Derek & Jessica Crain - Founders at Mindful Therapy Group: Maintaining Quality, Organic Growth, and Navigating Business and Marriage

Derek Crain  00:00

If you're a fly on the wall in our department meeting or department heads meeting, we're never afraid to talk about what we're doing wrong or what we're failing at. And I think that one of our greatest strengths as a company is that we look at failure as, you know, sort of failing forward, learning from those failures, and getting better.

Callan Harrington  00:22

You're listening to That Worked, a show that breaks down the careers of top founders and executives and pulls out those key items that led to their success. I'm your host, Callan Harrington, founder of Flashgrowth, and I couldn't be more excited that you're here. Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of That Worked. This week, I'm joined by Derek and Jessica Crain. Derek and Jessica are the founders of Mindful Therapy Group and Mindful Support Services. When they first founded Mindful Therapy Group, they had a vision of uniting like-minded mental health care specialists to serve with compassion, experience, and a fresh outlook on mental wellness. They now serve more than 1,000 independent clinicians and have collectively served over 48,000 families, couples, teenagers, and children seeking to improve their lives with professional guidance. I really enjoyed this conversation. Derek and Jessica are the first married founder couple that we've had on the show, and we dove into the specifics of how they make that work. Given that they've created a large therapy business, there's no surprise that healthy boundaries were a big part of that process. And to add to that, we also dove into the importance of having a visionary partner and an operating partner. This is commonly referred to as the visionary and integrator, which was coined by EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System). And I loved hearing how Derek and Jessica have divided their roles and maximized each other's skill sets to grow the business. Even with all that, the part of the conversation that I loved diving into the most was how Derek and Jessica kept quality high while scaling the company organically. That is super difficult to do, and as you'll hear, they had truly explosive growth. Maintaining high quality while growing is top of mind for me personally, and I loved hearing their approach to handling this challenge. So with that, let's get to the show. Where I'd love to start this out is, tell me about the founding story.

Derek Crain  02:42

Well, Callan, from the time I can remember, I always wanted to be a therapist, you know. And I think that stems back from when I was a kid, growing up in a poor environment, growing up in a single-parent family home. I always felt like we struggled a lot. We struggled with having food on the table. We struggled with moving around a lot, and I actually think I grew up in a pretty traumatic environment, and so it was those feelings that made me want to help other people. I eventually went on and got my degree in sociology and ended up getting an MSW. From the time I can remember, I always wanted to be a therapist, but that was hard for me because I always saw it as something very unattainable. So I spent a lot of time in the field, in medical social work, and doing various jobs in social work, really gaining a lot of clinical skills. But the one thing that I wanted to do was be a therapist, but I always thought that was unattainable because I was afraid of the business side. I was just intimidated about business. But the more and more I worked in the field, and the more and more I worked for, you know, "the man," per se, I kept getting frustrated, feeling like my work was being managed, feeling like I was just doing things that I didn't want to be doing, and ultimately, I wanted to be on my own. I would a lot of times go home and complain about it with Jessica. One time, she says, "I'm tired of you bitching about this. If you want to become a therapist, I'll help you with the business pieces. I'll help you get going." And she did.

Jessica Crain  04:14

If you think back to those early days, I was working as a nurse, but I have a very operational brain, and I think that's what made me a good healthcare provider on the other side of it, in nursing, which is very different from mental health. But my brain just wants to fix a problem, you know? That's where I came in and was able to say, "Okay, what are the things that need to happen?" and also identify what the problem was with Derek's approach. And I was able to help spin that into the group practice. Derek was able to start his private practice with my support. We were able to figure out all the nuts and bolts, and that really translates to what we do now, which is help healthcare providers, help clinicians have the strength and problem-solving behind them to be successful in private practice. So the same thing that we did as founders in the early days of just getting the confidence to start a private practice is what we're now enabling hundreds and now thousands of providers to do.

Callan Harrington  05:14

You mentioned something I thought to be pretty interesting in that, you know, you grew up in this environment and wanted to be a therapist. Was there inspiration? Or was it just like, "I want to do that," Callan? 

