Beyond the Case
A podcast where global leaders from the Harvard Business School Owner/President Management (OPM) community join in a personal capacity and share the real decisions, failures, and mental models behind building enduring companies.
This podcast is independent and not affiliated with Harvard Business School.
Beyond the Case
CEOs Don’t Have All the Answers: Leading a 750-Employee Autism Company Through Uncertainty - Ronit Molko
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Ronit Molko shares her journey from growing up in South Africa during apartheid to building and scaling a national autism services company in the United States. After moving to the U.S. to study psychology and specializing in autism, she started Autism Spectrum Therapies in 2000, initially as a small consulting practice that eventually grew into a large organization with hundreds of employees across multiple states.
The journey was far from easy. The company relied heavily on funding from the state of California, which meant delayed budgets, payment delays, funding cuts, and constant uncertainty. At one point, the company went nearly a year without getting paid and had to rely on loans and lines of credit just to make payroll. Despite these challenges, Ronit continued to grow the company, expand into new states, diversify payers, and eventually build a full management team so the business could operate independently of her.
One of the most important turning points in her leadership journey came when she decided to be fully transparent with her employees about the financial and operational challenges the company was facing. Instead of pretending to have all the answers, she openly told her team that she did not always know what the right decision was and that sometimes she changed her mind when new information came in. That moment of vulnerable leadership transformed the company culture and created deep loyalty and alignment across the organization.
Ronit eventually sold the company in 2014 to a private equity-backed platform, stayed involved for a period after the sale, and later worked in private equity advisory and as CEO of another PE-backed autism services company. Today, she is focused on the future of behavioral health, particularly the role technology and AI may play in improving outcomes and access to care.
Throughout the conversation, her story highlights entrepreneurship in healthcare, leadership during uncertainty, the importance of culture, and the reality that even CEOs running large organizations often do not have all the answers - they just keep making the best decisions they can with the information they have.
Here are the Top 10 Takeaways from the conversation:
1. Entrepreneurship often starts by solving a problem others don’t yet see
2. Timing matters in business
3. Single-customer or single-payer businesses are very risky
4. Cash flow problems, not profitability, kill businesses
5. Culture can be a company’s biggest competitive advantage
6. Vulnerable leadership builds trust
7. Leaders often change their decisions because they get new information
8. Founders must eventually build companies that can run without them
9. Selling a company is emotionally and operationally exhausting
10. Sometimes you don’t sell at the perfect time — you sell when life, partners, and markets force the decision
Books:
Welcome everyone to another episode of Beyond the Casey. This is a podcast where group leaders from the Howard Business School to OPM community joined in a personal capacity to share the real lesson life and the mental model that go behind building and joining company. My guest today is Ronet Mulko. She's from OPM 47. Did I get that correct, Ronic?
SPEAKER_01Yes, that's correct.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, welcome to the show. How are you?
SPEAKER_01Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm well, thanks. How are you?
SPEAKER_00I'm doing very well. Thank you. Ronald, could you please introduce yourself, talk about your background so the listeners can understand who you are and where you come from?
SPEAKER_01Sure. I was born in South Africa. Um, I left South Africa right after high school and immigrated to the United States to basically study, to come to college here. Um I grew up in South Africa in a small community in Johannesburg, very tight-knit community. But, you know, I grew up in a very tense political situation with apartheid and kind of the ending of apartheid. So I decided that I was not, did not want to get my education in South Africa because there was a lot of violence, a lot of unrest, a lot of uh instability in, I mean, the whole, in our whole lives, but also, you know, at the university campuses. So I decided I would leave early and uh come to the US and get my education here. So I came here, started my education, I got a bachelor's degree. I always knew I wanted to be a psychologist or work in psychology. I always knew I wanted to work with children. I started doing research and working with kids with special needs, and I met a child, a young girl actually, who was autistic. And at the time we were just kind of learning about autism in mainstream. Um autism, you know, in those days was not detected in women very often in girls, and it was primarily considered a male disorder. So it was very unusual to that the first person I met was a girl who'd been diagnosed with autism. I worked with her and that really piqued my interest. And so I kind of pivoted my studies to focus on autism, special needs, and also child abuse and maltreatment. And landed up going to the University of Kansas to get a doctorate in child development and family life with a specialty in autism and child abuse and neglect. And that kind of set me on the path to working in the autism services industry.
