Today we’d like to introduce you to Courtney Wright.
Hi Courtney, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
My colleague, Lauren Hampton and I, founded KidPRO in 2017 after finishing our doctoral degrees in early childhood special education from Vanderbilt. We had spent 4+ years fine tuning our research acumen, managing people, and executing evidence-based interventions with high fidelity.
Lauren didn’t want to go to academia, and I didn’t want to go back to the grind of the traditional therapy work day of seeing 5-8 kids for 45 minutes to send them home with very little hope for carryover of what they were learning.
KidPRO was born out of the desire to DO BETTER. We had spent years digging deep into research methodologies, evaluating therapeutic interventions and measuring minute details of a parent and child’s participating in their therapy session. We were ready to share what we had learned with the world, or at least with Nashville families.
We grew slowly, managed our way through the pandemic, and in 2021 expanded to add an occupational therapist and speech therapist to our team. It was time to think about growing, but the pandemic was wearing me down. Instead, I juggled with the idea of selling. I met up with some people in Atlanta discussing the details of the merger. I was excited to be done with the liability of it all. Until I realized that what we were doing was different and worth fighting for. My optimism was reignited.
My husband and I started looking for a building where we could scale and build our profit margins. We purchased 432 Melrose in the fall of 2021 with plans to build it out and move in by January of 2022. I passed my entire caseload to the new speech therapist to give me time to plan and execute a move to our new location just 3 miles north to a more central location in Nashville.
About the same time, major private equity backed ABA clinics started popping up in Nashville with 4-6 locations at a time.
Since 2022, we’ve doubled our number of employees and multiplied billables by 2.5. We have closely monitored productivity, ratios of payroll, opex, and occupancy as related to revenue, and profit margins. We continue to serve the autism community of Nashville who care about receiving multidisciplinary services in one location. What I’m most proud of is rediscovering our values and leaning into them as an organization where everyone is respected and heard. We’ve built systems around these values and celebrate the daily wins in a field where we doing some pretty tough work and burnout is high.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
We started small, using what we knew to make small differences which led to big outcomes in families lives. We offered whatever worked for the family. We worked late hours and early mornings. We drove ALL over Nashville to serve the families who sought us out. Scheduling became a challenge. In March of 2019, my business partner moved out of Nashville, so I shifted to a single-member LLC and led Kidpro on my own.
It was a trying time, but also an incredible time to start listening to myself. I immediately dug into the things that I had not been closing paying attention to including budgets, financial reports, and productivity audits. I quickly enacted block scheduling to be more cost effective and profitable. We added technicians to our team. And then March 2020.
I closed the clinic, furloughed employees, and pivoted to teletherapy. Families were scared, but also desperate for services for their children. We did the best we could for as long as we could, but we were ready to go back and so were families. After the 4th of July holidays, we reopened with all the masks, shields, bleach, and distancing we needed for families and employees to feel comfortable.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
The thing that sets us apart is our commitment to relationships. This is very clearly demonstrated in our high retention rates, especially in a field where the average is 15%. I am a clinician at heart and run my business as one. I joke that I’m not a great business woman, because I’ll never be as profitable as some of the larger corporations. I like making my own decisions for the betterment of my team and the families we serve. I feel SO strongly about our values (collaboration, approachability, knowledge, intentionality, empathy, and reliability), and every decision I make in the business is made after a reflection of our values.
So, before we go, how can our readers or others connect or collaborate with you? How can they support you?
I’m always connecting with community partners: pediatricians, other therapists, psychologists, etc.
I love supporting small businesses, minority-owned business, women-owned businesses. I think the real HEART of the work we do comes from wanting to do it differently that a big corporation does it.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.nashvillekidpro.com
- Instagram: @nashvillekidpro
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nashvillekidpro
