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

Brittni, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Parents play a huge role in our development as youngsters and sometimes that impact follows us into adulthood and into our lives and careers. Looking back, what’s something you think you parents did right?

From setting up lemonade stands as a child, to learning how to sell items on Ebay as a teen, becoming an entrepreneur was a given for me rather than an accident. My father led by example by starting and running his own successful business and I always remember hearing him talk about how important it was for him to be his own boss. I’ll never forget preparing to leave for college and having my dad ask what goal I wanted to set for myself. The answer was an easy one for me, I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said I want to be an occupational therapist. But that wasn’t a specific enough answer for my dad; he continued to encourage me to think bigger. Knowing how important it was to my dad to be his own boss, I transformed my goal into “owning my own occupational therapy practice.” He challenged me further to quantify when I would achieve that. It was 2005 and the year 2020 sounded like a realistic, round, number to attribute that goal to. The simple act of setting the goal and having it play in my subconscious helped me to stay open to the opportunities that presented themselves. On January 1st, 2019 I met that goal set with my father in 2005. If my dad had not instilled an entrepreneurial spirit or taught me the importance of goal setting, one could only wonder if I would have ended up at the same place at the time I did.

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?

From a young age, I always gravitated toward working with children. I am the oldest of three children and found myself leading my siblings, whether they may have asked for that or not. I frequently volunteered to do things like organize children’s birthday parties, facilitate youth camps, and spent a great deal of my time as a teen babysitting. As I was trying to decide what I wanted to do with my life, I knew caretaking would be a dominant aspect. I was introduced to occupational therapy by a family friend who had received occupational therapy as an adult following a car accident. She encouraged me to look into the profession as she felt that it aligned with my nature. At the time I thought pediatric physical therapy was more in line with what I wanted to do. Occupational therapy can look so different depending on the setting and the population served. I could not imagine how occupational therapy, as I was familiar with it, would fit into my goal of working with children. I reached out to a local therapy practice to gain observation experience with a physical therapist. Upon arrival I learned that the physical therapist was out for the day and I was placed with an occupational therapist instead. The therapist they paired me with happened to be working with a pediatric client and it was in that session that I saw the intersection of my passion and when I knew that occupational therapy was the career path that I was going to pursue.

After completing my degree, I accepted my first job with a pediatric clinic where I had completed one of my internships. I spent the first couple of months getting my feet wet as a new occupational therapist and navigating all of the dynamics of working in an office. While the clinic had been outstanding to work for as a student, there were some cultural challenges that impacted my happiness in the workplace. Six months in, I decided that I needed to find another place to work. Cultural challenges were beginning to dim my light and I needed to reignite my passion. After an uninspiring job hunt, I felt pulled to stay in my current position. Something had brought me to that clinic initially, I loved my clients, and I feared the grass would not actually be greener on the other side. However, I knew that I couldn’t continue to thrive in the environment in the way in which it currently existed. Slowly I began using my voice and proposing changes that I felt would improve the workplace not only for me but for the whole company. Some of my changes were adopted which gave me the confidence to go after leadership roles and new responsibilities within the clinic. My leadership opportunities continued to grow and 3 years after starting my career I was offered the position as the Clinical Director of Occupational Therapy. It was also around that time that I was approached by the owner of the company with the proposition of potentially buying the company upon her retirement. Having set the goal to eventually own my own practice, I was instantly interested by this and began an informal mentorship with the practice owner over the next 3-4 years. During that time I also had the opportunity to work with business consulting companies and be a part of making larger company decisions. In 2018 I took the first official step ownership as the co-owner, assuming the Executive Director and managing partner role. During that year, I sought out additional business consulting leading me to improve the way we tracked data, structured our positions and streamlined company processes. January 2019 I took over as the 100% owner and, with that, announced a company name change and rebranding to help clarify our mission to serve the children in our community. When I assumed full ownership we only had 1 clinic with under 20 staff of occupational therapists, speech therapists and a handful of admin. We quickly began to grow as our systems and processes continued to improve and we found the need to open a 2nd location by the end of 2019 in order to best serve our community. The 2nd location officially opened in May of 2020 right as the pandemic was in full force. We successfully navigated the challenges we were faced with, and came out even stronger. By the end of 2020 we added physical therapy and at the end of 2021 we opened our 3rd location. We currently have over 60 staff and continue to build and restructure our team and services to best serve our community.

