Chris Ronzio (00:43):

Hey everyone. Welcome back. I'm Chris Ronzio and today I'm here with Matt Grammar. He is the founder and CEO of the Kentucky Counseling Center. Hey Matt.

Matt Grammer (00:52):

Hey Chris, how are you?

Chris Ronzio (00:53):

I'm awesome. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me.

Chris Ronzio (00:56):

So real quick, explain what is your business? What's it's all about?

Matt Grammer (01:01):

Yeah, so it's all about getting mental health services to people who need them the most without a long wait time and, and low cost. So we provide counseling, psychiatry and targeted case management, and we break down all the traditional barrier barriers that you'll see nationwide. So we accept all insurances. We provide services for all age groups and it can, it takes less than a week to get an appointment with us. Traditionally, you can see, um, you know, two to three month wait time to get into somewhere.

Chris Ronzio (01:35):

Wow. That's crazy. So, speed and accessibility feels like the main driver. Is that the differentiator?

Matt Grammer (01:43):

That's it. We're built to scale. If it takes somebody longer to longer than a week to get an appointment, we're hiring more providers.

Chris Ronzio (01:52):

It's kinda like the 20 minute pizza delivery thing. Like if you can't get an appointment by next week, it's on us.

Matt Grammer (01:59):

That's it. That's it. There is a massive demand for services and there's a wide shortage of providers. So there's no sense in looking at it any other way than just pure growth mode.

Chris Ronzio (02:09):

Totally, important work you're doing. So, how did you get the idea for this? Where did it come from?

Matt Grammer (02:15):

I got into the counseling field, my dad had schizophrenia, so was always really drawn to mental health. Trying to figure out, you know, what's up with him. Um, you know, that whole thing. When I was going through college, I worked at an inpatient psych hospital. And then I realized that there's just not enough services out there for people that want outpatient counseling and there's such a stigma behind mental health. So I wanted to do my part in changing that. And, um, and so started out Kentucky Counseling Center and have just continued to grow.

Chris Ronzio (02:53):

I love it. I think it was gosh, 10 years ago, or so now that I was involved in this mental health kind of startup, and I know how hard it was to get off the ground and trying to monetize that. And do we go direct? Do we go retail? Do we go through insurance? And so the fact that you've grown it, like you have to, you said before the call, about 160 professionals, is really impressive. So along the journey, was there a moment that you felt like, okay, this thing is taking off, this is really moving.

Matt Grammer (03:24):

Yeah. I mean, it was early on. So Kentucky counseling center was just me for about six months and then I had a full case load. And then I found myself, you know, spending marketing money to get new clients, but then I'm referring out because they can't see them. And instead of having a wait list, which you see at most other places that provide the same services, I said, let's just bring on providers. And let's keep bringing them on, so we don't have to have people waiting and we just haven't stopped. Last month, we added 20 new providers. The goal this month is to hire 15 new ones. So we're just, we're going along, we're trying to provide the service as long as the demand is there.

Chris Ronzio (04:07):

So I want to zoom in on this because you make it sound easy, but going from one provider to a team of two is a massive jump in any company. And I know a lot of listeners probably struggle with that, especially when you were the service provider and you had a full caseload, so whatever business people are in that they're listening, how did you justify adding that next person? When you think about the salary cost or all of that? Like what made you confident in starting to share the workload?

Matt Grammer (04:37):

It was kind of a, either I'm going to do this, or I'm going to fail, trying mentality. I started the company, I had 250 bucks in savings, and I had just gotten married. We didn't have the cash. You know, she was the breadwinner and I was doing contracting work. But I said, listen, I want to take that $250. I'm going to put $225 into an office. I'm going to use 25 bucks for ad words. Let's see if we get some clients. And so we got some clients we use profit for that to add, more and more marketing spent. Then we expanded offices. Then we just got to the point where we're using profit, we never took out a loan for anything. So as long as the profit was there, we had the cash to reduce the risk. You know, there wasn't a lot of risk involved in spinning that.

It just worked. And I'm just a believer and if something's not broken, don't change it. So we've always used profit to pay for the next person to go on down the line. To me there wasn't a lot of risk involved, looking back there was, but I've been fortunate to have a really great team. And I think that I got lucky. Yeah, I had a full case load. I was the billing person. I was the marketing person. I was answering phones, doing everything. I saw the value in delegating. And if you want to scale, you've got to delegate and you've got to get a sacrifice money right now and believe that it's going to come a little bit later. So I never had an issue with putting profits back into the company.

