Researching OTPreneurs: Why OT Practitioners Start Businesses

Research on OTPreneurs? Yep, we're going there. 

Discover how a group of innovative OT students is shedding light on the path to entrepreneurship, documenting the real-life experiences of OT entrepreneurs. In this episode, you'll learn about the core themes emerging from their research, including the spirit of occupational therapy, the quest for autonomy, embracing uncertainty, and the essential mindsets for success. 

Special guests Bryan, Vanessa, Gabriel, and Luke share invaluable insights from their study, illustrating how OTs can navigate the transition into entrepreneurship with confidence and resilience. They also discuss practical advice and inspirational stories, such as how Chloe's mental health education initiative and Ben's community stroke rehab center are making waves.

Don't miss this opportunity to gain actionable tips and encouragement for your entrepreneurial journey. Listen in now to transform your OT practice and reshape your professional future!

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Transcript

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When OT students are researching a specific topic, you know there must be something trending in that arena. So when I found out a group of OT students were conducting research into OT entrepreneurs, you can imagine my excitement here at the OTpreneur. Today, we are diving into what this group of students learned about OTrepreneurs through their research. And full disclosure, I may or may not have been one of their research subjects. We'll get into that in just a little bit. Are you thinking about starting an occupational therapy business, but don't even know where to begin? Whether you're starting something on the side or going full time in your business, the OTpreneur podcast is what you need. This show will help you get in the right mindset and give you actionable tips to go from just an idea to OTpreneur. Let's go. Hey there. I'm Jason, or as you might hear during this episode, Michael. And today, I'm excited to welcome to the OTpreneur podcast, a group of OT students from California State University, Dominguez Hills, to share their research on OT entrepreneurship. So without further delay, Brian, Vanessa, Gabriel, and Luke, welcome to the podcast. How are y'all doing today? Doing good. Hey, everyone. Doing good. Hi, everyone. Alright. Well, let's go ahead and dive into this. And there are 4 of you all here plus me. We got 5 people on this podcast. It might get a little busy, so I'm gonna do my best to kind of drive the conversation. So, Brian, let's go ahead and start with you. Would you like to share a little bit about your group as a whole and how you all decided to conduct some research into the experiences of occupational therapy practitioners venturing into entrepreneurship? Sure. 1st and foremost, we just wanna say thank you, Jason, for inviting us onto the podcast to share our research with you. We all met because we're, 2nd year masters of occupational therapy students at CSUDH in Carson, California. And all of us were interested in entrepreneurship, as future OT practitioners, but we noticed there was a lack of avenues and resources for the trajectory of entrepreneurship. So we decided to utilize the advantage of a qualitative study approach, and we wanted to learn about the experiences of OT entrepreneurs to hopefully shed more light on, every individual's unique experiences. And hopefully, this would help guide, future OT practitioners and their journey towards entrepreneurship. Awesome. And I know you're occupational therapy students. And correct me if I'm wrong, but do any of you I don't think any of you do, but do any of you currently own a business at this point? No. We don't. Okay. So if anyone wants to share it, was this something like a personal thing? Like, in the future, I know I wanna start a business and that's why I was super interested, or was there just, like I don't know. Maybe each of you just share briefly share, like, what drew you to this particular project? I can start. So I do have an interest in entrepreneurship. Obviously, I wanna get more experience practicing, as a Oates practitioner first, but I have a lot of passion for, community based services. So in the future, I see myself starting maybe a business or a consultation service that hopefully, help remedies the unhoused population, in the community. Gotcha. And, Gabriel, what about you? Yeah. So prior to this, research, I think we all had a collective agreement that we wanted to pursue some sort of entrepreneurship avenue into our, occupational therapy career. And I think for personally, for me, this is something that I do want to get into maybe own some sort of small private practice. And I think learning more about other other entrepreneurs story can help motivate us and as well as other future aspiring entrepreneurs. Yeah. Very cool. And Vanessa? Yeah. I think the interest to own a business is definitely there. And, following through with this project definitely kind of further persuaded me, and it just opened my eyes to not just brick and mortar businesses, but really the whole vast options that are out there for OTs. Yeah. And, Luke, I wanna ask you about the ultimate goal of this research project. But before I get into that, was starting a business something that you were interested in even as you were or before you started this project? As we were doing the project, I think it it was kind of a budding interest of mine. And then I was able to get a field work experience working with someone who owned their own business. And I thought it was really eye opening how they were able to kind of function in their business and seeing what they were able to do with their time, but kind of as well as, like, what their priorities were and how they were able to accomplish that. So I think definitely it grew as I saw her work more and, I think definitely I'm a lot more open to it and, I think it could be a really cool venture and a good way to kind of, keep my interest in the tea flourishing. