Timothy Zercher 0:00

Oh Nadine, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate you taking time.

Nadine Wilches 0:03

Thanks, Tim. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Timothy Zercher 0:06

Absolutely. So, first question I wanted to ask is what inspired you to move beyond traditional mental health care and focus more on preventing problems before they begin?

Nadine Wilches 0:17

Yeah, great question to start with. So I'm an LCSW by training. I also have training as a in global public health and as a behavior analyst. And so I spent 20 years in mental behavioral health care, a lot of crisis care in the community, everything from child welfare, neurodevelopmental disorders, IDD populations, lots of community-based mental health and education-based mental health care. And in that work, it became really evident that by the time folks were in crisis, there were a lot of things that could have been done and potentially, in my opinion, should have been done, that we could have supported these, mostly children and families at the time, before a crisis began. But these are non-clinical things that don't get a lot of attention, don't get a lot of funding. And so we started to think about what we could do to create a standard of prevention care that would be much more focused on these preventive factors, these situational factors, these social determinants, and get ahead of the problem. But yeah, it was really the 20 years of just watching crisis after crisis come in and just seeing that most of those situations are preventable.

Timothy Zercher 1:27

Absolutely. Absolutely. So you challenge that idea that mental health starts in the therapy room, which I love. Can you tell us like a story of an experience that helped you kind of see that and exemplified how much more environment matters?

Nadine Wilches 1:43

Yeah. So there was actually a really pivotal moment. So I'm working in crisis care for a long time. I was working as a clinical director, which typical roles overseeing a big team of clinicians, and in this case, in a school for children who could not be served in a typical general education population. So these are kids with social, emotional, behavioral needs, K to 12, lots and lots of challenges, aggressive behaviors, and pretty serious needs. And so as the behavior analyst and counselor, I'm working one-on-one, I'm teaching other people how to work one-on-one, and we're creating these plans. But then I was put into a school director role. And all of a sudden, I'm in a completely new situation. And I'm also pregnant at the time with my son, who's now 14. So we're going back 14 years of the inception of this environmental piece. And I knew that I can't be in crisis response situations anymore. A lot of times I was kind of called in as the last line of defense, like, get Nadine. She's going to help us figure out what to do next, because it could be very dangerous at times and very stressful for the team. So since I couldn't be in those situations, it allowed me to take a literal step back and say, okay, I can't do this, but what else can we do? And we started really looking, we always looked at antecedent management. That's a really common term and philosophy. We started looking at that from an environmental lens and started shifting places and spaces through the school. We started shifting practices, who does what when, who's involved, when do we switch? How are our de-escalation practices right now? And we went from seven crises a day. So this is when we have to fill out an incident report. I went on maternity leave and we started this new intervention. We had seven the following year, total incident reports following school year. And so it convinced me that absolutely can be done. It should be done. We were happier as a team. We weren't restraining kids. We had less phone calls to parents. We're calling parents for better reasons. It was really exciting times. And then we moved back east because uh family and had little kids and decided, you know, really to shift this model.

Timothy Zercher 3:57

Wow. That's incredible. That's incredible. So MindArc, your current business, combines AI, data, and behavioral health. What has been the biggest challenge in getting people to really embrace that vision, that way of doing things?

Nadine Wilches 4:12

So initially, you know, going back at inception, it was just differentiating ourselves from telehealth. The only real tech out there at that time was telehealth. So people just assumed we were in that category and we were new to this space. And so we were dismissed pretty quickly. So our first challenge was we are not telehealth. This is what we're doing. And then it was really how can we convince people to spend time and energy on prevention, given that their bandwidths are tight and how can they shift energy? And so we were really working on ROI models. What is the return on your investment? How can you justify this shift? And then I think the last barrier now that we're dealing with, so we've gotten that far, and now it's very easy to do those pieces and the awareness is there, but it's the funding piece now. There are funding streams in behavioral health care at the community education and health systems levels that are just really not set up for this very well. And so we're having to be pretty creative when it comes to funding this.

Timothy Zercher 5:09

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, it's not a startup ecosystem in general.

Nadine Wilches 5:13

Yes, we've created one.

Timothy Zercher 5:15

Good. How does your team go about gaining new partners or clients? And what do you call the organizations that you work with?

Nadine Wilches 5:22

So we've started off mostly on a relational marketing basis. So we've leveraged our existing relationships, our team's existing relationships, and we started off with pilot studies. And so we did a lot of work to prove the value in this through pilots. Then we use those case studies to really go to conferences and talk about how that's worked and meet a lot of people. So that was our initial strategy. And now we have basically alliances with folks working in the community who do this work on a day-to-day basis, who know this field, who then talk to people that they know about what we do and support us in making those inroads and having those initial conversations. So very relational-driven marketing strategy.

Timothy Zercher 6:09

That makes sense. That makes sense. And it works because that's how organizations grow and develop is via relationships almost always.

Nadine Wilches 6:16

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Timothy Zercher 6:18

What have you found is the hardest part of growing your team?

Nadine Wilches 6:21

So we've kind of been lucky in two ways. And then I'll talk about the challenge. So we won it at the Center for Advancing Innovation Child Health Challenge, Technology Challenge through NIH. And so we got a really strong group of free advisors really early on. And these folks were pivotal in helping us just start a business and understand. So I'm coming from the nonprofit world as a clinician for 20 years and shifting to starting my own business was a big challenge and big change. And so we had a lot of help, which was fantastic. So I credit that. And then I credit our university partner. So we sit at the Stony Brook University's incubator ecosystem. And so our team feels much bigger than it is because we have incubator support from the Center for Excellence in Information and Wireless Technologies at Stony Brook. We have faculty support, we have research support there. We have research grant dollars opportunities. So our team and interns, we've got a big ecosystem of support there. But by no means is it easy to grow mind arc health. Like I said, we're kind of on the bleeding edge of a competitive technology market, doing something that no one else is doing. And so it's really hard to find our fit and find that peg hole that where we can really do the work. And so I think it's been an exercise in persistence for sure. Just lots of persistence, fighting the status quo, finding funding opportunities, proving our value repeatedly, just when we think we've kind of proved our credibility, just finding ways to do that better. So definitely been a challenge, but a labor of love for sure.

Timothy Zercher 7:54

I love that. I love that. So because we are a marketing agency that specializes in behavioral health, we always have to ask some marketing questions. The first is what is the marketing tactic or marketing strategy that you're either considering or just watching really carefully in the marketplace right now?

Nadine Wilches 8:08

So I told you kind of about our affiliates, which has been really fantastic. And then I started a podcast called Navigate with Nadine. And that has really helped us meet people that we wouldn't otherwise meet and understand and explore different markets and see what people are dealing with. And I think again, building relationships and understanding where we might fit in has been brand new and really helpful. And then we're exploring the reseller market, which I think is probably the most interesting thing to mention. So because we are a technology that we can train people on and provide then those consulting services to whomever, we can white label our tools for different entities that this tool can fit well in portfolios that are already existing. And those folks are already embedded in certain markets and have a name for themselves and are working. So this has helped us get into the New York City school districts, for example. And so we're exploring this more now that we've had an initial reseller partnership success.

Timothy Zercher 9:10

I love that. It's a smart way to grow, I think. I think more technology groups need to need to look at that because I think there's a ton of potential there. A lot of organizations that are looking for new features, new processes to offer to their current clients, and makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you so much, Nanya. I really appreciate you taking time to join us and for the work that you're doing, creating a real impact in a lot of kids' lives.

Nadine Wilches 9:30

Thank you. Nice to meet you. Thanks for having me.

Timothy Zercher 9:32

Absolutely. Thank you.