#80: Dr. Colleen M. Lorber (Wraparound Experts)

I've watched people in our field in mental health do amazing things.
But what we lack right now is a collaboration in our environments.
So we're doing a great thing here at a Boys and Girls Club. We're doing a great
thing here in a school. We're doing a great thing here in a clinic. But one of
the things that is a challenge in our field is doing that all together. And so
that's really the goal.
Let's discover the Cleveland entrepreneurial ecosystem. We're telling the stories of
its entrepreneurs and those supporting them.
Welcome to the Lay of the Land podcast, where we are exploring what people are
building in Cleveland. I am your host, Jeffrey Stern, and today I had the absolute
pleasure of speaking with Colleen Lorber. Colleen has her PhD in school psychology
and founded wrap around experts from over 15 years in the field, combining her
knowledge of the environments and professionals that she worked with to provide a
model of services that wrap around a child and the environments and people that
influence the success of that child every single day. Colleen knew she wanted to be
a child psychologist in the sixth grade, and that goal and that determination drove
her to complete her doctorate at the age of 27. During her undergraduate and
graduate school years, Colleen worked at residential treatment facilities for at -risk
youth where she helped children with autism through behavioral therapy and mobile
therapy services. When Colleen was completing her doctorate, she began working at a
privately owned company as a psychology intern, and after 15 years there, she
departed from the company as its chief operating officer, where she was managing over
1 ,000 employees spanning psychologists, speech therapists, special education teachers,
Title I teachers, occupational therapists, physical therapists, RNs, LPNs,
medical assistants, and school health aides. Unfortunately, the research coming out
examining the current state of our society's mental health is quite dismal. The
pandemic has clearly had an effect on how we are operating our everyday lives.
Colleen and wrap -around experts, though, believe that the way to begin to work on
our mental health, starting with children in Ohio, is to bring it back to
concentrate on basic human needs, which include not only physical and biological
needs, but also our feelings of safety, security, love, and belonging and esteem.
This is the exact nature of the work Colleen is pushing forward with wrap -around
experts and is what we spend our conversation exploring today Please enjoy my
conversation with Colleen Lorber
So having heard you tell your story recently when we first connected and just
recently Reflecting on society, the state of mental health, which I know will talk a
lot more about in our conversation. I've been looking forward to this discussion and
sharing it with a broader audience, as I found the way that you're able to talk
about the work you're doing and why you're doing it is really exciting and
inspiring. And so I've been excited to learn more about it. And so I wanted to
just thank you for coming on today. - Oh, thank you. I'm excited that one of our
missions is to get the message out to as many people as we can. So I appreciate
this opportunity. - Yeah, so we'll cover a lot of things here, but I thought it
would be most interesting to start with your own interest in child psychology and
just kind of working through your own professional background and personal background
and path to entrepreneurship. - Sure. That could be a really long story,
so. And I am Irish, so we tend to like to tell long stories. But so personally,
I knew when I was young that I wanted to be a psychologist because people have
always fascinated me. Even when I was little, I wanted to know, well, why are they
making that decision or why did they choose to interact that way with their friends.
So I've always had this draw towards why people do what they do.
And when I got a little bit older, I understood that, oh, psychology is really the
way that I'm going to figure that out. And so that's kind of how it went. And I
followed the path from young deciding that all the way through getting my PhD when
I was 27, you know, just straight trained it all the way through, just didn't stop.
And it never didn't fascinate me. I always was learning new things.
And then how did I get to entrepreneurship? I mean, that's a very long story.
Basically, it's, you know, I never knew, I always knew I never was going to take
the traditional school psychology path. So I have a degree in school psychology, my
PhDs in psychology, but as I was learning more about what school psychology was,
I knew that I wasn't going to be able to go into a school and have that kind of
a structure that seemed a little but restricting to way that I operate. So I tend
to push against what the rules are, not because I don't believe in the rules,
but because I want to know the reason why the rules are the way they are,
which I have learned is a lot, like many traditional entrepreneurs. And so I started
out my path, not even going down the traditional public school route. I always tell
people I would have been fired probably pretty quickly because I would have said to
people, well, no, yeah, I don't agree. I'm not doing it that way. So I went, my
first route was really going towards a private company and I ended up starting as
an intern there and never left for 15 years.