Chris Ronzio (06:12):

Well, it just shows your risk profile that, that wasn't a big deal to you to invest that, but you were always investing in your business. And so when you brought that first provider on and you started sharing caseload and sharing the leads that were coming in, how did you make sure that they create the same experience that you were delivering to maintain, you know, your brand and the relationship, the customer reputation you'd built?

Matt Grammer (06:35):

You know, I think that I have a good sense in judging people. Maybe that doesn't sound great, but I feel like I can connect with people. And my mentality when hiring somebody is could I have a beer with this person? And could I, if I'm looking for therapy or medication management or whatever it is, could I feel confident that I could tell this person my darkest secrets and I'd be comfortable in that environment? And so that's what we use. That's our test and interviewing. And everybody that we've hired has passed that test. And, you know, ultimately it's just, we listened to feedback from, from clients, from coworkers, from everybody else. And so far it's working.

Chris Ronzio (07:21):

That's great. So with so many providers now with such a big community, how do you manage the consistency of delivery or process? Do you have like a feedback system or you have so many people doing this kind of offering, I'm curious how you keep it consistent.

Matt Grammer (07:40):

Yeah, so we focus highly on quality control. We reach out to every client that touches our system, making sure the service went well after their first visit. We're reaching out to everybody for a review and an opportunity to give us some feedback, positive and negative. And so if we get negative feedback, we act on it and we change it immediately. That's one of our strengths. We're really quick. We're very open-minded, open door policy. We know that we're not going to be perfect all the time, but we certainly strive for it. So we've always taken feedback and we've always made the changes that we need to make sure clinicians are happy. No matter what position in the company they're happy. And most importantly, the clients.

Chris Ronzio (08:27):

The feedback speed of execution, speed back or something, I guess we should call it. As long as you act on it and do it quickly, you're always getting better. So you mentioned hiring that second person at the beginning, at what point did you start to hire business roles? You know, like beyond just the people that are seeing patients.

Matt Grammer (08:50):

That was the scariest far to me, that was the riskiest part. For a while it was just me and I think five, five to seven other clinicians. The more clinicians we added, the the more I was able to scale out of the clinical role and to do more of the back of the house type stuff. And once I got a feel for like, I did every, every position that we've ever had, I did it first, did it to how I wanted it. So I could train somebody to make sure that it was done right. But then most importantly found somebody that could do it better than I could and brought a different perspective. And had that open door policy. I would tell them, I still tell people upfront, don't be afraid to disagree with anything that I'm saying, I'm not, I'm not always right. We need open dialogue.

Once I got to the point where I'm like, okay, I've got billing figured out of that customer service figured out, I've got each department figured out. Then I found another person who was like a utility knife, who had skills in all those levels. And as we're growing, because in the beginning you don't have enough to pay somebody for a full-time position to just do billing or just to answer phones. There's not enough business there. And so I would find somebody that had multiple skill sets, and then as we would grow, we would look and see, okay, you're better at this or that. So maybe it's time to hire another person. And then finally, I mean, not until like last year, did we have a director running like each department, because before then we didn't even have like individual departments. It's all just kind of, okay, we gotta do this, that, and that now we've got it to where each department has a ton of people in it. And we've got systems in place, everybody knows their role. And so we kind of figured ourselves out last year.

Chris Ronzio (10:55):

In a growing business, you go from task management to team management at some point, you know, like everybody's just scattered and doing things. And then finally you start to bring on these senior people and you're really just upleveling what you do in each of these departments. And so it sounds like you've gone through that transition. We've had our fair share utility knives as well. So as you bring on those people, and as they've grown with you, I'm curious how you manage the changing of someone's role as you need more specialists. Do you keep peeling off responsibility is and making new roles, or how does that work in your organization?

Matt Grammer (11:31):

Well, it all goes back. I try to replicate what I did. At first I did everything. And then as we scale up, I'm doing a little less of everything and more specialized work over here. And so each we have a director in each department now, and at one time they were doing like that billing director did anything related to billing, but she also did these things, you know, and the other, and the same way with each department. But we just got to a point where there was enough volume, just enough business coming in to where it made sense that now that director is doing very little groundwork and they're overseeing the department, that's doing all the groundwork and making sure the systems are smooth and making sure customer service is there. And, so I really value the director position for each department.