Derek Crain  05:24

It was more living with a single-parent mom, who was 17 when she had me. You know, she had a lot of different troubles in her own life. A lot of times, we moved around to different cities because she had a new boyfriend. And there were times when, you know, she would break up with that boyfriend, and I was there more than a son. I was there more like a brother or her support system. I found myself really sort of enjoying being in that role of supporting her and supporting others, and probably for the wrong reasons because there was some trauma behind it, and that's who I grew up and learned to be. Eventually, later on in life, I learned how to be a therapist for the right reasons. But yeah, I think it was that trauma that inspired me to want to help people, which is what a lot of therapists do.

Callan Harrington  06:15

So, Jessica, you talked about you love to solve problems and you love the process piece to this. When you made this switch to start this, to go out on your own, did that process piece come in right out of the gate, or was it once we started to build some of this book? Now we need to hit this process to hit the next level. What did that look like, and what were some of those early things where we needed process in right away because this was starting to get painful?

Jessica Crain  06:40

I think it was right away. You can't run a business without solving some level of problem, just from scheduling to billing to just managing your accounts receivable. I mean, at that time, we didn't even know what that was. To finding support, I think really early on, going and seeking out other people that had some skills or some expertise in areas that we didn't have. You know, at the very beginning, it was going out and finding a billing service to kind of fill that gap of "We don't know anything about insurance." Derek was killing himself working 40 hours a week in talk therapy, you know, after we got going. And I think what we realized really early on was, you know, that one person can only see so many patients. How do we solve that problem? So, at the time, he was doing supervision. He was working with other budding therapists that he had started supervising in the hospital setting, and then in the private practice setting, we said, "Well, what if we brought some of them around us, take the spill of Derek's private practice, and we formed a group?" But we didn't know even how to write a contract. We didn't know how to build a business model. We didn't know how to build a commission structure or anything like that. So I put an ad on Craigslist. This was 2010, and this guy, Steve Suckman, we worked with him for many, many years after that. Steve had experience in all different kinds of business—software, restaurants—and, you know, had built a wellness group with his ex-wife and had an idea for a licensing model and was able to help us apply that to what we wanted to do. To this day, we still use the same business model that we started with Steve. Obviously, again, you iterate and you build on that. But you know, we've never been afraid to go out and find the people that are going to help us solve the problems that we don't even really know what they are until, you know, you face them.

Derek Crain  08:38

And Jessica's been always so good at taking my vision and operationalizing it. I am really good at assessing people and driving business. I can remember early on, as a little boy being so poor selling candy bars, you know, in my elementary school so they could make money to have an allowance, because I didn't get any money from my mom. So from the sales side, that's where I really excel. And she drives us operationally.

Callan Harrington  09:08

So you started to add more of these processes. As the business started to expand, you started to bring in some more of these experts to help add these processes. And then, Jessica, you have this system where once you bring something in, now you're operationalizing whatever that might be. I mean, you've grown this business to a large size. Was that the plan from day one? Or was this something that organically happened from the two of you just kind of challenging each other and growing this? What did that look like?

Derek Crain  09:37

I had a waiting list that was really long, and we knew that we could serve a need, and it started to grow. Then it organically just sort of took off. But I will say...

Jessica Crain  09:47

...like we were growing it from the beginning. We started out with, you know, a handful of providers and an office space of three offices, and I remember, within less than a year, we were taking a wall down, moving into the neighboring office. And you know, we were up to 20 providers, and it was a flywheel at one point. But I think, you know, along the way, it was growing organically out of that same need that we had at the very beginning, which is, "How do we solve the patient need problem?" So when you have more patients than you have providers to support, you're going to keep kind of going with it. And so that's been, I think, at the core of our growth from day one, and still drives us today, is, you know, there are more patients that need care than what's available out there in the marketplace.

Callan Harrington  10:38

Just for my sake and my audience's sake, a provider—would that be the therapist that's providing the services to a client?

Jessica Crain  10:44

Yes, in this setting, it's licensed therapists and psychiatric providers, so like nurse practitioners, MDs that are providing medication management.