I went from an intern to then supervising psychologists and then supervising speech
therapists and supervising special ed teachers, then taking over our nursing department
that we had there and then eventually becoming the chief operating officer and really
finding that psychology is a hand in hand with entrepreneurship,
hand in hand with business ownership. And I thought, I love this. I love the
psychology of business as well. And, you know, through lots of life circumstances,
it led me to kind of closing the door on that business that I was working with.
And here it was. It was a, hey, Colleen, what are you gonna do? It's now or
never. Are you gonna decide to, you know, go down the road and do what you've
always wanted to do or not? And I jumped jumped in both feet. I think that that
intersection is pretty interesting. I think I found when I just take a step back,
most of the problems of companies, there's hard technical stuff, but most of the
problems are people problems. And they're about why people are the way they are and
why they behave the way they do. And that's how it is. They're almost like one and
the same. - A thousand percent. So I think one of the reasons that I was able to
move as quickly as I did through that company is because of my psychology
background. I knew that to understand how to get things done,
I had to understand my management team on a level that other people maybe didn't
have this. I don't want to say didn't have the skill, but just maybe didn't dive
in the exact same way that I would from my kind of brain. So with a psychology
background, I'm able to look at my management team and go, okay, she operates this
way. He operates this way. If my goal is down here,
how do I get those people to my goal or the company goal by knowing the way that
their brains work? And honestly, I think that's what helped catapult me through that
those 15 years and becoming chief operating officer of it was a very large company
so quickly and at a pretty young age in comparison. So as you kind of make your
way through that journey, 15 years in, at what point do you start thinking about
maybe there's something that you yourself would like to pursue outside of that world
in which you have professionally developed. - Right. Very honestly, I thought that I
was going to be at that company forever. I thought that it would be something that
I would create into my own, you know, take what was there, a beautiful base and
foundation and continue to grow it down the path I thought. And business
circumstances did not allow for that. That's a different podcast probably.
And it was, it was sort of being forced on me. And I don't know if that's how
lots of entrepreneur journeys are, but that's how mine was. And it was that,
like I told you before, the now or never Colleen, here's your opportunity and you
don't get many of these in life. So So you're either gonna go down that traditional
route and go get a job or you're gonna go do what you believe in and When you
we're thinking about that opportunity what it is that you believe in you know Like
what were the the questions that you were asking? What what were you curious about
you know trying to validate? Did you have a vision at that point for for the
future for maybe what wraparound experts would become? I think it was always there.
I think in the back of my mind, I knew how can, let me take it back.
So my life and the way that I live life is how do I make today a great day?
You know, how do I make each day just a little bit better than it was yesterday?
How do I accomplish something new today? How do I meet a goal? And so for me, I
could look at the state of our psychology in schools and kids, and that's really
where my passion is, and go, "What are we missing? What's the piece of the system
that doesn't seem to be there, or that isn't talking to each other?" Always in the
back of my mind was, how do we build collaboration that doesn't exist right now?
Because we're all just sprinkling a little good here, a sprinkling a little there.
So that's really where that wraparound experts came from. How can I take the experts
in these fields and wrap around the kids? How do we all hold hands together with
all the knowledge that we have and really do something that is going to affect more
positive change for kids faster? Because if we do it together, we're going to
definitely make change quicker if that's just logic and that's what I wanted to do
with wraparound experts and I've I've watched people in our field and mental health
do amazing things but what we lack right now is a collaboration in our environments
so we're doing a great thing here at a Boys and Girls Club we're doing a great
thing here in a school. We're doing a great thing here in a clinic. But one of
the things that is a challenge in our field is doing that all together. And so
that's really the goal. And how we get there, I mean, I might have a little bit
of a roadmap thought of now, but it's also just leaning on each other and
supporting each other through that process. And that's what I think wraparound experts
it's going to do. I know it's going to do. So as you're thinking through those
really kind of like foundational beliefs, what is the process that you follow from
there to start to work towards? What does maybe a first pass at this look like?
What's the real business kind of question, right? Because it sounds all theoretical.