SPEAKER_00Great. Wow. Incredible background. And um I think it's very noble that you're working in the autism field and you also started a business in the same space, right? So walk us through, you know, what the inspiration was for that. Why not go get a job as opposed to try and build something by yourself?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I, you know, I did my doctorate at the University of Kansas. After that, I went to UCLA to do a fellowship, a postdoctoral fellowship. You have to get 1,500 postdoctoral hours to become licensed. I wanted to be a licensed psychologist. So I worked at the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA and focused on all kinds of disabilities with kids, everything on the spectrum of developmental disability and psychiatric disorders, but still was very interested in autism. I also worked at the autism diagnostic clinic, which was kind of new in those days, not necessarily super new, but they had just come out with the first standardized measure for autism the year that I was working at that clinic. So we were kind of using this standardized assessment for the first time. And I actually tried to get a job. I graduated, I went to a couple of schools, school districts in Los Angeles, and you know, told them that I wanted to be kind of the in-house autism psychologist and help them develop programs for kids with autism and classrooms for kids with autism. And they kind of were like, we don't really see a need for that. And I had worked while I was doing my doctorate, and I did not like the clock in, clock out, you know, nine to five kind of structure and having somebody looking over my shoulder at what I was doing. So I realized that I should work for myself. And when I was turned down by these schools, I uh with a with a colleague of mine who was a professor, we decided to start a consulting company to consult to schools and to and you know be available for families to provide services. And interestingly, the school that turned me away from the job that I wanted was the second school to hire us as consultants. And we landed up having them as a client for a long time. And they were like, we didn't understand what was going to happen because at that time in the early, the late 90s, early 2000s was when autism started to really be diagnosed once we had this assessment. And especially based in California, California had a state mandate called the Lantman Act that was signed in the in the late 60s, which required the state of California to provide funding for kids with developmental disabilities from birth to death, which was a huge mandate. And so suddenly the state was experiencing huge pressure, tons of influx of kids with an autism diagnosis and didn't really have the capacity to handle. And so I started my business at that time. And so we kind of caught that wave of lots of kids being diagnosed with autism and schools and the state not really being able to manage it. So it worked out well. But yeah, I started a business providing services to kids with autism. So we worked in schools, we would work in classrooms in the school district with teachers. We also went to families' homes to provide services in homes and eventually opened up clinics. It took a while for the clinic model to take hold in California because it was very much an in-home services model. Clinics became much more popular in other states. But eventually we opened clinics and we provided services, teaching kids language, communication, social skills, independent living skills, helping them in the community, helping parents take their kids into the community. And it just kind of grew from there. There was a huge demand for services and a big lack of supply of providers. And so it was a market that was very hungry for services.
SPEAKER_00And were you ever considering a nonprofit model for this business? Or were you already?
SPEAKER_01No, in the Yeah, in the beginning we didn't. I mean, the nonprofit world was not something you know I was accustomed to. Interestingly, the way California was set up, it was it's divided into 26 regions, and there are regional centers that are nonprofits through which the funds from the state of California come into these regions and then are distributed through these independent nonprofit organizations following state mandate and state legislation to provide services. But no, I didn't have any experience in in nonprofits, set it up as a for-profit business, contracted with these nonprofit, you know, kind of middle organizations that would distribute funds and approve services.
SPEAKER_00And the business you started is um autism spectrum therapies, correct? Correct.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that was in 2000.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, sorry, go on.
SPEAKER_01That was in 2000, we started that, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Could you touch on some of the early challenges that you might have experienced with the business and what your mindset was when you were trying to overcome them?