Callan Harrington  10:54

Okay. So from the perspective of getting these providers up to speed, one of the things that I've heard is, Derek, you had a waitlist, meaning whatever you were doing was having very good results with the people that were seeking you out to the point where you had this waitlist on here, and you started to have this spillover, to have these additional providers that you're bringing on to take that when your book was full. What did that process look like for getting those providers up to speed? Did you have a framework that you had built? Were there process documents that you built on how to get them to maintain that quality? Because that's one of the biggest things that's on my mind as I'm expanding and adding more people. In a services business, I'm constantly worried about, is the quality going to slip? What did you guys do to make sure that quality maintained a high standard and you were able to grow and scale this?

Derek Crain  11:48

In the early days, it was rough. I had to learn a lot when I was a provider. It wasn't the same as when you worked in the hospital and you were setting up resources for patients. When you're on your own as a therapist, you have to learn business skills. You have to learn how to value yourself. You have to learn how to deal with cancellations in a very transparent way. You have to learn how to ask for what you need from your patients, and that's very hard to teach. But we spent a lot of time within the confines that we had in this independent contractor model to show providers and guide providers how to value themselves, how to show up for themselves in business. And a lot of them just aren't used to being entrepreneurs or showing up for themselves in business.

Jessica Crain  12:38

To add to your quality question, I mean, that's still a challenge, especially at scale, to ensure that providers are good. I think we've learned along the way how to assess who makes a good partner with us, and oftentimes the therapists that make good business partners with us, meaning they complete their notes, they submit their charges, they, you know, manage their practice well, tend to be also really good therapists. So we've drawn some correlations over the years and have been able to work within our business relationship to teach some of those things, which, in turn, just helps build, you know, stronger skills on the clinical side. And honestly, you know, Derek is an amazing clinician, and you know, that's really been built on his assessment skills and his people skills, and translates that still. I mean, he still does practice management seminars, which, you know, really drive those clinical pieces, like I said, but we're still iterating on this. I mean, even now, we're building in more processes on the clinical side to measure quality. I think what's cool is, as technology has gotten so much better over the years—which, I mean, by the way, when we started, we didn't have a centralized EHR, and then we were server-based and all these things—and, you know, obviously, now things have evolved on that side, but, you know, still leveraging technology to help, you know, measure quality. There are new third-party softwares that we're bringing on that are really designed to measure quality, which is, you know, where the field is going, is wanting to have more accountability for therapists to drive certain outcomes, which really are based on, "Are the patients getting better?" which is what you want, and that's what we're focused on right now.

Derek Crain  14:29

And I always say that good clinical skills go hand in hand with good business skills. They really are intertwined.

Callan Harrington  14:38

Can you walk us through that? What does that look like? Do you have an example of that? 

Derek Crain  14:41

Yeah, you know, when you show up for your patient and you're in a first session with them, you know, that's called the disclosure session, where you're saying, "Hey, you know, this is my time here. I'm going to show up for you every week. I need you to be here every week. These are the things that we're going to work on. I need you to respect my time. You know, I'm getting paid for a service." All those are really good fundamental business skills that you're sharing and role modeling with that client. And they need to see that role model. And they've probably been in many environments where they haven't had that role modeling, where the boundaries are loose. So good business boundaries correlate with good clinical boundaries.

Callan Harrington  15:21

You said it, and it's exactly where my head was going to. It's the boundary setting on, "This is when you can contact me. This is when you cannot. Here's what we're adhering to," which, you know, it's applicable in anything, especially in business. Because in business, it can feel like there is no boundary. And then once that happens, it becomes almost impossible to get to the next level. Something I'd like to circle back to is, I heard you talk about this a little bit on the vision and then the implementation of that vision. I mean, what I'm hearing is that you both have very good separation of duties and where you two like to operate in.

Jessica Crain  15:54

Yeah, I think it's interesting to work with your partner. You know, we've got a very team-oriented relationship, where we don't have to talk about the ways in which we operate together, because we're a team with, you know, our individual roles, just like you would on the baseball field. You've got a first baseman and a third baseman, and you know, we know exactly where to be at the appropriate time, and operations is where I like to be. And you know, Derek's really the big thinker and the dreamer, and I'm, you know, here to help execute on those dreams.