And you're like, "Oh, that sounds pretty, pretty, Colleen, how are you gonna actually
make it happen? And the way that you make it happen is you grow people. You find
the people that have the passion that you have and that have an understanding or an
area that you don't know and you get the people around them that can help support
them and you get them out in the environment. So what we do is we have
professional staffing of ecologists, counselors, social workers, board certified behavior
analysts, like behavior technicians, special education teachers, all those experts,
and we take those staff and we train them up in this model and then we put them
out there. We get them in the schools. And the way that that will be successful is
that we continue to support those professionals in those environments, we listen to
the needs of the kids in those environments, the schools, the community organizations,
and we meet those needs with the experts that we have. That's how it grows into a
business, is that we provide staffing, essentially, and then also training,
because I really believe that there aren't enough of us. The mental health crisis we
are in right now is pretty significant. it was rising, and then COVID just kind of
pushed everybody off that cliff. And there aren't enough professionals, like
psychologists and social workers and counselors and all of that, to really help as
many people as it's needed right now. So that's where our training comes in.
We want to give it away, give away the knowledge. I was told a long time ago that
you know you're doing your job when you've worked your way out of your job. So I'm
a good psychologist when they don't need me anymore. And that's my goal is to help
as much as possible till they walk away and go, "I got this, Colleen." Right.
I think that is true. And in your absence, is there enough structure,
process, self -reliance to handle the same kinds of things that you're helping people
work through. 100%. Yep. How much of a, I don't know,
deviation is the right word, but how much of a, in your training, like compared to
all these practitioners who are maybe used to approaching, you know, child psychology
in a certain way, how different is your approach then what folks might be used to
the truth is i don't think it's much different it's it's just a coordination of it
in a way that we're not doing it or or that we don't frequently concentrate on the
coordination of it and that's really one of our focuses is how do we pull the
community members together like for for us the training isn't just for the teachers
in the school, I want the bus drivers to know. I want the cafeteria workers to
know. Anybody who can affect change or has an influence on those kids' lives during
the day, that's who needs to know, including parents. Oh my gosh, I will give lots
of pizza parties, whatever needs to happen to get the parents there. Because when we
do it all together in the environments the kids are most exposed to, that's when
we're going to be able to help the most. So I wouldn't say it's a deviation. It's
just a different kind of coordinated approach.
- And how receptive, I guess from all parties, do you find people are to this
approach? - I will tell you that that's been one of the most
validating experiences that when I started talking about what we're going to do at
Wrap Around Experts and I started talking to professionals that I respect and who
have mentored me and or new people I have just met and their response is being,
"Oh yeah, I want to do that with you. Can I do that with you?" It was just,
I don't know, like, you know, it's one of those things that that you can't even
describe, somebody just gave you the best present ever. So the reception has been
quite amazing and even talking to potential clients, you know, clients for us would
be schools, communities, parents. That kind of reception too has been extremely
positive. Great, Colleen. How much is it? How do we pay for it? When can you
start? Let's go. Let's do it. So it's been pretty great. Great. No,
that's awesome. And how does the more like practically from a business operations
perspective, you know, how do you go about building both sides of that equation,
right? Like pulling together the right group of practitioners on one side and then
going to market on the other side. Right. So one of the things that has always
been very important to me in my life and my parents have taught me is, you is you
never burn a bridge, you never know when that person's gonna come back in your
life. And so building relationships for me and helping people solve problems and
helping them solve different needs they have had in their environments has always
been a priority to me. And so I think that on the client end, that is something
that has fared quite well in starting a new business, is that going out to them
and expressing that idea has, and in the state we are in right now, has been not
a difficult sell on the business end. They're also, right now, is a significant
amount of funding that the government has put in place, both state governments and
federal governments, that are directed towards mental health services and training,
and that's helpful. That they don't have to go find the money for it. A lot of
these environments have been given the money for it. So business -wise, that helps.
On the staffing end, which we all know the state of staffing right now,
there's a struggle. You know, one of the things in our profession is when you
believe in it, you can feel it and people want to do it. So, and I don't know if
this is very popular, but in people can attest to this, I say it in almost every
one of the trainings I do with our teachers, I stand up in front of teachers or
groups of people working with educators or who are educators and I say, if you
don't actually care about the children, please go get a different job. Because for
us, it means so much that I don't want you to Influence the kids that are going
to eventually be running our world in a negative way. So go away. There's lots of
other jobs We know they're out there go away and no shame. No, you know, not at
all so we attract that we attract the passion and People in our field want to feel
that passion. It's why they went to school to be Psychologist counselor social
workers and they don't they don't want just a job. And if they do, they'll go do
something else. I don't know. Not what we're trying to do. So we haven't struggled
much in that. And I should knock on wood somewhere that we really haven't had much
of an issue. Having people respond to just even ads and then interview process has
been pretty great. Thinking about it, it's maybe an unfortunate tailwind,
but I think it is a tailwind nonetheless. That's probably ultimately a boon to what
it is you're trying to do, which is the general state of mental health in the
country and how I think tuned into it in a way that, at least I don't ever
remember people being tuned into it, like how explicitly it's brought up in
conversations today and in a way it wasn't. And really, in the context, I think,
like you mentioned, of COVID and the generational impact that that had on kids who
were taken out of school at a developmental period for them, I'd be really curious
to get your perspective more at a societal macro level on what is happening in our
state of mental health and how you have seen things change and maybe where it's
going. - Right, well, it's not great. There's the easy answer,
is that COVID did something to our state of mental health as a very large group in
society that I don't think anyone could have predicted. It put us all on this,
you know, rickety bridge that we didn't have much answers for.