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and that's interesting that you bring that up because I've I've I've have shared a lot on this podcast before about, you know, if you're thinking about starting a business, go work for a small business. Like, you just don't learn about business when you're working in a huge school district or working in a giant hospital. Like, that's just not what you're gonna learn. But like Luke mentioned, right, when you go and work for someone who's just one other employer, maybe they are their only employer, or even maybe up to, like, 5 to 10 employees. Like, you really get to understand the business side of things. You start to see what programs they use for payroll. You start to understand, like, EMRs, different EMRs, and how to even come about using an EMR. So, yeah, if you're thinking about a business, I think working for a small business is definitely a good start. And who knows? Maybe we'll dive into that a little bit more as we get to our research. But, yeah, Luke, I just wanna give you an opportunity to kinda share, like, the purpose and ultimate goal of this research project. Yeah. So definitely our goal, as Brian was kinda saying, there's very little research on the topic of OT entrepreneurs in general. So I don't know. You really you kind of go through settings. And for us, I mean, me personally, you see OT entrepreneurs, even school and where I worked with, but you very you know very little about how they get to these positions. Like, it's kind of you see them and you're like, oh, I wonder how they got there. And you don't really know the process of doing that. So unless you really have like an extracurricular class that's offered at your school, you don't really get to see what that process is like or get to understand the steps you need to take to go through it. And I think there's just a lot of limited resources on that process to getting getting to that point that you see. But there's a lot of that fluff in between that you don't really get the experience of knowing. To kind of piggyback on that at Cal State Dominguez Hills, do you all have that opportunity to take some sort of entrepreneurship? Is that something that's even available? Or did you learn about some of those classes available at other potential universities based upon your research at all? I think it's really on a school to school basis. Currently, it's not offered at our program. But I bet, like, our our school's pretty pretty, open centered to where if we ask about it, they might be able to provide it for us. But I think it's a lot. It's on a school to school basis. There wasn't a lot of research stating, like, this school has it or this school doesn't. It's probably if they have the personnel that, you know, has the experience. But, yeah, currently, it's not offered at at our campus. Yeah. That that's pretty much what I've heard. You know, some schools have it, some don't. And to be honest, entrepreneurship now seems to be, you know, a cool thing. And so I think more and more schools are gonna start offering those types of courses or partnering up with the business school at the university so that you can open up, have an elective over there. But, yeah, it it's definitely something I don't think most OT practitioners received education in at all while in school. I know I didn't, and it doesn't sound like you for having that opportunity. But who knows? Maybe 10 years from now, it'll be more common. So very cool. There there was an emphasis on making us, entry level practitioners. So we did actually bring it up and, that that was pretty much the curriculum is just so jam packed with what we need to know to become entry level that, taking specialized courses on entrepreneurship does seem like maybe it would overload the current the current curriculum. With that being said, we do have classes on program development, but not super specific on, like, how to start your own business. Good point. It's we have to remember that this is entry level program. And I know there are some post post professional doctorate programs that really focus on entrepreneurship or starting your own business. And so, yeah, you know, after you all go and and get some experience for 5 years or so, that's definitely a a consideration for more learning. So alright. Look. I wanna come back to you. Prior to conducting this research, you know, I know whenever you do a project, you've gotta go back and look what's available out there. What did you find while conducting your lit review related to occupational therapy and entrepreneurship? That's a great question. So we had to scavenge a few types of journals. Specifically, we looked at some OT journals, but, you know, the dearth of research really wasn't there. So we