SPEAKER_01So, you know, when we started the business, the funding was 100% funded by the state of California. So we had one payer. So that's huge risk in a business, right, when you have a single payer. Even though it was broken up into different regions, essentially it came from the state of California budget. So we were contracted with the state of California. We had some school funding ultimately, but it was still kind of 90% state, 10% school. So there was a lot of challenge in managing it because the state of California signs their budget traditionally around August of the year, but a lot of times the budget would be delayed because they couldn't agree and the budget didn't get signed. And so in those years when that happened, you just wouldn't receive payments. You'd get an IOU from the state. And so we certainly, yeah, we certainly had times where we hadn't been paid for 11 months by the state of California and we were using lines of credit and personal loans and things to fund payroll and to fund the business. So lots of challenges with having a single payer, you know, and kind of deriding the roller coaster of the state of California and their budget systems and their funding. Ultimately, you know, we brought on school districts. And so we we had some payer mix, but there was a lot of risk being just in California and having a single payer. And so about nine years, you know, we kind of went through the crash in 2008, which put a lot of pressure on state systems. Um, a lot of companies closed. What we experienced then was the state of California kind of coming to providers and saying, we've cut your rate by 30%. It's retroactive 90 days. So write us a check. And suddenly you had to pivot the business and figure out like how to be profitable when you've had a break cut of 30%, you know, kind of pivot your model. So we went through some really challenging and interesting times of having to really change our entire clinical model, delivery of service to cut out major expenses. And unfortunately, that often comes from quality assurance, quality metrics, supervision. You know, you have to kind of change your model. When we started, we had a very intense supervision model, which is kind of how the science is written to provide services, you know, in best practice. And we had to cut to, you know, the state limited the amount of supervision you could provide, limited, you know, created lots of limits on hours. In the beginning, we used to get paid. If you showed up at a family's home and the family didn't show up for the appointment, you got paid for that appointment. They stopped paying for no shows. So just a lot more stress on the business and trying to remain profitable and maintain your staff and give them a decent living wage while you were constantly having compressed rates and pressure from payers.
SPEAKER_00So at any point did you raise outside funding for the business or was it all bootstrapped and self-funded?
SPEAKER_01We didn't. We used lines of credit. We didn't use outside funding. In 2009, after we went through kind of the financial crash and, you know, the impact in California, that was a very tough year. A lot of businesses closed. And that was when we decided to expand outside of California and diversify our pay and rec. And so we actually went into Louisiana and Washington. Louisiana was so during this time, a lot of pressure was being put on insurance companies to start paying for services. And so some c some states had started, had passed a mandate for insurance companies to cover services. And Louisiana, interestingly, was the ninth state to do this, way ahead of bigger states like California. And so that was one of the states that we expanded into to develop relationships with insurance companies and to understand the model of working with insurance. And then we moved to Washington, we expanded into Washington, where we had Nike and Microsoft and self-funded insurance plans and big companies. And so, you know, chose those two models to kind of diversify our payments, but also starting to learn that insurance landscape. And the insurance mandate was passed in California in 2012. Took about two years for it to come into effect. And that was another huge pivot because on June the 30th, your payer was the state of California. On July 1st, your payer was an insurance company. And so you had to flip your business model literally overnight, you know, and to a different payer. And the way they wrote the mandate, they didn't really account for co-pays, they didn't account for deductibles. So suddenly parents who had received a free service from the state had a copay for every session. Some of them had $10,000 deductibles. You know, it was it was a huge ri wave to ride to kind of get accustomed to this new payer model. But because we had experience outside of California, I think it was somewhat easier for us than a lot of other companies because we kind of had relationships and we understood how it was going to work.
