so disheartened. And it is so easy to feel absolutely beat down by the things that are happening and how they're happening and why they're happening. And the reality is that we need people who can compartmentalize. We need people who can understand that what's going on out there is awful and that it's making things harder and process that while still doing the work to create the world that we need on the other side of that. And I, I know how hard it is to be a mission oriented find founder and to spend so much time fighting for what things should be instead of what things are.

And, and there is this aspect that is, that can be really disheartening when you look at it. And it still has to kind of be the fuel that we use to get through it, which is it's really, really hard and we have to do it anyway because nobody else is going to. And so if I can just draw attention to that and point, you know, I'm sure you have lots of listeners who are in that space who are struggling with the fact that it feels like they are screaming into a void that just wants to gobble them up and spit them out. Because the world is, you know, the world is really negative toward people who care more about the mission than the finances. And we still need people like you in this world and people, you know, people who will still focus on the mission despite the fact that the world outside is terrifying are the reason that our, the people who we live amongst are going to have programs when all of this, when we're on the other side of this.

Or if somebody wants to get a hold of you, they want to hire you to come to their agency or their community, they want to find out more about LB Health, what's the best way for them to do that?

Yeah, so we. You can find me on LinkedIn. LinkedIn.com in L2E L L E T W O. You can find, find our contact information on our L2 website. E l l e w o dot com. We have a podcast, Different Not Broken. You can find it at different not broken podcast.com and there's contact information there and you could hear me run my mouth more. Not sure that anybody would want to, but if you do, it's there.

Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn every day.

So thank you for your work and thanks for being on the show.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Paul.

So, listeners, you heard something that stirred something in you. I know you know somebody who could benefit from this message, so please share it. That's how this grows, that's how we help more people. And it costs you nothing. A reminder, if you're ready to develop a strategy for your impact business, whether you're navigating uncertainty, you're raising capital, you're growing a team, check out my resources@paul zelizer.com and until next time, keep working for positive impact and letting your values guide your business. Sam.