Derek Crain  16:25

I always like to give this example. I don't know, Callan, if you've ever been to an RV park where you're pulling in a trailer and there's that pressure when you back up a trailer. I'm not the one that likes that pressure. So Jessica backs up the trailer. I drive the trailer to wherever we go, but I need her detailed brain to drive the trailer because she can handle that pressure. And I like to be the person in the back, sort of communicating, "Here's where you need to go, here's what cars or other obstacles we're gonna miss." And we work really well together.

Callan Harrington  16:59

So you've built this successfully. You've gone through a lot of challenges in the business. You know, you've done this as a married couple. How do you make that work? 

Jessica Crain  17:08

I can't really explain how we are able to do it as a married couple, other than we get a lot of work done, you know, in unconventional ways. Maybe we go for a walk in the morning with the dog. The amount of face time that we have together really allows us to process things. I mean, you talk to our team, there are times at the office where we'll butt heads and we'll kind of have different opinions about how we should handle things, but I think there's a lot of opportunity for us to work those things out and come back the next day on the same page. And I think that happens time and time again, where you're not confined to an office or an eight-hour day or one conversation, you can come back to it and continue to work out the issues in more organic ways.

Derek Crain  17:55

I think it has a lot to do with our honesty with each other. Jessica and I have a way of just being able to allow each other to express what we're feeling. If it's an anxiety about a business move or whatever it is, we can be honest. And there are times we have conflict, but we're not afraid of conflict. We know that if we work out the conflict and we don't avoid it, we'll always come out on the other side of the conflict.

Callan Harrington  18:24

It is amazing how much that makes a difference, where that avoidance, it's a little trickle, just ends up being a flood very quickly, the longer that's avoided. I think that's excellent advice, just in general. Now I'm curious, does this ever shut off? Are there times where you have to draw a boundary, where it's "We are not talking about work during this time," or is it this constant blend?

Derek Crain  18:45

I mean, I think it's both. I think sometimes we have a hard time turning it off, and sometimes, you know, Jessica will turn to me and say, "You know what, I'm done talking about the business," or I'll turn to her and say, "I need a break from the business." And we know when to respect that boundary. We know that it's just time to focus on our family, focus on our kids, and put the business aside.

Callan Harrington  19:05

You're almost being very intentional, where this is a designated spot outside of this, where we can actually unplug, but you're creating the environment to unplug as opposed to hoping that you're going to unplug in your current environment. Is that right?

Jessica Crain  19:17

Yeah, I don't think we're very good at unplugging in our daily environment.

Callan Harrington  19:22

I could see that. I mean, I'm not good at unplugging in my daily environment. I couldn't imagine in that scenario. But I love the suggestions that you're making and the practices that you've done. So you've grown this to a good scale. What was the turning point? What was the point where it was, "Okay, once we did this, this allowed us to really get to the next level"?

Jessica Crain  19:42

I think there was a lot in play with COVID. There was a huge shift from not being confined to a physical space to provide therapy that was enabled through technology in 2020. At that time, we were ready with the technology. We had already, you know, shifted our electronic health record system to have one that allowed for the telehealth experience. But prior to COVID, providers were not interested in being on a screen all day. And I would say patients weren't used to it, or interested in it, either. But we had had a really big snowstorm, and probably in Ohio, you get a lot of snow, but in Seattle, we do not, and when we get a lot of snow, it's crippling, because the whole city is made out of hills. And so nobody wants to drive because if you do, none of the roads are plowed, and you're guaranteed to crash your car. So we had a snowstorm in 2018—I think they call it Snowmageddon or something—where, like, the whole city was shut down for eight days. When you ask, "What enabled us?" It was our operations team. We had really built an awesome team, and we still have most of those players today, but they turned 3,500 patients' visits that were scheduled for that coming week of the shutdown, to telehealth. And that was the turning point, I would say, because we were no longer bound to our brick and mortar locations.

