Northern Lights - Issue 24 - September 2023
Mental Health Services: Imagine What You Want and Do That
by AMY LANE
Jessica Horness in her Traverse City office.
In the fabric of a community, mental health care is a vital thread.
In Traverse City, Jessica Horness is a part.
With start-up assistance from Venture North Funding & Development, Horness is providing counseling and psychotherapy through a business that’s been a success since she opened, helping clients and fostering human change and healing.
Driving a Business Around Customer Feelings
“Whether my business succeeds is redefined every day based on how my clients feel. It’s my job to go where my clients take me to help them with a variety of mental illnesses and emotional difficulties. We want to see that people are able to eliminate or control troubling symptoms so they can function better and increase well-being and healing,” Horness said.
“The thing I have said to people who are beginning their careers, who are figuring out what they want to do…is what do you actually love about the work of it. Human change takes a long time…you can’t always come home with the `W’ (win). So what do you love about the work itself, and about being in the presence of other beings and watching them unfold.”
Passionate and compassionate, Horness has been practicing counseling and psychotherapy since 2020, spending three years at the Traverse City branch of Catholic Human Services before entering private practice and opening her Jessica Horness LLC office on East Front Street in January. The business venture has given her space to create, to develop her own fee structures, to build and to experiment, and, she said, to “dream about what the future will look like.”
Dreams for Mental Health Services
Within six weeks of opening her doors, Horness had filled to a capacity caseload of 25 clients and has had a waiting list since. The response didn’t surprise her.
Said Horness: “There was no question that there was need.”
But there can also be obstacles faced by those seeking mental health care, such as barriers to insurance coverage, scheduling challenges, stigma and finding a provider who has capacity. Horness said in structuring her business, it was important to her to eliminate as many barriers as possible. “And just trying to hold the idea of, can I eliminate those barriers and still make it sustainable to myself. And if I believe that’s possible, what creative solutions come forth.”
Horness’ areas of expertise include clinical mental health counseling – with support for such experiences as depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, compulsive behaviors, PTSD and other trauma-related areas – alcohol and substance use counseling, life transition support, and culturally competent counseling including support for individuals navigating culturally-specific concerns.
Her pricing model is unconventional; she accepts Medicaid and private pay only and is committed to making psychotherapy as accessible as possible, offering sliding fee scales and establishing payment agreements individually with each client. “I can work with my clients to set a fee that’s going to work with them,” Horness said.
The price structure was an experiment she wanted to try, aided by the financial cushion of a $5,250 micro loan from Venture North that gave her start-up resources to be flexible with pricing, pay rent, cover other expenses, and pay herself. And, the money gave her “space to think,” Horness said.
Venture North: Providing a Financing Backstop
“You can’t run an experiment from survival mode. Venture North kind of gave me, as a business owner, the capacity to say: Who do I want to be, how do I want to do this.”
Venture North business development manager Steve Brower worked with Horness to develop the right lending solution for her business. The loan was structured with interest only for three months, so she could afford to move into her new office and prepare for client visits, giving her time until she opened her doors and had revenue, “which was wonderful,” Horness said.
Venture North’s Micro Loan program, which provides $50,000 or less in capital, “was a perfect fit for Jess and other businesses that need a small amount of capital to grow or get started,” said Venture North President Laura Galbraith. She said that so far this year, Venture North has assisted 16 out of 18 businesses with the Micro Loan program, and of those 16, eight were start-ups.
Venture North also provided Horness a $1,200 mini grant for accounting and web services.
Galbraith said Horness’ business venture “was easy to support,” due to her prior experience as a therapist and preparation in requesting the loan, including “a thoughtful business plan that was brief and concise.”
She said that as a Community Development Financial Institution or CDFI, 60 percent of Venture North’s lending “needs to be invested in people running businesses in areas of economic distress. Jessica’s business not only meets that criteria, but she is taking important steps to improve our communities’ mental health needs.”
Visions for Mental Health Therapies and Education
While Horness established her business doing one-on-one therapy, she is looking to build and grow, hoping to develop group therapy next year that would give more people access to needed services. Group therapy aspects like curriculum, structure and schedule are yet to be determined.
She’s also working toward launching a continuing education program for yoga teachers – a six-month program with participants meeting once a month, accompanied by an online forum where the yoga teachers can talk and engage.
“It’s something that I’m really passionate about…offering people a chance for competence and maturity in their teaching,” she said. “At the end, everybody walks away with a full, well-thought-out ethos for themselves about who they are as teachers.”
Another vision, perhaps for 2025: Supervising other limited-license mental health practitioners, in a mentorship situation rewarding to both Horness and those with whom she would work. “They come in and talk to you about cases, and you help them develop as practitioners. That’s something I am really excited about. I really love teaching,” she said.
“You can’t run an experiment from survival mode. Venture North kind of gave me, as a business owner, the capacity to say: Who do I want to be, how do I want to do this.”
An Integrated Center for Care
Long-term, there’s a dream of creating an integrated care center bringing together a variety of disciplines and practices that are healing, such as counseling, therapy, wellness and fitness.
Venture North consultant Tim Ervin said “Jessica and her business are fighting the smart fight for the cause of mental health, a cause accelerated during the pandemic (and) indifferent to age, gender and economic status. Her entrepreneurial vision is one we all need to kindle for the health and well-being of our communities. And her business is a poster child for Venture North, which wants to deploy resources to effect positive social change as a mission-driven CDFI.
“We are standing by to support the next chapter of Jessica’s vision. After all, who among us can say that mental illness has not affected us in one way or another.”
Horness’ business model is a work in progress, a blank canvas that she approaches as art. “Not only do I have that canvas, but I’m not sure what’s going to be on it today. But I have an intention of what it’s going to get to,” she said.
And to others in the mental health field, she would share this: “Imagine what you want, and start doing that, because it might actually work.”
Amy Lane is a veteran Michigan business reporter whose background includes work with Crain Communications Inc., Crain’s Detroit Business and serving as Capitol correspondent for nearly 25 years. Now a freelance reporter and journalist, Lane’s work has appeared in many publications including Traverse City Business News.