extended our search into health care journals, and we found a decent amount of information on that category was from physical therapists and even nursing, which I thought was interesting to find those specific ones. And then, occasionally, we'd go into a business journal. We used a lot of guiding terms like occupational therapy and, health care, And we combine that with other terms like private practice, owner, entrepreneur. And we found some some general findings that we found was that the OT profession in general was projected to grow by at least 45% by, 2030, which I thought was really interesting. And the amount of people that experience disability in general is just 1,300,000 and that can be a range of anything. And kind of just coupling these numbers together, you can see that OTs can be useful in a multitude of settings working with also, all sorts of different types of people, which, we definitely know, even learning in in school. But it's also just shown by the different types of ways OTs can be private practice owners, things such as direct service privately or agency contracted. You can own a multi therapist clinic. You can do consulting, educational seminars, product development, and even podcasts like yourself. So there's definitely a variety of ways OTs can get into, entrepreneurship. It's not just black and white. Like, you have to own the clinic. There's tons of ways to do this. And we found that a lot of these individuals, liked being an entrepreneur just because they had more freedom in their personal lives. They were able to have more leisure, and that's just stuff we found in journals. And we also found that private practice created opportunities for more community based programs and they were able to provide more clients in our health care such as specialized services. And they also found that there was a decreased provider burnout as well, which allows you to really focus on that PEO model, you know, person environment occupation, which is really nice. We also found that the even the American Occupational Therapy Association advocated for OT entrepreneurs. So this is a topic that's they've kind of been saying we need more, we need more. But still with that, we know there are a lot of underserved populations. And I know there's a few budding ones coming up like, mental health, which I know OTs are now licensed to work in. So, yeah, there's still a lot of underserved populations. So what we are finding is a lot of a lot of reasons why there's still so many people that need services and not as many occupational therapy entrepreneurs out there is because that these individuals don't really feel prepared. They experience barriers such as financial obstacles, limitations with insurance, and just lack of awareness from of OT by the general population. And then even in class, we'll hear some professors saying in certain settings, there's a lack of what OT can fully accomplish in those settings as well, which could be another limiting factor to what OTs can get done in their their individualized health care settings as well. And then even to give a little bit of insight onto our new topic, what we're talking about OT entrepreneurs and quality of life, we found that entrepreneurs even tend to typically exhibit better health measures, such as lower somatic and mental morbidity scores, lower blood pressure, lower prevalence of hypertension, and higher, higher self support, self reported well-being measures. Sorry. So there's still a lot of great things that can come from OT entrepreneurship as well. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm yeah. I completely agree with that, being in entrepreneurship in entrepreneurship myself. But no. That's awesome. And, you know, there's some professions out there that you just think of owning a business. Like, I know dentist is one of them. Like, if you become a dentist, like, everyone thinks you're going to open up your own dentist practice. I think physical therapy is kind of heading in that direction, but that's definitely something in OT that hasn't been there. But, you know, with entrepreneurship being cool, we're starting to see that a little bit. You mentioned AOTA. They have their own entrepreneurship conference coming up, in June of this year. I think this episode will be out before then. We'll see. But, if not, it might have just happened. But yeah. So entrepreneurship is cool, and I'm glad that you were able to find that research. I'm always telling I I advise some students on their or not their capstone, but, their project as well. And I'm always telling you, you gotta get outside of the OT research sometimes, and I'm glad that you all were able to do that diving into some business, PT, and other research. So very cool. Alright. Well, Vanessa, let's go to you and talk about some of that methodology now. Luke shared with us a little bit about that lit review. So based upon that, kind of what was the next step in the project? Yeah. So based off the lit review, we we knew that we wanted to get the perspectives of OT specifically. We had some nursing perspectives and some PT perspectives. So getting that, specialized OT perspective was really important to us, and we were able to do that through, semi structured interviews. So we would pair up 2 researchers, and we would conduct an interview on a participant. And, through those interviews, we just made sure to ask a lot of open ended questions. It