SPEAKER_00And as you were growing in scaling, how did you think about going about hiring people? Were you ever concerned the business was too dependent on you, or had you always made a conscious effort of delegating responsibilities well so that there was no key person risk at the business?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you know, that's an interesting journey, right, as an entrepreneur, because when you start your business, you're doing everything, right? I started the business in literally my dining room of my house, you know, with me, my business partner, and one employee. We never imagined we were going to grow to the size that we did. You know, we kind of always envisioned ourselves as kind of a boutique consulting company with master's level and PhD level people working in schools. We did not foresee, you know, we worked for schools for six months, and then the state of California actually contacted us and said, can you write us a program that really incorporates the family as caregivers in providing services because the they were they were projecting the cost of sending people into homes 30 to 40 hours a week and kind of the growth that they were seeing in the market. And so um, you know, so we didn't really anticipate that we were gonna kind of have this wave of growth. It was a huge wave of growth that we experienced. So we could have grown much faster, much bigger, but we really wanted to, we really cared about the quality of our outcomes, making sure that the kids were making progress and that the clinical program was delivering what we said it would. So we constrained growth. I think into, you know, we we also created a real space for a lot of people who were super talented from different universities to come and join our company. So I think that's one of the things I'm really proud of is, you know, we recruited from top universities across the company. We had 19 very, very strong leaders who specialize in everything from sleeping to eating issues to behavioral issues. You know, we had a really good comprehensive team. So it was always around creating a space for very talented people to bring their gifts and their talents and to work in the industry. It was not around one person developing a specific model. You know, we really grew a clinical program using the talents and allowing very talented people to contribute. So we had that in terms of the leadership of the company. We tried to go through a sale in 2008, and that fell apart when the market crashed in February of 2000. And at that point, I think was when I really realized that, you know, you have to build a business that can function without you, right? After going through that process. And 2009, I started building a management team, so an executive team with a CFO and a president and vice president of clinical and vice president of business development and HR and technologies. We kind of built this team of seven and really empowered the team and empowered the clinical leadership. You know, there was a level of clinical leadership. Because in autism, you really have the clinical side of the house, which is writing the programs, making sure the kids are getting customized programs, that they're that you're delivering outcomes. And then you've got the business operation side of running a business, which is really a professional services firm. You're hiring a lot of people to go out and provide services. So you have to blend this clinical demand and the requirements as a licensed clinical practice with what is essentially a professional services firm, you know, clients then, professionals then training them and utilizing them and utilizing ours. So I think in that process of creating an executive team and knowing that at some point we would sell the business was when I kind of, you know, created a team that could run the business without me. And actually, Harvard was very instrumental in that, you know, because when I when I was accepted to OPM, their mandate was you can't answer the phone during class, you can't be texting, you can't be stepping out to take phone calls, you have to really separate yourself from your business. And so when I went to OPM, I set up five KPIs that were going to be sent to me every Thursday to kind of measure the health of the business and put people in in charge of running different aspects of the business and that experience of really not really running the business for those periods of time and relying on other people and empowering them to make decisions. And you know, I kind of had these five KPIs that I monitored that I would step in if needed. That kind of really created how do you create a business that can run without you? I'd say that experience was really instrumental.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And you did eventually sell the business, I believe, in 2014.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I sold it in the middle of my OPM experience, yeah, which was an interesting journey to go through because, you know, 2015, everyone was building their business plans and I was kind of like building a building a ghost business plan. But interestingly, you know, we went, me and another participant sold our businesses in the middle of OPM, and we went to the faculty and said, you know, what about what about dealing with legacy? What about dealing with after the sale? And they actually created some courses around legacy that they ran just for me and this individual. But at the end we had to do a presentation and the whole class showed up for the presentation, and they all loved it so much that they voted to include that. So I don't know if it's still in there, but they expanded it to include like what's your how do you think about your legacy? And your legacy isn't just the business you leave behind, but it's your family and your community and you know your personal legacy. And we we did some legacy classes. I don't know if you had that class.
SPEAKER_00Professor Raman Anandraman, I'm not sure if you had him, but he he has this very nice closing lecture for Unit One, which is about the four types of wealth, and it's not just financial wealth, but you know, it includes a lot of what you just mentioned. So I'm guessing there's some correlation there.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we did it, I think, with Frank's Espanese. I don't know if you had him, but I think that's who we did it with. But we really had to present on selling a business, what happens afterwards, the legacy, and that's where we we really talked about, as you say, those different quadrants of what is a legacy. It's not just the financial success you leave behind, it's everything else.