Derek Crain  21:17

And I can say that when COVID hit, we both looked at each other and said, "Oh my gosh, we're done. It's over. Our business is done." And that team rallied together, got those appointments over online, and that's when the pirate ship was born. We call each other the pirate ship because we just sort of swagger around the oceans, and we solve problems together, and we get it done well. 

Jessica Crain  21:43

And we're bootstrapped. I mean, from day one, we've continued to just build on, you know, what we've been successful in, and figure it out on our own. You know, we're not out there, you know, looking for fundraising or outside leaders to come in. We have found so much success together that we're going to keep doing that.

Callan Harrington  22:04

So you've hit on a couple of things here. I'd love to just kind of clarify, was it the fact that you had a strong operations team that, when this change happened, you were able to adapt and then capitalize on this, or was it you had already had really strong processes in place that were conducive to a change like this, or both?

Derek Crain  22:24

I would probably, you know, say both, but more so the strong operations team that had that grit, that had that motivation to solve this problem and get this done.

Jessica Crain  22:36

Yeah. I mean, there's no process for the technology struggles we were going to have, as you probably experienced, or everybody experienced. Zoom wasn't ready. Nobody was ready for the volume and just even the drag on servers. And, you know, just nobody had the bandwidth figured out for how to serve this many patients. So 3,500 patients at that time—quickly, we started learning we had to grow, you know, our network even more because more people needed mental health care than ever. So, I mean, it was a double whammy, right, of the adoption of telehealth and really the rise of people needing more support with the pandemic.

Derek Crain  23:18

And then you start to see the normalization of accessing mental health because so many people were anxious about COVID, so many people had depression, and there started to be more of, "It's normal to go get mental health care," and that really helped out the business. So fast forward, you know, to 2024—now we see 23,000 patients a week, going from 3,500 to 23,000.

Callan Harrington  23:42

How do you navigate those big changes? And what I mean by that is you have this process team in place. Is it that you're meeting on a quarterly, monthly, weekly basis to assess where those bottlenecks and pain points are? You've had this rapid growth, and I'm assuming you probably had to make some changes as when people went back in person again, because my guess is at least some percentage of these wanted to do this in person and not continue to do that online. What does that process look like for making sure you're on top of these pieces?

Jessica Crain  24:12

I think that's a really great point. And I think where we have been so successful is we meet every single week with everyone and like our whole leadership team. And, you know, we go around the room and we talk about, what are the ways in which we're solving big problems, you know? What are the pain points? What are the wins that, you know, we can celebrate together? But, you know, what are the goals? We do a lot of goal setting together, and that's driving our success now, just being able to, you know, keep that communication going and keeping everybody on the same page. With the growth, adding different pieces. You know, we've added marketing. We never had marketing. It's just a funny idea that mental health sort of markets itself. But now with our growth, we've had to add that piece as we were, you know, expanding into new states, and nobody knows about us. You know, we have to look at the company a little bit differently.

Derek Crain  25:00

I mean, if you're a fly on a wall in our department meeting or department heads meeting, like, we're never afraid to talk about what we're doing wrong or what we're failing at. And I think that one of our greatest strengths as a company is that we look at failure as, you know, sort of failing forward, learning from those failures and getting better.

Jessica Crain  25:21

Yeah, we call them arrows. You know, what is that arrow teaching you? Don't just move right into the problem-solving or try and answer the question or try to show up for, you know, the problem that's facing you, but also, like, what's underneath that? Where are the ways that we need to adapt as a company to solve that in a broader way? 

Callan Harrington  25:41

In my mind, it's, "Okay, we had this unique challenge. What's the bigger lesson that we can take from this, and how can we extrapolate this to all of what we're doing? And does this need to be a change? Is this a one-off? What does that look like?" That's kind of what I'm hearing. Am I off on that?