was a narrative study, so we definitely wanted to hear their story in their own words, and we allowed them to kind of lead the conversation in that way. Some highlights that we did specifically want to ask throughout the interview are, maybe facilitate facilitators and barriers to becoming an entrepreneur, and then, some some high points, maybe some challenges. And then we also asked about advice that they would give to other practitioners who are looking to become entrepreneurs. And then, another cool part that we did was we had them submit photos for the photo elicitation responses. And this, this was really cool because we get to see maybe the photo that they chose that represents their journey is, is different than what they're telling us through their interview. And so, some of the submissions that we got, you, of course, submitted the photo of winning the entrepreneur of the year award at OTEC, which is really cool. And, we had we had some, previous winners of that award, the who were participants as well. Oh. And, so it was just really, you know, I imagine that that that photo represents a culmination of all your hard work as an entrepreneur to get to that point. So I really like that aspect of the photo elicitation. And then, the participants that we got there, they varied from settings, but we have, really experienced highly experienced people that we recruited either through, we had heard of them from our school at career fairs or maybe they were guest lectures. And then, of course, we also got a lot of responses from that flyer that we posted on, the OTAC, the Occupational Therapy Association of California website. So we got a lot of responses from there as well. And, really, ideally, we we would have just went ahead and interviewed everybody, but we did have to cap it off at that, 7 participant range. And we were able to get a lot of a lot of cool information with with the participant pool that we had. Awesome. Well, first of all, thank you so much for including me. I I I feel very special. And I'm sitting here trying to figure out what picture I sent in. I couldn't even remember. So, thanks for reminding me. Of course. But yeah. So you talked about your participant pool and all of that. When it was all said and done after you looked at the data, and we'll dive more into this, what were those primary themes that you came up with? Yeah. So we came up with the spirit of occupational therapy, and I know we're gonna talk about that in a little bit more detail later on. But also, freedom and autonomy is something that came up a lot for for entrepreneurs and, uncertainty. Of course, opening a business, there's a lot of uncertainty related to that. So, that was a reoccurring theme. And then lastly, mindset. And, there was a lot of maybe recommended mindsets or mindsets that participants found particularly useful in their journey as entrepreneurs. So, I would say that those themes were came they kept coming up throughout the research. Awesome. Well, let's go ahead and dive more into those, and I'm gonna jump over to Brian to share a little bit about the spirit of occupational therapy. Yeah. So, through our research, we noticed that all of our participants, did a really good job of kind of embodying something we define as the spirit of occupational therapy. And we define that as a commitment to upholding the guiding principles of occupational therapy, such as altruism, justice, and equality, which serve as the foundation for starting and running their business. So this is something that we saw in all of our participants, and we wanted to break it down into 2 more subthemes. So the first is expertly identifying community needs. So across all of our participants, we saw that they started out in, like, a traditional setting such as a school or a hospital. But when they moved on to starting their entrepreneurial journey, they used this experience and what they had learned, to leverage it and create a business that would either address a health care disparity or a significant need in their community. So we saw that some of our participants might have addressed, social emotional needs of school children. Others improved accessibility of in home services for not only OT, but PT and nursing as well. And some of them, such as you, even created a business that provided consultation to the school based OT community. And I wanted to share a quote from one of our participants, Chloe. So Chloe currently owns an OT consulting company that is focused on delivering mindfulness and movement strategies. And in her quote, she says, our business is rooted in pediatrics, infants and toddlers and little ones because we want to show and model all about how they have to manage a lot of big emotions because they're not getting the right supports or information from the community. So based off our interview with Chloe, with her previous experience as a school based OT, she saw that a lot of kids weren't getting mental health support. And as we know, mental health is very important for success, not only in adults, but for kids as well. So Chloe created her business to provide a lot of mental health education and training for kids so that they could learn how to regulate their emotions and how to communicate with adults and with teachers, in order to flourish in school. And another quote from her is that, We are starting to see a shift, at least in early childhood and inclusive