SPEAKER_00Could you walk us through the sale experience? Um, were you consciously trying to sell the business or did did a suitor just approach you all? Um what the journey felt like? Um just some stuff.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it was an interesting journey for us. You know, as I mentioned, we try to sell in 2008. We were very close to closing a deal, the market crashed, you know, when when best earns crashed, our lender pulled out, the bank pulled out, and we didn't really have an investment banker that was um experienced enough and facile enough to kind of manage that. So the deal kind of fell apart, which was unfortunate, but probably would not have been the best deal. I mean, financially it was a good deal, but I don't think the company would have done very well uh in terms of legacy of leaving a good company that's providing services, which was really important to us. And so we kind of slipped out of the market. At that point, I thought, okay, I need a CEO to run the business that's much more of a finance person because I'm a much more clinical operations person. So we actually hired a CEO who was a finance guy, and that was a disaster. So after a year, uh we had to escort him out because he was really coming from just a complete finance lens. And I think the best, you really have to understand the clinical piece of this type of business because you are the work you're doing every day is shaping a child's brain. You're shaping their future. You know, you're not producing, you're not manufacturing a piece of furniture. It's a really important responsibility. And I think you have to have a leader that understands those two pieces. So I try to hire someone that could be better in management presentations than I thought I was and had to kind of recover from that experience. And then I had some issues with my business partner. We he wanted to leave the business and he didn't want to be involved anymore, and it was a tough time to sell because the market was declining after the crash. The states really pulled back on their rates and the number of hours they were providing. Uh, the market got really tough here in California. And so we saw the business shrink in terms of revenue size, just purely, we were growing, but because there was so much rate compression, you know, our top line revenue was was declining. Um and it was a tough time in the market, and my business partner really wanted to sell. So it was more of a I was pressured to sell at a time that was not the best time to sell. Like if we had waited three or four more years for the market to recover, it would have been a very different outcome. But, you know, that's how it went down. So we were kind of pressured to sell. And I was getting a lot of interest for years, probably five years before I sold from private equity. And I didn't really in those days understand what private equity was looking for and where they saw value in them in them in the business. Because I was like, we're paid by the state of California, you know, they could turn it off tomorrow. Like, how is this a solid um business to invest this kind of money in? So it took me a while to understand. And I actually signed up for um different financial conferences and I became a member of different groups, you know, to try to understand this whole private equity market that I had no familiarity with. So I took some time to educate myself. And we had a lot of interest. And actually, it was at Harvard, it was my first year at Harvard. I went to each of my Harvard professors and I said, This is the situation I'm in with my business partner. This is the situation I'm in with the environment. Should I sell or should I try wait and kind of weighed up each of their opinions around selling? And they kind of motivated me to, you know, it's better to sell a business than to close a business. And at that point, you know, we were kind of on a downward trend. The whole state was on, the industry was on a downward trend because of what was happening, you know, financially in the markets. I made the decision to sell. Um, and the process itself, I mean, I'd gone through it the first time. I didn't wasn't really educated the second time. I was way better informed, but it's still a difficult, it's a very difficult process. You know, you go through all these management meetings and meet with all these individuals. You can kind of tell when a buyer is there just to learn about the market versus real interest in your business. So it's kind of tough to sit through a five-hour presentation when you kind of can tell within the first 30 minutes that they're not even interested. They just want to learn. It's an exhausting process, right? And then you engage in an LOI and then you just start this diligence process that is it's absolutely exhausting, you know. And as people say, you're working two full-time jobs, you're trying to sell your company and you're trying to run your company, and you have to run your company as if you're not gonna sell it, right? You can't take the eye off the ball in any capacity because it's not done until until it's signed and the the money is crossed wires, right? So it's a really interesting process. It was exhausting. I learned a lot, but it was absolutely exhausting.