So when you things that that rock your foundation in a way that something like a
global pandemic does, getting that all put together is a very long road because
those core foundations have been shook to the point where you start questioning very
basic very basic things in life. So you know am I going to hurt someone by going
out into the environment giving them a hug, you know, if I don't have my mask on,
if I do have my mask on, am I gonna hurt someone's feelings if I feel this way
about the whole COVID thing or don't feel something about it. I mean, it permeated
so many parts of our lives that getting that back together is gonna take us a long
time. So yes, if there was a time to start a mental health business, it was
absolutely And being able to address that in a way that is going to actually help
us put some of those pieces back together is extremely important to us. And we
really believe that the way to do that is just to go all the way back to the
basics. And that's research and science too. It's not just a belief of ours, but
when you have such rocking of foundation and tragedy and all of that, bringing
yourself back to the basics of your needs and your mental health is what we need
to do to kind of write the ship. - You're talking about basics. What are some of
those basics? What are we pulling people back to? - So any of my colleagues and
people I went to graduate school or undergraduate school laugh at me because I could
not be more of a fan of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And anyone who's taken a
class, a basic psychology class has heard of this. And it really is the paramount
thing that we need right now. Maslow's hierarchy of needs basically says, "Guess
what? You're a human. You have needs. You need to fulfill them in order to be
okay." And it's all away from the food that you're eating, the water you're
drinking, the exercise you're getting, how safe you feel, how secure you feel. Can
you pay your bills at the end of the month? Where are you living? Do you know
where you're getting your next meal? To love and belonging, how are you feeling
connected to the people that you care about? How are you getting validated?
How are you feeling this sense of achievement. Those are all such staple things of
being a human that that's where we need to go back to. I challenge everybody and
this is a big part of what the workshops we do. Fill out your hierarchy of needs.
Do you know how to meet your own needs? And that's what we say are the basics.
And mental health is selfish. Mental health has to be a selfish process.
And the reason being is because no one's coming to save you. I am so sorry, Wonder
Woman's amazing, so is Batman and Superman and all those superheroes, but they're not
coming to save you. You are in charge of your mental health and it is up to you
to figure out how to fulfill those basic needs. And one thing that I have to make
clear is that when we talk about mental health, We definitely are differentiating
from mental health, from mental illness. And for us, mental illness is definitely a
different topic. And so that's when we are experiencing this extremes of where our
typical mental health is. Mental illness is more of the extremes, where we are
struggling with daily life functioning because of our feelings of sadness or our
worries or those other things. That's a much different topic. We're talking about
everyday mental health that we all have every single day. Positive, negative, we all
fluctuate from in those feelings. That's really what we're talking about when we say
we have to get back to those basics of it. And preparing for this was reading some
of the findings of the last two years, and they are pretty catastrophic, I think,
in terms of particularly the implications for children. How optimistic, pessimistic do
you feel thinking about the future,
and with that, I think there are a few concepts that I wanted to ask you about,
and we can come back to these questions also. But what does it mean to practice
positive mental health, and how do you
you know, what it is that you're trying to do to impact a lot more people.
- Right, so here's the truth. Pessimism, optimism, here's what I am,
realistic. I'm not all rainbows and unicorns. I never have been that way. I am not
gonna promise you that everybody's gonna come out of this and be okay because we
are seeing the data that people are struggling. Suicide ideation is up significantly.
Our completion of suicide is rising and that's hard.
It's hard to face that reality. What we need to do is actively practice positive
mental health like you were referring to and doing that every single day is what is
going to help us curb that. So while I'm not completely pessimistic,
I am not completely optimistic. I'm realistic in that if we take the steps to
really start focusing on our mental health, we can make change. We will be okay.