practices of what should be occurring. I see that we're shifting the culture of how kids are talking to kids. So I assume neurotypical kids engaging more with neurodivergent kids because we're modeling how to do that. So we see a lot of success with Chloe and her business. And it's not just Chloe, it's a lot of our other participants too. They were able to tackle a very specific issue in their community. And because of how they approached it, it allowed their business to flourish. Another one of our participants, Ben, was approached by his local university to develop an OT program at a community center, and Ben had a lot of experience with stroke rehabilitation. So he combined this community need with his experience to create a community outpatient rehabilitation center that actually provides services free of charge to stroke survivors. So his, center was completely funded by the city. So clients who were discharged from, say, a hospital or outpatient rehab and they still had lingering, issues with their stroke, they could actually receive services from Ben's community center and overcome a lot of the financial and insurance barriers that, individuals like that typically face. Wow. That's really cool. I haven't heard of a city financing. They're helping to finance a OT program. So that's really awesome. Yeah. And it's actually, near our school too. So some of the students were able to like go and see firsthand what a business model like that was like. And then so for our second, sub theme of spirit of occupational therapy, it is promoting employee welfare. So we know that occupational therapy is very person centered, and we saw that a lot of our participants as business owners would prioritize the physical and mental well-being of their staff. This helped reduce stress, it promoted a positive company culture based on acceptance and longevity, and a lot of our participants advocated for quality of services over quantity. Chloe, one of our participants mentioned earlier, says that she always prioritizes her staff's mental health first and foremost. And another one of our participants, Amy, noted her responsibility as the business owner to make sure that everyone gets paid and has benefits. So in order to promote this, Amy decided not to use a 10.99 for her employees. She noticed that this would place less stress on them and that it would be up to the company to handle the taxes as opposed to the employees. Very interesting. Yeah. You know, I always like to say that that OTs are some of the most OT practitioners in general, some of the most ethical, well meaning people I've ever met, and that kind of just goes right along in line with that. So that's that's very cool that you're able to pull that out of there as well. I mean, there's so many things about running a business, that but I don't think that employee welfare would would come out if you were interviewing other people than OT practitioners. So that's really a a key thing there. Awesome. Thanks for sharing, Brian. Now let's go over to Gabriel and talk about the autonomy and freedom aspect of the research. Yeah. So freedom and autonomy was a common theme for all of our participants. So all of our participants expressed a greater sense of liberty both in their personal and as well as their professional lives. So in their professional lives, one of the main things that distinguished this was moving away from the conventional employment policies. For example, one of our participants talked about the restrictions of having predetermined visits, which is usually defined by insurance or the company that you work for. So this kind of implicitly, limits client centered care. So an a quote that I'm gonna pull out by Nicole said, there's just so many restrictions and so many visits, so much more that you could do, but they only give you 3 visits. So this quote kinda also expresses the frustration that comes with constantly abiding by, you know, employ the traditional employment and insurance policy. So this kind of impeded her ability to provide comprehensive care as well as impeding her, professional autonomy. And then in contrast, I know Brian talked about Ben, but, he mentioned that I think because I'm not encumbered and pressured by insurance telling me whether or not I can keep a client on or discharge them, it's given me a lot more freedom. I'm always going to try to do the right thing for the client. So as Brian mentioned, he operates a, a practice that is funded by the city. So he's been able to extend his services out to clients whom insurance companies would deem ineligible, and this supports a more holistic and client centered approach to treating clients. And then in the personal sense, owning a business has allowed a lot of our participants to fulfill other important roles in their whether it be delegating more time to being a husband, father, wife, or mother, and even just taking more vacations at leisure without, feeling the pressures of going back to work. And I think Vanessa is gonna share us a quick story here about that. Yeah. So I think something that exemplifies professional freedom is the story, that our participant, Betty, shared. She is a co owner of one of the leading pediatric clinics here in Southern California. And, when when sensory processing was just well, it's now called sensory integration, but at the time, sensory processing was really big. It was being taught by Jean Ayers at USC. And