We recently connected with Amber Thompson-Snell and have shared our conversation below.
Amber , appreciate you joining us today. Let’s kick things off with talking about how you serve the underserved, because in our view this is one of the most important things the small business community does for society – by serving those who the giant corporations ignore, small business helps create a more inclusive and just world for all of us.
My background is in the health insurance space. Over the years I have watched the struggles between high monthly costs, high deductibles, doctors denying claims, doctors not being “in-network”, hidden/uncovered costs… and especially when it comes to Mental Health. I had a really hard case that I couldn’t solve. I wanted to go to Austin, Texas and advocate or go to Washington DC to advocate. My husband and I went to work! We found a platform that we wanted to offer at a cost low enough for the average consumer to be able to afford without having to sacrifice quality of care. That’s how our business Foundation Mental Wellness was born. We are on a mission to help with suicide prevention. We also personally give a portion of all of our proceeds back to a non-profit called Room Redux. This is where we anonymously transform the rooms of children who have experienced sexual or physical abuse… and we do it in 1 day. I am the Executive Director for the DFW Chapter. We believe that the more people we help get access to therapy, the more rooms we can transform and this is our small contribution to making the world a better place while doing our best to make a large impact.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
When we initially started this work, we didn’t know much about anything. We just knew there was a strong need for the obstacles we continued to face in the insurance world. What started with just phone or video visits with a therapist giving 24/7 access, transformed to the ability to get access to a licensed Psychologist and/or Psychiatrist with almost ZERO wait. Additionally, we do not require you to follow the steps. You have the ability to go straight to the level of care you need without jumping through hoops. We have a membership based platform that offers unlimited access to therapy and access to care 24/7. We do it for just $69.99 per month with a one time up fee of $25.00. There is an additional fee for psychiatry/psychology. We know that our competitors (there are A LOT) all have great solutions. But most of them want to do it through insurance. That’s the hardest part of the whole process. We are nationwide. AND we include regular Urgent Care as well as discounts on medication. We have the highest value mental health platform in America. We were recently chosen to partner with a film called Spyral. It’s about a husband who documented his wife’s mental illness all the way until her passing (by suicide). The movie was narrated by the late Michelle Trachtenberg.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
Resilience is all I know. I grew up with a mother who was mentally ill. She has bi-polar – manic/depression – schizophrenic tendencies. She had me at age 17. She was undiagnosed for most of my life and was self medicating with drugs and alcohol. She would get in bloody fights, worked in bars, and had men in our house like a revolving door. When she would get manic, she would send me off ( usually a family member) or babysitters for days or weeks at a time. I went to 13 elementary schools. That’s 13 schools in 6 years!!! I finally made it to “some stability” when I moved to central Texas to live with my father and step mother. That had it’s own set of unstability and drugs yet again were ever so present. I couldn’t wait to be an adult. I couldn’t wait to get free of all of the hell I had grown up with. But little did I know… I would fall for anything. I wasn’t taught morals, values, love, or lessons. I was out her in life “just figuring it out”. Long story short, I found myself a single mom of 2 when I met the man who I thought was prince charming not knowing he would get a new name in my story. The “abuser”. Now a single mom of 4….and in my mid 30’s. I had to teach myself all of the things I wished I had known. How to love myself. How to stand up for myself. At 33 I started my self development journey. The end result. In 2023, I married the man of my dreams. We have successful businesses, relationship, a total of 9 children, and waiting for the 10th grandchild to arrive any day!!
Any fun sales or marketing stories?
When we first started Foundation Mental Wellness our platform had 2,000 licensed clinicians. I thought that was amazing and it had to be the only one of it’s kind. We worked our hearts out for a whole year to still not reach the thousands of members that we needed to keep our platform. Since October of that year, the platform partners kept “threatening” us to kick us off for not having enough members. Well… December came… and they did. Me. The co-founder & CEO of what I thought was going to be the best thing in America – just booted us. I felt like an enormous failure. Without clinicians…. we are nothing. We have not business. OHHH but was there something better in store. We could have quit. In fact, our business partner in Las Vegas gave up on us completely. No communication for months. But my husband and I, not only refuse to quit, we are unrelenting at being successful. In just 2 weeks, we had replaced our old platform with what we have now. It was everything I dreamed of. It has an amazing backend dashboard, amazing therapists, zero AI, and all of our clinicians even sound happy to answer the phone and take your call. It’s because of the “failure” that we experienced that we were able to offer sooooo much more!!!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.foundationmentalwellness.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/foundation_mental_wellness/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61553979597976#
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/foundation-mental-wellness-67b02b2a8/