One of the things that brings me the most pride is that while the company has grown successfully over the last several years I have also actively grown and nurtured my own family. I was pregnant with my 3rd child when I came into full ownership of the company in 2019. I was determined to build a successful business, but not at the expense of the well-being of my family. This led to me seeking out coaching and mentorship empowering me to take ownership over work-life balance and build the mindset and systems that would support the life that I wanted to live. The success that I have had in doing so has encouraged me to support other working mothers, and I take great pride in the fact that a large percentage of the leadership in my company are working mothers. I am also thankful for my experience in the occupational therapy field which has helped me to be an even better parent to my 3 daughters. As my children have encountered their own challenges in the form of diagnoses such as ADHD and dyslexia, I have been able to be their advocate and help them to advocate for themselves. This has given me a whole new appreciation for the families that we work with on a daily basis and helps me to stay connected to the decisions that we make as a company and the impact they have on our clients, staff and the community.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

As a business owner and mother, there are always a lot of plates spinning that I have to attend to. I had previously worked under the notion that as a mom and business owner, it was most important to put everyone else’s needs first. This came at the expense of my time, money and most importantly energy. As an occupational therapist, I felt that I needed to continue seeing clients on a weekly basis because, after all, that is why I got into the field to begin with. As an Executive Director, I felt that I needed to be the first one into the office. I needed to be visible at all times and heavily explain why I may not be in the office at a given time or another. As an owner, I felt that I needed to under compensate myself and use that money to pour back into the business. Putting in the hard work now should pay off later. As a wife, I also felt that I needed to be the one to do all the housework and maintain our home. Cooking, cleaning and picking up after everyone else was something that was my role and I needed to do it myself. As a mother, I felt that I needed to be the person to drive my kids to and from school and meet all of their daily wants and needs. Unlearning these concepts and adopting the mindset that I have to “put my oxygen mask on first” has allowed me to be more grounded, confident and successful in my key roles. This does not mean there is a disregard for the needs of others, but rather the acknowledgement of the fact that our lives are the combination of the choices that we make. Being able to understand what the things are that keep me grounded, which are different for all of us, and putting those first have helped me to make better decisions and live an overall more balanced life.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

I can remember the first time that someone came into my office and asked me what our plan was for COVID-19. I had no idea what they were talking about. I was operating half-glass full and in somewhat a sense of denial and wanted to downplay the potential of what this unknown virus was going to do. As I started to do my due diligence research, it was evident that I needed to start making some concrete plans about how we were going to operate in the case that this virus ever made it to our area. I started to assemble an action plan of phases based on information that was available to us at the time and hoped for the best. As COVID found its way into our area and shut downs were being discussed, we hit a whole new level of challenge. I had no idea how we were going to operate on a two week closure. At the time, every dollar counted. We were in the process of opening a 2nd location and I had employees I had hired for that location that were counting on having a job. The service delivery type of telehealth has been a part of our profession for a while but not something that we ever had to utilize. If you were to ask me in January of 2020 if I thought we would ever use telehealth I would have told you absolutely not. However, as a means of survival I needed to put that thought aside and figure out how to make telehealth just as successful as our in-person services. I found the author of a recent book on the subject of telehealth, hired her for a 1 hour consult, and got to laying all the foundation for moving our 100% in person therapy clinic to 100% virtual. I called a meeting with my whole team and told them that we had no option but to be successful with telehealth. It would be their job to figure out how to tailor their sessions to the virtual platform, and it would be mine to figure out how to continue to keep their paycheck coming. During this great period of unknown, reimbursement for telehealth service was not a guarantee. We kept seeing changes in policy to allow for payment of telehealth in other medical models, but the outpatient therapy services were excluded time and time again. I reached out to the policy makers, formed petitions for payment, and looked at other creative ways to keep my team financially taken care of. We pulled together to create “At Home” boxes that clients could purchase to carry out therapy at home. While these were a lot of work for not a lot of revenue, they gave our families resources that helped keep kids busy and continuing to work toward their goals. Not knowing how we were going to keep paying our staff who were working around the clock to completely change how they operate in their job, I secured a quick loan to help close the gap in revenue that I felt this “two week closure” would inevitably produce. Without knowing if we would get paid for the work we were doing, we knew it owed it to our clients to continue their service in whatever way we could. We transitioned 70% of our clients to telehealth and transitioned to telehealth completely overnight. I religiously watched all of the State of Emergency broadcasts hoping for any glimmer of hope that would mean they would pay for our services. One afternoon, while watching a broadcast, we finally got that hope. Medicaid, one of our largest payers, would be paying for telehealth services. I broke down crying tears of relief in a great release I had been holding onto for weeks.

Contact Info:

• Website: emergepediatrictherapy.com
• Instagram: emergepediatrictherapy
• Facebook: facebook.com/emergepediatrictherapy
• Youtube: @emergepediatrictherapy

Image Credits
Photography by Amelia Cassar Photography and Madalyn Yates Photography.