Betty, as long as well as her partners felt they were all taking the course, and they felt really strongly about being able to implement this, this new treatment for their, their client settings. But their, their employer basically said that they would not be implementing that. And, she kind of took that she took that knowledge and her and her partners decided to start their own clinic where they could go ahead and implement this new treatment. They felt really strongly that it would be successful. And now, of course, we see sensory integration everywhere. And so I just think it's, that's a really great example of feeling maybe frustrated by the constraints of your employer and then going going ahead and being proactive about that. And, you know, she started her own business where she was able to implement it. And, that's just one of the positive outcomes of having that freedom. Awesome. You know, every time you guys are mentioning these different entrepreneurs, I'm, like, trying to guess who it is now in my head. But, I'll save that for another time. Yeah. Anyways, going back to Gabriel, I think you also wanted to talk about uncertainty, that that theme of uncertainty. But was there anything else about autonomy and freedom first? I think that was it for autonomy and freedom. Alright. Let's jump into the uncertainty then. Yeah. So uncertainty was a theme that basically emerged from a combination of inexperience in the business world. As you know, OTs are not really provided with the amount of resources to transition into that entrepreneurial journey, and as well as the nature of volatility in the business world. So as opposed to having a traditional employment where you typically have more structure and your objectives a little bit more clear. So being a business owner presents a lot of ambiguous challenges like learning how to make a website, or a podcast like this. A prime example was, when COVID happened, and also the introduction of the assembly 5 bill. So this kind of this bill kind of shifted contractors to being employees. And a lot of our, participants specifically owning a, brick and mortar business and who had employees took a major hit. And in some places, some even had to close down their business. So just constantly making adjustments based on the state of the economy and as well as changes in the policy have been one of the difficult aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. And another, example of uncertainty is, dealing with business encroachment. So if you own or plan on owning a brick and mortar business, a lot of cities don't have regulations set in place to limit the amount of practice that can be operated in the vicinity. So this presents a lot of possible issues of competition and just trying to obtain new clients. And another, subtheme of uncertainty was payroll. So, I think handling payroll was a difficult aspect because, the nature of, OT, you know, we're rooted in altruism. So I think where we want to take care of our employees, but also trying to keep the business financially, viable. So it's it's the challenge of finding a happy medium, for the interest of the employees and as well as the business. Yeah. Absolutely. I I'm wondering when it comes to that whole uncertainty, right, did anyone and maybe myself included, did anyone mention the idea that as an OT, there is some degree of fallback security knowing that we have a license, knowing that we can get a job relatively easily because of our experience. Did that come up at all? I I can imagine. Right? If you have a large business, that's not so much the case. Right? You're more we're in about the 10, 15 employees that you have. But I know getting started, there's some of that. You know what? If I get started and this fails, I could go back to my job at whatever whatever. Did that come up? And and this could be a question for anyone if they recall. I think for one of our participants who was, contracted by school that did come up knowing that she was able just to get a contracting job if her business didn't, you know, succeed. But I think for a lot of our participants, they didn't really take that into account. I think a lot of them were kind of, you know, motivated and wanted to pursue this business head on first. And I think a lot of them were motivated by the fact that they didn't wanna go back to that traditional employment. But I can imagine that playing a big role in, like, you know, keeping just mentally as well, like, you know, pursuing the business and knowing that you have something to fall back on. And I think once you're well established, right, that starts to go away. But for me, that was really big, you know, just getting started. You know, I kinda had this mindset. Okay. Let me try something for a year. If it doesn't work out, I can go back and get a school based OT job. Like Yeah. Will it be the perfect job? You know? Will it be the same job I had before I got started? No. But the odds are I could find something. And even if I couldn't find a school based OT job, I could find a clinic or I could find something related. So, I know that's not the case everywhere. In California, we have a pretty healthy, job market. I know that there are some other places where that might not be as true, but that's definitely something that that was in my mind as I got started. So great. Well, thank you for sharing. And now I think we're gonna come back to Vanessa to talk