And I tell them, because I hear it from them a lot, "Hey, I feel like I should be doing more. I've got a lot of free time on my hands right now." And I tell them, Hey, that's, that's what we're looking for. I don't want you to be overworked. I don't want you to be stressed. I want you to be there if there's a fire and to be clear-headed and not be burned out, because it's more important for me to have that, if we need you, like we're on it right now. And for you to enjoy a nice work-life balance, it shouldn't be stressful.

Chris Ronzio (12:51):

That's so insightful that you want to retain some capacity for fires to happen so that people can respond to those things without burning out, you know, burning the candle at both ends. A lot of companies will just slam their people with a hundred percent capacity. And then when unexpected things pop up, everybody's working at 120% of their hours.

Matt Grammer (13:13):

And there's no bandwidth left.

Chris Ronzio (13:15):

Yeah. So really smart of you to have you to set it up that way. So you mentioned going from all front of house and more front of house, to more back of house. Are you still involved with some cases or, or what's the mix look like today?

Matt Grammer (13:31):

Am I personally still involved?

Chris Ronzio (13:33):

Yeah.

Matt Grammer (13:36):

My goal from day one was to work myself out of a job and to build a company that worked for me. I'm not really involved in the day-to-day anymore. I'm there kind of like a mentor, for the directors who are really running the company. So we'll have like a quarterly meeting and we'll have goals and we'll have things that we do. We need to add this, that kind of thing, but, my intention was to never create a job for myself. If I wanted that, I would've just remained a therapist and then had a solo practice.

But yeah, so like in the beginning, my company, we were, we pivoted who we were. In the beginning, I knew I wanted to get this company off the ground. We had all these ideas, throwing all these darts to figure out what's going to stick. It took several years to really, to realize, well, we're not really a mental health company, Kentucky Counseling Center is, we're kind of like a, almost like a referral source. We're looking for mental health professionals that want a private practice and Kentucky Counseling Center provides all the resources to them to run their own practices.

Chris Ronzio (14:54):

Interesting.

Matt Grammer (14:55):

Yeah. So we do, we'll find somebody who wants a private practice, maybe they're a psychologist or something. We do the billing, we get their clients, all the admin stuff. I really believe that private practices work when you've got the provider who focuses on nothing, but providing that great care.

Chris Ronzio (15:14):

Yeah.

Matt Grammer (15:14):

When you have a provider that's juggling the care with billing, calling insurance companies, marketing, you know, all that stuff. I think the client loses out on the quality of the service.

Chris Ronzio (15:27):

What I want to make sure people hear that are listening. What Matts built is this infrastructure, this system that supports the providers. And even if your business is different from his business model, think about how you're building your business to have that same sort of infrastructure to support the core product or service that you deliver in house. You know, he's done that by building this community of therapists, that's able to effectively do their job and do it better because of his systems and their support. And that's kind of what every company needs, right? Like every company needs the backbone, the infrastructure to make the job a little easier so that they can scale. It sounds like you guys have done a great job with that.

Matt Grammer (16:04):

Thank you. Yeah. It took some time to figure that out. You know, it took several years to realize our customer isn't really the client who's getting the service. It was like an eye-opening experience when we realized our customer is the clinician who's contracting with us to provide those services. So it's a, it's kind of a hybrid. It's really interesting. But once we figured out what we're good at, then we started scaling faster than ever.

Chris Ronzio (16:34):

Yeah. So it seems like it's been a pretty smooth sailing journey. Were there times along the way, the last seven years where you thought I don't know? I don't know if this is going to work?

Matt Grammer (16:44):

Oh, man. A couple, probably a couple of times, at least a couple of times a year, minus like the last six months. So right now we have, I'm always waiting for something to pop up. It's, you know it, maybe it sounds easy, maybe I'm naive, but, lots of sleepless nights and trying to figure out, is this going to work? You know, even now, we're looking at probably 10 million in revenue this year. And we're more solid than we've ever been. And I think we're providing a greater service than we've ever done and work stress for everybody involved is lower than it's ever been, but it still feels like somebody is going to pull the rug out. And I don't know if that ever goes away. So I don't take anything for granted if things are going great today, I'm happy with that. I'm hoping that I can say the same thing about tomorrow.

