We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Dr. Jessica Dresden and Dr. Natale Garrity. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Dr. Dresden and Dr. Garrity below.
Dr. Dresden and Dr. Garrity, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today. We’d love to hear the backstory of how you established your own practice.
We decided to start our own mental health practice, Embolden You, as we were craving life-work balance (yes, life comes first!). The work we do can be hard, and we wanted to make sure we were taking care of ourselves so that we could most effectively support and help our clients. We both had young families, and knew we wanted to have balance between our work as a psychologist and our important job of being a mom. Our backgrounds in having both training and work opportunities in private practice settings helped us significantly in creating a strategy for opening our own practice. We were able to learn the ins and outs regarding how the business side of things works, which was not any training we had received in graduate school. We took a big leap of faith and committed to never giving up no matter how challenging or busy things got. We chose to open our practice in Mahtomedi, Minnesota, as Natale grew up in the area and knew that this area had limited mental health support. Prior to us opening Embolden You, there were no other mental health clinics located in Mahtomedi. After we opened our doors in 2019, we soon realized that there was in fact a significant need for more mental health support in both Mahtomedi and surrounding communities. This need then increased even more significantly after COVID started. We could not keep up with the demand, and felt terrible turning away potential clients. We decided to ask some of our former, incredibly skilled, colleagues to join our team to help support the community. Since this time, our team of clinicians has grown solely by word of mouth and includes direct connections of ours (e.g., former co-workers, supervisors, individuals we attended graduate school with, etc.) or connections of current clinicians on our team. This has helped to create a very unique and fun culture at Embolden You! We are very proud of our incredibly skilled team, and of the space we have created where members of our team can also experience life-work balance that we value so deeply.
While building our business we spent much of our limited free time (nap times and after bedtime) to work tirelessly to create the practice that we desired and one which fit our vision and values. This required much perseverance, teamwork, and reflection. Throughout this process, we have been fortunate that, overall, the road has been fairly smooth. However, like any business, there is a lot that happens behind the scenes, and there are a lot of moving parts. One thing that we have always strongly valued is being incredibly thoughtful with any decision or change that may happen at our clinic. We probably actually think through things too much sometimes! We really care about our clinicians and want to ensure we are providing exceptional and quality care to our clients, so we try to think through things from every possible angle when making a decision and when building our business. When we have experienced random bumps in the road, we have relied upon and utilized our relationship and our foundation of friendship to get through it.
Our advice to those considering starting their own practice is to invest time upfront in thoroughly researching every aspect of the business. During the planning phase, utilize diverse resources such as professional networks, podcasts, industry boards, and online communities to inform your decisions and align your vision with best practices. It is equally important to clearly define your goals and vision for the practice. Finally, staying organized is key—we often joke that we have a Google Doc or spreadsheet for everything! With careful planning, dedication, and a clear vision, building a successful practice is both achievable and rewarding.
Dr. Dresden and Dr. Garrity, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
We are both licensed clinical psychologists who each entered the mental health field with a strong passion for helping others. We both found ourselves eager to learn how to best support and walk beside those who are facing some of life’s most painful and difficult challenges. We understand firsthand how transformative this type of care can be.
Our clinic, Embolden You, is a multidisciplinary team of mental health and medical professionals. Our team is composed of one psychiatric medication provider, two dietitians, and 30 mental health clinicians. We accept most major insurance plans including Medicaid and Medicare. Our primary specialties include Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Anxiety, Depression, Eating Disorders, Trauma/PTSD, and grief/loss. We provide mental therapy for individual, group, family, and couples therapy across the lifespan (ages 5-99+) as well as medication management and dietitian services. Our clinicians work with individuals (ages 5-99+) experiencing a wide variety of diagnoses and challenges.
The culture at Embolden You is different from many other clinics in that we are a clinician-focused practice. What this means is that when making decisions about our practice, we are always considering the clinicians first and foremost. The reason we do this is because we know that if clinicians’ needs are valued, heard, and honored, their clients will receive the best possible care. We also personally know how important it is to be a part of a workplace that puts clinicians needs at the forefront. In being a clinician-focused practice, we are proud to offer amongst some of the most competitive compensation that we are aware of for our clinicians and administrative staff so that they too can experience a life-work balance. Our clinicians are also offered significant autonomy in their positions. For example, they are able to pick the days and times that fit best for them to see their clients and are able to create the type of caseload that they would like. Our clinic is also very unique in that we only hire clinicians who we believe provide exceptional care. Each clinician is someone who you are easily able to connect with and are truly the most down-to-earth, wonderful people. When interviewing a potential clinician, our most important determining factor in a hire is whether or not we would feel comfortable with and trust them to see one of our own friends or family members. Many clients come to us and may not have had success in previous therapies and find that they make significant progress and are easily able to connect with their therapist on our team. Lastly, we are proud to be a woman-owned business and team, fostering a culture of care, collaboration, and empowerment. At Embolden You, we’re committed to supporting both our clients and our clinicians in achieving their goals and living fulfilling lives.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
Our clinic is recognized for its comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach, and specialized expertise in supporting individuals dealing with conditions such as OCD, anxiety, and eating disorders. We are one of the few clinics in Minnesota with a significant number of clinicians trained in evidence-based treatments for OCD, including Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) and Inference-Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (I-CBT). Unlike many OCD specialists who operate on a private-pay basis, we also accept insurance, making our services more accessible. Additionally, our team includes a multidisciplinary eating disorder team of specialists, which is advantageous for clients as they can receive all necessary care in one place, without the need to visit multiple clinics.
Our strong reputation is built on our connections within the community and professional networks, as well as word-of-mouth referrals. Many of our clients come to us after hearing about the positive experiences and successes of others who have worked with our team of clinicians. We have also been very passionate about serving our community through outreach events including teacher in-service trainings, parent night presentations through the school district, as well as presentations and collaborative efforts with a local church.
We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.
We both attended graduate school together at the Minnesota School of Professional Psychology where we became friends. We supported each other throughout graduate school, which was very rigorous. We kept in touch throughout our training even at times while living in different states. After graduating and receiving our degrees, we then worked together at another outpatient clinic. During this time, we realized that we both shared the same vision of creating a setting in which ALL people feel seen, heard and valued, both clinicians and clients. Through this process we realized that we balance each other out, which makes us great business partners. Jessica can be more comfortable with risk and spontaneity, whereas Natale is very thoughtful and practical. This balance is something we joke about often and truly makes us a great pair.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.embolden-you.com
- Instagram: emboldenyou
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/emboldenyouMN
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/embolden-you/
Image Credits
Mads Lizotte Photography