SPEAKER_00Thank you for sharing that. And while you were going through some of these challenges like before you saw the business, the economy was going down, the state of California pulled back some of the funding. Uh different vision of the company or leadership. How did you find the product? Where did you draw information from what was some of the I think what uh mindset did you have to develop to still stay optimistic about the future?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean there were there were some tough times, you know, in 2010, which was about two years after we, or a year after that first sale didn't go through, I actually hired a strategic consultant to help me work on culture. And that was big of one of the biggest turning points for me. I happened to meet him. I I was a member of women's presidents organization, WPO, which is like a women's only version of YPO. And I met him through one of our YPO meetings. And it was kind of a meeting where I was like, Do I close my doors? Like, what do I do? You know, it was one of those we were going through the state of California, hadn't paid us for 10 months. We didn't know when we were going to see money. I was taking a second more. Mortgage on my house. I wasn't taking a salary. It was like, you know, at what point do you call it quits and say this is not worth it? And we had that meeting at one of our WPO retreats. And he said to me, you know, let me help you. And he came in and he first started working on culture with our executive team of seven. And I would say that was completely transformational. Around, you know, he really worked with companies on what is your strategic vision and how do you create a culture that supports that strategic vision, right? And we learned a lot at Harvard and elsewhere around culture and how that can really destroy whatever strategy, whatever business you're trying to build. So we really started focusing on culture. And interestingly, we had a meeting, I'd say, a couple of months in after working with him, where we got, we had about 750 employees at this point. We got about 150 in a room. So it was supervisors, rectors, and a vibe and administrative leadership. And, you know, he said to me, you know, leaders go first, you have to be vulnerable, you have to speak your truth. And I was really fearful as CEO to tell the employees how much I didn't know and how how kind of tenuous and fragile things were, because you know, you don't want to scare your employees, right? And I literally got up there and I was like, okay, this is what it's like. You know, living walking in my shoes every day. You know, the state of California can call you and say, we're not going to pay you for another 60 days. You've got to go to the bank and loan money. We're trying to provide services. You know, I could just kind of like spoke from the heart for the first time. And I was super vulnerable and said to them, I don't know the answers to everything. And that scares me because I feel like, as you'll see, I have I'm supposed to get it right and I'm supposed to know everything. So I hide that from you. But the truth is, there are days where I wake up and I don't know what the next step is. And if you see me change my mind on Wednesday from something I said on Monday, it's because I got new information on Wednesday. And, you know, I have better insight, but to you it might look like I'm flip-flopping. And it was like an incredible meeting because after that, a whole bunch of the staff came to me and they were like, you don't need to pay me. I believe in your mission. Like, I'll put my salary aside and we'll get through this together. Like we'll walk through fire with you because we believe in the mission of your company. And it shifted the whole culture. And so that was really like a pivotal moment around vulnerable leadership, being vulnerable as a leader and speaking of truth and just letting people see. Once they saw me, I think, as human and not knowing and realized there was a lot of fragility in my seat, it kind of turned the whole boat. And they were like, we're with you. Like we'll walk through this with you. And we're so aligned with the mission of what you're trying to create that, you know, they stayed. Some of them are still there. They've been there for 22 years, 23 years, you know, since the company was started. So I would say that was pivotal. And then when they finally understood like the financial pressure on the business, you know, we have a lot of issues with our staff, like collecting timesheets. You know, every Friday, it was all paper-based in those days, right? Everyone had to sit drop their timesheet at an office for it to get calculated in order for us to pay them and in order for us to bill. And in California, you have to pay people within a certain time period of working. You know, the labor laws here are super tough. You gotta get and you gotta get billing right. And when they kind of understood the pressure we were under, the challenges around collecting timesheets like went away. People just brought them in on time because they understood, they finally understood the system. Like, I actually can't get paid until I submit my timesheet, and you actually can't bill and get paid and have the money to pay me until you can submit billing, and it's all one system. You know, this in our market, there tends to be division between the clinical side of the house that's delivering the service and the admin side of the house that's trying to process payroll, process billing, and they kind of point fingers a lot at each other. And when we got them all in a room and they understood what we called the physics of the business, we actually drew a map of the physics of a professional services firm and where all the spigots are and where, you know, the tensions are in the business. When