Chris Ronzio (17:38):

I think we all have that paranoia, I guess, with things are going well. It's like, well, when's it going to change? This things are too good.

Matt Grammer (17:46):

My finance director told me a couple of weeks ago. She said, Matt, I think you're, I think you're just looking for fires. Go get a hobby. Cause everything's going really well right now.

Chris Ronzio (17:56):

Founders are used to putting out fires. And so when we can't find them anymore, we create them, which is, yeah, that's a different podcast episode. Now, I'm curious. So you even mentioned that you're kind of like in the business of generating these leads and supporting your therapist. Right? How have you been able to scale on the marketing side to really grow a brand and make sure that as you scale, you continue to get the supply of leads that you need?

Matt Grammer (18:23):

Yeah, well, like I said from day one, any profit we've had, we put it back into the company. So right now we're like, we're a hundred percent tele-health operation, but prior to COVID we had 11 offices across the state and it just started with one, 200 square foot office. So, we've always used cash to expand and expand and expand. And then we finally got to a point maybe last year where like economies of scale, just kind of plateaued. And then we were able to see margins increase after that. It was always a pretty, um, I don't know. I think it's because the demand is so high for mental health services. There's almost a direct correlation between how much you spend on digital marketing and how many clients you're going to get in. The clients are there. If you tell them, in my opinion, mental health service is a sold product. You don't have to try real hard to sell. They want it. You just gotta let them know that you're there.

Chris Ronzio (19:23):

And then, you know, because the supplies grow number because the demand is growing, the market's growing and it doesn't feel difficult to sell. Have you had to differentiate against competitors or stand out in any sort of way, that's a notable strategy?

Matt Grammer (19:40):

Yeah, well, that's changed a lot over the years. When I started the company, there weren't a lot of private practices in my state. So there wasn't a lot of competition, that we're using like Google ad words or other avenues for digital advertisement. And then as we started growing, our competition became greater. More people were going into private practice instead of going into community mental health. Community mental health, they don't advertise typically. There just wasn't a lot of competition there, but then over the last, maybe five years or so, that's, that's changed quite a bit, maybe less than that. You got more private practices than ever. Everybody's competing for ad space on Google and other avenues. But since we converted to tele-health, we really had to change our strategy because after COVID hit, everybody's doing tele-health. And then you've got companies based in California trying to compete for ad space in Kentucky. We're competing now with national brands like Talkspace and Better Help for ad space. And we're not really competing with the local providers.

Chris Ronzio (20:53):

Well, it sounds like the tele-health model has been a good change for the business. What are you excited about going, going forward? Where are you taking this company?

Matt Grammer (21:01):

Yeah, it's been a great change. Going forward, I mean, we're just going to keep doing what we do. We're trying to dominate Kentucky. We have the biggest provider network in the state, and we're really proud of that, but there's 40,000 patients in our system, but there's like four and a half million people in the state. So we've got a long runway just in the state, but at the same time, we're expanding into other states as well. So next up, we're going to be adding a couple of states to our network.

Chris Ronzio (21:31):

I love it. I love the geographic focus and owning your market. And it sounds like you've been able to adapt and just continue to grow through the last few years. So kudos to you for everything you're doing. And if people want to connect with you, where can they find you?

Matt Grammer (21:45):

Yeah, they can connect with me on LinkedIn. Matt Grammer on LinkedIn and kentuckycounselingcenter.com is where our website is.

Chris Ronzio (21:53):

Amazing. All right, everyone, you just heard Matt Grammer, CEO of Kentucky Counseling Center out there in Kentucky. He's built this business from just him with a full caseload to now a network of over 160 providers. Great business, really cool story. Matt, I appreciate you sharing your lessons, your insights on how to adapt quickly to the feedback that you get and how to find those utility knife type people early on in the business and how to work yourself out of a job and so you can just be that mentor to your people. So again, amazing story. Thanks for sharing. Hopefully if you're listening, you could take a page out of Matt's playbook and put it in yours. Thanks again, Matt.

Matt Grammer (22:32):

Thanks so much for having me.

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