We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jessica Ortler. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jessica below.

Alright, Jessica thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Being a business owner can be really hard sometimes. It’s rewarding, but most business owners we’ve spoken sometimes think about what it would have been like to have had a regular job instead. Have you ever wondered that yourself? Maybe you can talk to us about a time when you felt this way?

Am I happy as a business owner in my field and the healthcare industry? I will tell you what I tell everyone else- it depends on the day. Ask me today, I might tell you that it’s not worth it, but that answer could change in hours or sometimes minutes. The highs are very high and the lows are VERY low.
It can be the most rewarding career path one could ever assume. It can also be the most lonely and the most painful.

I’ll explain to you how being a business owner has been the most rewarding thing I have every done first. My “why” if you will keeps me going every single day when things get really hard. The “why” behind my company is to establish a place where all employees are specifically and carefully chosen who fit our culture, mindset, and have the same values. We carefully choose our employees so we create an environment that is safe, productive, focused on learning and development, and somewhere where employees can really work as individuals and harness their skills and utilize them in different ways to better our community and our company.
I am happy to share with you that I have successfully and strategically chosen a team that fits these values, together myself and my team could change the world.

Watching each of them grow into professionals and take on new things and learn new skills that they never thought they could brings me so much joy. Bringing our team together to collaborate, work towards a common goal, and seeing everyone thrive and grow in their own personal and professional skills is invaluable.

I absolutely love teaching my employees skills that will not only help them succeed and excel in their career here at Speech Inspirations, but skills that will help them succeed and excel in life. Skills like work ethic, setting healthy boundaries, budgeting, having difficult conversations, building rapport, having tact during moments of trials to gain understanding, and so much more are not taught in school, and rarely taught in life by any members of our family.

Seeing my employees learn, grow, and find joy in being part of something bigger than themselves is why i wake up every day even when things are hard and scary.

On the flip side, i often find myself wondering what it would be like going back to working for someone else and being able to “turn it off” at the end of the day.
It is often exhausting, lonely, and overwhelming being the owner and CEO.
As an owner in the healthcare field, it feels like I am always fighting. It feels like the fight just never ends. I fight with insurance companies so they will pay us the bare minimum that they can. Sometimes I fight them to pay us for work that has already happened. In what other job can you complete work, get paid, and be at risk of that income being taken back like in ours?!
After I’m done fighting health insurance to simply pay us, I fight with them to pay us better so I can pay myself and my team members even a fraction of what we’re worth.
After I’m done fighting health insurance again, I end up fighting with the employees because they constantly feel either over worked, under paid, or under valued.
I can’t talk to “anyone at work” about these problems because what good will it do for my company if the owner is always complaining? I can’t even talk to employees who relate to these problems in length because it will cause their attitudes to slip and in the end hurt our company.

It’s exhausting, lonely, overwhelming, and the most incredible and rewarding journey I could ever take. Recently, we’ve decided as a team, to try and stop fighting health insurance and stop fighting each other. We’re in the process of opening a non profit so we can gain funding elsewhere and stop having to fight so hard to just pay our bills.

This is going to be another exhausting, overwhelming, and lonely but passionately rewarding endeavor. I am thrilled and overjoyed to bring everyone together and do something that has rarely been done, come together as a team to just stop dighting this fight, and instead focus our efforts into the dream that we first went to school for- which is being SLPs, OTs, and PTs in the community and make a positive impact in the lives of families and children who need us,

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

We provide services to the most vulnerable population. We help children and adults communicate and function and thrive in life. If it weren’t for us, so many children wouldn’t have a voice, they wouldn’t have the ability to do simple things in life like work, and eat!

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I have had to unlearn many lessons, but here are a few:
1. you can’t judge a book by it’s cover- when it comes to hiring and choosing employee’s- you absolutely CAN. I’ve learned to trust my gut, if it seems off, it is off.
2. slow and steady wins the race – when it comes to business, slow and steady is NOT always the best plan of attack. If we’re not careful to address problems quickly enough, problems compound, creating many more issues.
3. we shouldn’t share about our personal lives at work- this has proven to be everything but true. I find that the more i share, the. more my employees see that I am a human, too. I’m more relatable and trustworthy the more I share about myself.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

get to know your team well, individualize management styles because everyone is different. Focus on supporting each employee with their personal and professional goals.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.speechinspirations.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/speechinspirations/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/speechinspirations
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/76580828/admin/dashboard/