about the mindset theme. Yeah. So within the theme of mindset, we had several, different subthemes come up, and one of those was the importance of starting small. And I know that you talked to us about, about the importance of starting small and kind of your suggestions for that. And something that you said was that it's important to just find one person that you can help. And then through helping that person, maybe that person, feels inspired to give a testimonial or, maybe just word-of-mouth, and that kind of, that that testimonial can help you advance your site or or reach out to even more people. And so we felt like that was a pretty important theme, and this was echoed by another one of our participants who stated that it's better to, outgrow a space than it is to grow into a space. So still within the theme of starting small, but, in in that regard, it's more of a physical aspect of quite literally starting with a smaller space. And then another theme another subtheme that came up is just the importance of taking risks. Of course, this applies for entrepreneurs all across the board, not just occupational therapy entrepreneurs, but, you know, taking risks. One of our participants, Chloe, herself, her husband, her partner, and her partner's husband, they all took out the money from their pensions to go ahead and start their business. And, you know, I'm I'm sure that was not an easy move, but, they ultimately felt like they had a lot of confidence in what they were doing, and, it ultimately worked out. And, you know, she feels really positively about her decision to have done that and the outcomes that have, come forward since. So, quite quite a risky move, but it worked out. And, and then lastly, the importance of having a collaborative mindset. So, the participant Ben that, Brian was speak talking about earlier, he, he just emphasizes the importance of putting yourself out there, making the rounds at different hospitals, and just kind of letting them know every year, hey. We're here. Our community clinic is viable. Feel free to refer patients. Just letting your presence be known, in the community is very, very important. And yeah. So collaboration and networking definitely was a big one. Great. Well, thank you. So those were the 4 themes that that we all or that you all kind of found in your research. The spirit of occupational therapy, just to review, autonomy and freedom, uncertainty, that's a that was a big one for me, of course, and then also mindset as Vanessa just wrapped up with. Now I have one final question. I'm gonna give you each an opportunity to answer this briefly, and I'm actually gonna switch it up from the question that I shared with you because you none of you are currently occupational therapy entrepreneurs. That's why you all have, you know, that that interest of of maybe one day. So I'm gonna ask you all, what's the one thing that you're gonna take away from this research when you maybe one day start your business? And I feel like, Luke, we haven't talked together in just a little bit, so I'll start with you. What was just one thing that you really gleaned from this research that maybe you'll incorporate later when you start a business, if that happens? Yeah. I think the, the one thing I got from every participant is I left every interview that I did. I felt inspired. Like, they were so passionate about what they did. And I remember going into a few research. It it was looking at, like, the difference between a manager and a leader. And as we were all stating, like, an OT is is they're almost like natural born leaders and how we're we're kind of trained coming up through school. So kind of just taking that into account and knowing, you know, our worth in settings and, definitely being more outspoken and and, you know, going out of your comfort zone sometimes. I mean, even though the story Vanessa was saying, I remember when I heard that my, my job was shopping, I was like, Oh my gosh, you sometimes, you know, you have to take risks and get out of your comfort zone. So, Using what I know about, what the profession kind of guides us towards. I think OTs, we can go in, especially myself. I can go in and maybe try and make a difference and attack an area that might be less known about and kind of just go in knowing that, you know, we have the right skills and quality. So that's definitely what I took away. Fantastic. And, Brian, what about you? Yeah. So something that I noticed across all the participants were that they all did a really great job at being able to understand their environments and their clientele. So in school, we're taught that OTs are what we call master observationists. We're taught about task analysis, environmental analysis, and how we can incorporate that into providing a service. And this is something that I saw across all our participants. They were able to take a step back, do their research on the community, on on the profession, and in turn, deliver a service that, not only provided longevity, but also fulfilled a strong sense of purpose for them. Yeah. Absolutely. There are a lot of overlaps between task analysis for environmental analysis and market research. A lot of similarities there. So definitely. All right. And Gabriel, what about you? I think one of my biggest takeaways would be just being, comfortable with being uncomfortable. I think a lot of our participants showed great, confidence and strength with