they all understood the model, like everything shifted. And so that, you know, it was kind of a whole team-based approach and everyone pulling in the same direction that turned things around for us and got us, got us moving. Yeah. So I exited the business. I stayed on with my old company for two years. And then, you know, I had a two-year contract, left. I had a non-compete. I wasn't really sure what I was going to do. I mean, non-compete is really hard because this is your era of specialty, this is your area of passion, and suddenly you you can't do it, right? And so it's a really interesting journey to go through as a founder of a business. I ended up writing a book because I was doing some consulting with companies and went to somebody and I was kind of really shocked at what was happening in the industry compared to what I thought the industry was. And he said, You have to write a book. I was like, I don't want to write a book. He's like, No, you have to write a book. So I ended up writing a book targeted to investors because investors, you know, I kind of sold right at the beginning. There was huge, there's been huge private equity investment in the industry. So I wrote a book targeted towards investors first, providers second, and families, you know, to kind of explain the industry. And then I did consulting for private equity firms. And my mission really was around trying to really impress upon them the importance of the clinical piece. Like the outcomes are so important, the quality of clinical services are so important. You know, again, we're shaping kids' lives. We really are shaping the trajectory of their life and what it's going to look like with these services. So I did a lot of buy-side diligence work with private equity globally, you know, throughout the US and globally, I'm helping them in their acquisitions of businesses. I landed up working with a private equity firm that ultimately bought my business that I had sold. So I was on their board for five years and worked with them for a period of time in a strategic advisory capacity. And then I wanted to get back in the game. And so left that board position and uh worked at a pri another private equity back, took a CEO role for about 16 months and then left that role. And now I'm now I'm figuring out what's next. I mean, I think, you know, I've got a clinical degree, right? I didn't even think about business. And again, you know, I grew up in South Africa, it was a very different system and culture. Women were not going into business and were barely going into professions in South Africa. The way I grew up, you became a teacher or a physical therapist or a secretary. You know, it was kind of a very different world business. It didn't even enter my mind until I came to the US. And when I started my own business and realized I loved business and I loved growing business and I loved solving problems and I loved strategy and vision and growth, right? This whole world opened up to me that I didn't really know about, right, as a teenager growing up. So that didn't really even consider that. I think for a PhD who's starting your own business, you've got to understand the entrepreneur, entrepreneurial journey and you know, get mentors, get business mentors of people who've been in business. One of the things I really enjoy is mentoring professionals. I've mentored mostly women who've opened their own businesses. So I think find a good mentor who can really guide you on how you do this and how to think about it and what are the considerations. I think that would be my number one thing. Because I didn't really have a mentor. I just kind of figured it out. When I was doing my PhD, I worked for one of my professors who had a small autism company and I ran that for him. And that was really where I learned how to work with the state of California, how to think about reimbursement. That was kind of where I learned the dynamics of running a business, but had no idea what I was stepping into when I did it right, like most entrepreneurs don't. I think at this point it's innovation with technology and AI. I mean, I know AI is scary to a lot of people, uh, and it's, you know, it's growing at such a rapid rate, but I think there's a huge opportunity in behavioral health to really innovate services, create better outcomes, better quality of services, using AI, not as a replacement, but as an adjunct to clinical services. So I'm really looking at technology, AI, where can we innovate? How can we improve services, improve outcomes? You know, it's it's very challenging to send employees out into communities, driving, you know, in states like California, cities like Los Angeles and New York, and you know, traffic and dealing with all of that and actually getting people to people's homes and delivering good services in the current reimbursement landscape is tough. So I think there's a big opportunity for technology to help us and AI specifically. Gosh, there's so many books. I mean, my bookshelf is I'm constantly trying to donate books because I'm constantly buying books. I think Malcolm Gladwell's books, interestingly, have, you know, I've loved, I love the way he thinks about the world. The most recent book I've been reading is The Revenge of the Tipping Point. Um, and I'm I'm learning so much from that. So I think his work has been really influential. This book on culture, you know, from our advisor, Chris McGarth, he wrote a book on something called The Primes, which is how small visual representations of dynamics in businesses that's only shaped the way I think about business and it influences personal relationships as well. So I think those are two that come to mind. There are probably a lot more, but I can't think of them off the top of my head. Thank you. Thank you, So, and I really appreciate it. It's great to connect. Bye.