Okay, air quotes. Sorry. We will. We will, we'll get there, we'll write size as
much as we can, but will people forever have a little bit of an effect from this?
Yeah, yeah, it was a big deal. And some people more than others. Unfortunately,
this past November, I lost my dad to COVID. And so it will always forever have
this impact and influence on my life. And you know that's that's part of my mission
is being able to teach people how to practice that positive mental health that I so
luckily had the two very amazing parents that were able to teach me how to do that
in hard times. I mean we didn't grow up with a ton of stuff but somehow Somehow,
and my mom, who unfortunately also is no longer with me, you know,
my parents had a way of teaching us how to deal with the hard and still see the
sunshine outside. And that's what we need to teach people how to do. And I feel
lucky that I had that opportunity and then also went to school to get the research
and psychology behind it. And I have the opportunity to mesh those and then give it
away to as many kids and people that I can. And other people have had similar
experiences to mine. And I'm on this big, gigantic search to find them and pull
them all out and bring them all close to me so we can continue to do this. And
the way that you do that-- So you ask me, how do you actually practice positive
mental health? It's like any sport, hobby, anything like that. You literally have to
practice it. And the things that you can influence are your thoughts and your
behaviors. We are in control of our behaviors. We don't always want to admit it,
but we are. We are the people who choose what we are going to do. That those
behaviors come from our thoughts. How do we do that? We have to take those thoughts
and figure out how to manipulate them. How do I take my no good,
very bad day, whatever that was when we were little kids? And how do I go,
oh, wait, maybe this isn't that bad? Or even if this situation is absolutely
terrible. Here's the one little piece of light that I'm gonna hold onto until I
march through this terrible moment in my life. And that's what we want to do is
teach people how to do that. How do you build a bubble wrap around your mental
health so that when tragedy does come, 'cause it will, this is life. I mean, it
will happen to all of us in one way or another. How do You build that bubble wrap
around your mental health so that when that tragedy does come, it doesn't rock your
world as much as it could if you hadn't been practicing your positive mental health.
I think there are a few directions I want to ask about from there, but one is
relative to the status quo
You know average in in schools, you know, I don't know if competition is the right
word But you know like what what is it that you are competing against necessarily,
you know from a resource perspective from You know schools who are looking to
purchase this You know, what what are they kind of weighing when they're they're
thinking about this? Well, you know There are a lot of places that do what we do.
There's a lot of places who will do pieces in parts of mental health or have
really great ideas and are executing those. And for schools and for communities,
the hardest thing for them is to know what is going to integrate well with their
cultural environment that they have already in their buildings. And that's really
difficult. And the way that we do that is number one, we don't say yes to
everything. We have to figure out if we are a good fit. And that's by actually
listening in an initial needs assessment. So unlike some other businesses where,
if you sold them something, it would be fine. Like, it would work. That piece of
metal would work in that machine or something like that, I don't know. - Rare.
- This has to be the right fit because we don't want to cause anything that sets
something off to not be the right fit. So how do, these are the expectations. And
we meet with school personnel and we say, this is our model, this is our view,
this is how we think. Does that align with your missions or the social -emotional
learning stuff you're already doing in schools. And so that's what sets us apart a
little bit, that one size, I tell everybody, one size does not fit all, it doesn't.
And we might not be the right size for you, and that's okay. And maybe I know
somebody who is, and I'll tell you who they are. So I think that that's one of
the things that is a huge challenge for schools right now because they do have
funding available, and there's lots of options that are being thrown at them right
now, so it's hard. Yeah. On the flip side of it, for those where you have
identified that alignment, how do you think about success? You kind of mentioned
earlier, success a little bit is like how well people operate in your absence after
you've done the work, but how do you try and measure progress and accountability and
outcomes in the work you're doing? - Right, business -wise, it's-- - Business -wise,
and also, you know, I feel like they're kind of related in a lot of ways, right?
- Yeah, absolutely. You know, numbers -wise, business -wise, it's that whole repeat
customer thing. So we have a lot of experts, And so business -wise, if we go in
and we're talking about a topic or we provide someone a staffing expert and they
come back to us and go, "Oh my gosh, I love the way they approach that or I love
the support or I love this training, do you do anything on this topic?" Business
-wise, that's success. We just won. We were able to integrate into their culture and
their system and give them some value. And for that business -wise works.