Jessica Crain  25:58

No. I mean, I think we're doing that all the time, just continuing to reevaluate the market. I mean, I think behavioral health, prior to 2020, I don't think was a big focus. And you see a lot of growth in the marketplace for behavioral health and interest, you know, from big banks and VC and all that that you never saw before. And so it's like playing Whack-a-Mole a little bit in terms of what, you know, how do we continue to adapt and stay relevant? And what do the insurance payers want? What do patients want? You talked about, you know, the return to office. And I think that's, you know, a really important piece of what we're doing now, or just what we've been doing from day one, which is continuing to be really invested in building brick-and-mortar spaces. Because it's not just one or the other—just this year or in the last 12 months, I think we've opened five new brick-and-mortar locations across all five states, actually, that we are in with that intention to continue to offer that as an option for patients and providers.

Derek Crain  27:06

And to put it in perspective, prior to COVID, none of the providers wanted to do remote work, as Jessica mentioned earlier. Now, all the patients—they're calling in, we get four or five thousand patients calling in a week—they still want to be in brick-and-mortar offices. They want that comfort of the brick-and-mortar, but now the providers don't want to be in brick-and-mortar because it's easier for them to be at home doing the work.

Jessica Crain  27:36

There's like a safety in it. I think for therapists, there's a little bit of like a boundary between them and their patients, but it can create disconnect in connection, in building that relationship. 

Derek Crain  27:46

I always think about the patient, you know. I think about a five-year-old who needs support from a therapist, and I just can't imagine them being on a screen, or a domestic violence victim who is at home with their abuser, and they're trying to, you know, have therapy and they don't have any privacy in a building.

Callan Harrington  28:06

You brought up an interesting parallel. Not that I'm making the case that podcasting is synonymous with therapy, although sometimes it could feel that way. But you hit a good point, and it's so true. If we're in person, you are right. The conversations do tend to be fairly organic because you're there, you could read the full body language, versus the convenience of doing this today. I have an off-site client meeting that I can take out. I can come down, record this for an hour, and go right back up. That'd be impossible to do if, even if we were in the same city, and recording it would be very challenging to do. So I think it's a really interesting point, and kind of talked about this throughout, you have really interesting challenges that you have to overcome within this space. I loved hearing that COVID example, because you're just putting a lot of gasoline on the fire on there. And just like, "Okay, we gotta figure out how to manage this thing at this point." So I guess to that point, you've built this thing up, you've put in this machine for evaluating challenges and building processes around this. You've continued to grow. You've got this adaptability, and you've grown this to a really good point. What's next? What comes next for the both of you, the business? How do you think through that?

Jessica Crain  29:15

That's the question of the year. I'd say it's something we spend a lot of time thinking about, and we try to be forward-thinking. I think in that way, like for us, we've been doing this for 13 years, and, you know, we've grown it organically to this point and been all self-funded, and we're in five states, you know, we're serving a lot of people. I don't know if it's us that can expand this out nationally, or even if our model works in all 50 states—I really don't think it does. There's different regional differences and things where maybe our model doesn't have as many legs. There's an opportunity definitely to grow it a lot bigger than what we've done. It takes a lot of time. We've expanded this year into three new states: Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado. And, I mean, I can't even say we're making any impact at all in those states, but we're thinking small. We're not a 1,500 provider company in those states, and nobody knows us from anybody. And so we're grinding in those new states, just like we did 13 years ago in Washington, and you have to do that in each and every new market at the scale that we're at. We've got about 250 employees, and I can't see us being able to replicate that ourselves in any timely way over the next 5-10 years. So, you know, we're looking at, you know, what would it look like to either maybe partner with another bigger organization or bring in other leaders that maybe have had that type of experience. I mean, that's on the table. Everything's on the table right now, but on the day to day, we're just trying to be impactful in the states that we're in.

Derek Crain  30:54

I can tell you, we still enjoy doing what we do, flying to these new states, learning these different markets, learning how patients pursue healthcare, learning how healthcare is delivered to those patients. What is the medical model like? We still enjoy it, and we still have a passion for it. So as much as it can be tiring being an entrepreneur and having this many therapists and nurse practitioners and employees, we still have a passion for providing mental health access to patients, and so it's hard for me when I still have that big passion to know what is next.