being able to, you know, overcome the challenges that come with starting up a business and just even just, you know, taking the leap of leaving their traditional employment. And I think that, you know, one thing that all of our participants had in common was that their business was successful in in their own definition. So I think just taking the risk and, you know, also finding, you know, you know, the right social support of people, people that could help you. I think that's one of the things that I took over. Absolutely. And we'll, finish off with Vanessa. What was your key takeaway? Yeah. I think, just finding finding the right mentorship was a really big component. I know that as your business grows and develops, you, you know, you have the finances to outsource certain things, financial advisement, payroll, all those different things. But in the very beginning stages of your journey, you have to kind of take all of that on yourself and having, mentors that are business savvy and not just, really great OT practitioners. That's gonna give you the the extra insight needed to be successful. Absolutely. Great. Well, I just want to, again, say thank you all so much for being here, and also just thank you for for taking on a very different type of project in OT school. I know a lot of projects, revolve around treatment, revolve around assessments, revolve around, you know, the actual every day of, you know, 99% of occupational therapy practitioners. But if you all took a little bit of of a risk yourself and and looking into entrepreneurship of occupational therapy, you know, I I I really appreciate it. I I was very excited when I saw the, I I wanna say it was LinkedIn, maybe Facebook, whatever it was, the, the flyer or whatever. And I was excited when you all reached out to me to be a part of it. And and, again, when you sent me a I got the email from Brian, I believe it was, like, here's our document. I was like, yes. Awesome. Let's do a podcast. But yeah. No. I just wanna, again, say thank you all so much for doing this and for being here. It's really gonna help, I think, some OT practitioners entrepreneurs that listen to the podcast episodes. So thank you. We really appreciate you being here. Yes. Thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you, Jason. This is cool. I really enjoyed it. Awesome. Well, I am very much looking forward to seeing where you all end up in your OT careers. And I'm sure one day, I will find out that 1 of you own a business or 4 of you own a business. So, yeah. Alright. And that is going to wrap up this episode of the OTpreneur podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in. And I know this was a little bit different than our typical episode, even our interview episodes, but I think it's important to highlight some of this research. We come on here, myself, Sarah included, all of our guests that we bring on, and we are really in our business. And we talk so passionately about our business, and we know what we know. And sometimes we I will even admit this. We can be blinded from other aspects of OT preneurship. And so I think it was great to bring on these 4 students who kind of looked into OTpreneurship from a different lens, and we're able to kind of compare. I I think they said it was 7 different business owners' perceptions on business, on occupational therapy businesses. So it was really great to have them on. I hope that you were able to glean some different aspects from what they discussed today. And, yeah, you know, even myself, right? To to hear some of the stories that OT preneurs have taken on, is really interesting. Right? Like, I really used a model where I spent very little to start my business. But as you heard in this episode, there are some people who kind of trade in all of their savings to get started, and there is no one right way to get started. Right? So I hope that this episode either maybe you learned something from it, maybe it made you more confident in the route that you're taking, or maybe it kind of brought up some questions that you just know that you need to get answered. Really quickly before I let you go, we have a new feature that is built right into wherever you're listening to this podcast, and it is basically a feature that allows you to send us a text message. So if you have a question about this episode or maybe you wanna request a episode, go ahead and use that little button that just says, text us basically, and send in a message. Send a text message. Let us know what you thought about this episode, about the podcast in general, or again, to request an episode in the future. And one last time, I wanna say thank you so much to Gabriel, to Brian, to Luke, and to Vanessa for coming on the episode. If you would like to view their manuscript that they put together that has all the information that they shared on this episode, be sure to check out the show notes for this episode. We will have a download link directly for that. Alright? Well, thanks again for tuning in. We will see you next time on the OTpreneur podcast. And remember, wherever you are on your OTpreneur journey, we are here to support you. Take care, and until next time. Adios. Here at the OTpreneur podcast, we can't thank you enough for listening in today. If you're looking for a community of OT entrepreneurs, be sure to check out the website atotpreneur.com. At OTpreneur, OT means business. We'll see you next time.