On the other end of it, it comes, you know, me personally, it comes from both
sides of not only the clients, but also the employees.
Nonverbals are important to me. And so I can see in someone's face and in their
body when they're feel good about something or when a light bulb goes off.
One of my most favorite things is when I'm giving a training to a whole bunch of
group of people and somebody raises their hand and they either predict what I'm
about to say or they go oh and then they give an example that nails it,
that they got it. It's giving that enlightenment, it's giving away that information
so that feels successful And with kids, we see it in their behavior.
So kids don't always, depending on the age, have the cognitive capacity to say that
they get it. But when you see the change in their behaviors or you see the change
in their relationships with other kids in the classroom or something like that,
that's success on that end. That's when you know you got it. - Got it. Yeah, That
was part of the area I was curious about, 'cause I don't know, thinking about
Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you know, I'm not, I'm not sure that a lot of these
kids will be able to necessarily articulate whether or not those needs are being
fulfilled. And so how you think about that. Are there any kind of quantifiable
aspects to that or is it all kind of qualitative? - Well, we absolutely can quantify
it. So we do, pieces of what we do are also behaviorism. That's all about
quantifying. So we can chart it. We can chart. So when we're teaching kids and
little kids the basics of, you know, food and water and going to the bathroom and
those kinds of things, we can chart it with them. So how often do you eat? Did
you do you feel hungry? You know, we And we can help them figure out how to pay
attention to those basic needs of their bodies as a first step. You could do that
with adults too. In fact, people do it all the time. You know, when you hear about
dieting and all those sorts of things, one of the things they talk about is
rejournaling it. That's data. That's how you keep the data. And then when we talk
about the things that are a little bit less tangible or easy to understand like am
I eating, am I drinking? What if it's the, do I feel connected to my social group?
Well, you can count that too. When was the last time I saw my friends, the one,
when was the last time I had a belly laugh or I cried, I laughed so hard, I
cried. If you can't remember, it's time, like that's your data,
You know, and we do it in psychology all the time when we're doing assessments. How
many close friends do you have? And it's not about the amount. It's not necessarily
about the amount. It's about do you have it? Is it even available to you? It's
more about a yes or a no. So there are ways to quantify it and we do that all
the time with psychological assessments. And then we can give back the data. So when
we start, here's where the kids were at. Here is their level of understanding.
That's one quantifiable way is we will give a little pretest of just knowledge. And
then where are their basic levels of needs? Where do they understand it?
And then at the end of the programming, we do it again. And we say, okay, how
much do they know now? And how much have their behaviors changed from the beginning?
So, that's the quantifiable part. That's really interesting. This next line of
questioning is circling back to something I asked about earlier, which was how do
you or do you think about how do you try and scale what you're doing? Is it
possible to scale what you are doing? Yes. Let's do it. So, I am a psychologist.
I am. My goal is absolutely to scale it in the value way,
you know, like the mission of what we're doing, but I'm also a business person. So
yes, so scalability is so open right now in terms of what environments we are in.
There are workplace environments that need this. There are schools, communities, all
different kinds of boards. They're just, the mission of this information doesn't
change for age. This goes across all ages. So we can give this mission to a lot
of different groups and we have a lot of different professionals that are licensed
across all age ranges. So we can scale it in terms of just the environment.
And then the breadth and the depth of how much we go into the trainings,
that's scalable. And then how many we're in. So how many schools are we in?
How many communities are we in? How many experts do we have? Like all of those
things are scalable to, you know, I don't want to say infinite, but it's happening
everywhere. And we're in Ohio. There are other states. Maybe we go there,
you know? So for me, I've never really thought small
and that's something that is so exciting to me bringing it back to the mission of
how many people and kids could we really help? And then I get all the good goose
bumps and get all dorky about it, you know, and tear up and how exciting it would
be to be able to do that and really just, you know, keep going, make it a chain.
Yeah, absolutely. When you weigh those different paths forward, the different options
that you could potentially grow into, you know, how do you try and balance those,
weigh those? What has you maybe most excited looking forward over the next year?
Over the next year so while I think big I also think and I don't know if this is
a real word But do ability I have said it for years. I don't know.
We got to look it up in a dictionary I have no idea if it's real worth but do
ability because I
I Really believe in not making promises in this area that we cannot keep So we
need to balance do ability with that scaling and what makes me most excited right
now is getting that footprint in our schools as much as we can.