Callan Harrington  31:33

Yeah, it's one of the things that I hear quite a bit, especially from bootstrapped founders, is you have more options. When you're venture-backed, it's very clear, right? We have to go public, or we have to go for a big acquisition. I mean, those are really the only two options. But when you're bootstrapped and you've grown organically to the size that you have, I think it makes that decision even more difficult on what comes next because you do have many more options, it sounds like, which you're wrestling with. If I'm hearing that right...

Derek Crain  32:05

I think you are. And I think those are very validating comments because it is hard.

Jessica Crain  32:09

Yeah. I mean, we get a lot of interest, you know, there's private equity and venture capital, you know, interest in what we're doing. You know, like I said, behavioral health is a very hot topic out there in the investment world. We're not sure if we want to entertain those conversations just yet. Like Derek said, we're still enjoying it, and it's fun to come to work and solve problems every day. It's fun to, you know, have 100% autonomy in how we choose to do that and make decisions. You know, you're looking at the board right here. We want to make a quick decision or pivot—it's just us. I mean, obviously with our team, but you know, there's a lot of freedom in that.

Derek Crain  32:50

I know we'll have to make some type of a decision, you know, someday. But you know, it hurts me to think about our services being watered down in any type of way. So that's what I think we have to grapple with. 

Callan Harrington  33:05

Yeah, it ties it back to what we were talking about earlier. It's always thinking about maintaining that quality of what you're providing. So, last question I have for both of you is, if you could have a conversation with your younger self, what would that conversation be? What advice would you give them?

Derek Crain  33:20

I think for me, it would be more of a validating conversation. Saying, "It's okay that you grew up poor, it's okay that you grew up with a single-parent mom, and all those things are going to be to your advantage someday in life." It would be a validating, comforting comment, and I wouldn't want to take away growing up poor because I think it's driven me, but I would validate my younger self.

Jessica Crain  33:47

I think that's a great point. I also didn't grow up with resources. I'm the first and only, you know, person in my family to have a college degree, and I had zero confidence that we'd be successful in business. You know, that's why I went and did the blue-collar thing as a nurse, and that experience is what helps our success now. It's kind of the same thing of like, every experience that you have throughout your life is going to get you something that's going to help with building your company. If there are people out there that, you know, are nervous to start a company, or they think, "Oh, I don't have my MBA," or "I don't have experience raising capital," or "I don't know anything about budgeting"—we didn't know any of those things starting out, but I think that we knew how to work hard, and that was really what built the company. And still, I think what creates our success is our work ethic and the myriad of different experiences. I mean, I waited tables for eight years while I was going to college. I cleaned toilets as a kid. I was the janitor for my mom's janitorial company. And you know what? You know, when the sink is dirty at work, at the office, I'm still the one that's wiping things up. That's who we are. We're not afraid to pick up a hammer and, you know, pound nails when we're doing a build-out or move furniture or whatever. Like, that's what I think makes a successful business owner—someone who can roll up their sleeves and work hard every day.

Callan Harrington  35:18

A couple of things on this one, I can totally relate when it comes to—you just figure this out. And then I think the dirty little secret is, everybody else is just figuring it out. Nobody has it all. And then once they hit a challenge, it's like, "Oh, I wasn't prepared for this." I don't think anybody's prepared for that. So I love you sharing that, and then honestly, like, to tie a bow on all this, I really appreciate you sharing the upbringing and what you went through. You know, we talked about this before the show. The purpose of the show, just in general, is people can see people that grew up in all sorts of different situations and go on to have success, and hear their stories. So thank you both for coming on today. I had a ton of fun going through this, and I really appreciate it.

Jessica Crain  36:00

Thank you, Callan. Thanks for the opportunity.   Absolutely hope it was helpful, and hope that we can provide some insight to somebody who's looking to start a company or grow their company.

Callan Harrington  36:09

If there's one thing I could say for sure, you provided that. So thank you for that. I hope you enjoyed Derek, Jessica, and I's conversation. I loved hearing their approach to keeping quality high while scaling. If you want to learn more about Derek and Jessica, you can find them on LinkedIn in the show notes. Also, if you liked this episode, you can find me on LinkedIn to let me know. And if you really want to support the show, a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify is very much appreciated. Thanks for listening, everybody, and I'll see you next week.