And there are so many schools, just even in our Cleveland area, that we could work
with. And just then the extending out of those regions where people need it and
then expanding our experts. So, So, you know, that's one thing that's going to be
an interesting road to watch is that when we expand and we take our experts with
us, they've got to be ride or die. I mean, those people have got to be the ride
or die people that are going to go and expand because it means too much to me for
them not to be. Like I said earlier, you've got to love it and you've really got
to mean it. Or I don't want you to hang out with us. Right.
What have been the most difficult parts of this,
this company building process so far? You know, the, the business part,
the, the cash part, the, the annoying things of meeting with all the people you
have to meet with and no offense to any of the lawyers or banks or any of those
people that I've had to meet with and who have helped me so much to get to this
point. But that's the annoying part. We have the mission. They have the money.
Let's go. Like I'm like all the way down the road going, come on, come on, come
on, let's go. And everyone's telling me, "Slow down, Colleen, "wait a minute, we got
to make sure "that you have enough cash to do this, "or you have enough cash to
do this." And I'm like, "All right, hurry up, come on." That's been the hardest
part, is going through all of that minutia, those tactical things that must be done
or you don't have a business. And luckily, luckily in my position, after having the
experience I did, I have a lot of base knowledge in that to know where to go,
who to talk to, what's needed, what'll make an impact, what you could probably pull
back on that isn't going to mean as much to people, you know, to be able to
balance that cash and stuff. So I would say the actual business logistics of it.
In a similar vein, you know, what has surprised you most about this process so far.
You know, what have you learned that you maybe didn't expect or things you've picked
up on along the way? - I did not ever expect to hear multiple banks tell me that
we're gonna grow too quickly and that they can't keep up with us. I thought that
was bass -ackwards. Is that a word? I don't know. But But like I didn't understand,
you know, that was one thing that was quite surprising to me and that I've shared
with a lot of my business colleagues and in different groups is, wait a minute,
what do you mean? We're going to make too much money. You don't want to come along
with us. That doesn't make any sense to me. I don't get it. And I come to find
that that is, that's a thing that was surprising. Bass Acquard.
That's what that was about. - Bath backwards.
- That's awesome. Cool, well, I'll bring it back here to Cleveland to kind of wrap
up, but before we do that, I kind of wanted to just give you the space if there's
anything that you would like to talk about that we haven't covered yet that you
think is of particular importance about the work you're doing or kind of learnings,
reflections that you've had on it. One of the things that I am always trying to
impress on people is that you don't know anybody's journey.
You really don't. And even though you don't agree with people or you might not like
the way people are responding, I always take a step back for my own mental health
and go, I don't know where they came from. I don't know their story. I don't know
what got them to where they are today. So I try to impress,
give people a minute. Give them a minute and not necessarily give them a pass.
'Cause I don't know, you know, you gotta take care of yourself and those things,
but We have to recognize that people have gotten to where they are through a
journey that you didn't go through. And it would behoove all of us to take a
moment to think about that in our interactions in life. That's one thing. - No,
I think that's pretty special. Yeah, just practice some empathy. - Yeah, might be a
good idea.
Well, the closing question that we have for for everyone who's who's come on the
show, as we're painting kind of a collective collage here, is not necessarily for
your favorite thing in Cleveland, but for something that other folks may not know
about. So a hidden gem. Yes. So I have four daughters. And while a few of them
are too old and too tall for this hidden gem. There is a little place called
Memphis Kitty Park that is near and dear to my heart.
My mom used to take my sister and I, my mom took my kids, my grandparents used to
go, and it's a little tiny amusement park tucked away in between I think Parma and
Cleveland -ish somewhere around there that I say, if you have little kids, you got
to go. It's it's it's adorable and they'll remember it forever. Well,
that's very special. All right. Amazing. Well, Colleen, thank you so much for for
coming on and sharing your story and the work you're doing. Again, I think it's
it's really important. And I'm excited that you're building this here. Thanks. I
appreciate it. If folks have anything that they would like to follow up with you
about, what would be the best way for them to do so? You can go on our website,
wraparoundexperts .com, or you can shoot us an email. Our emails are on there.
Mine's pretty easy. Colleen @wraparoundexperts .com. All right. Right on. Well,
thank you again. I really appreciate it. All right. Thank you.