“Cultivate a work-life balance”

Dr. Carla Groves, CEO and Owner of Mind Your Self Counseling, is proud that her company provides top-notch services for mental health and well-being across Texas. There are many vulnerable and disadvantaged people in San Antonio, including Veterans and Active-Duty military personnel dealing with trauma.

Although Covid had a negative impact on several industries, mental health was not one of them. Carla is proud that her company was able to move from an in-person presence to being able to offer services completely online within a three-week period in early 2020. She was able to double her revenue between 2020-2021 by adding services other than therapy online.

Carla is open to all ideas and excels at introducing new and different techniques to produce new revenue streams, reinforce existing ones, and ensure her corporate culture and staff are at the center of her work. She provides new information, continuing education, and opportunities for personal and professional growth to her team.

She promotes work-life balance and flexibility to retain people in this and other transitional industries. She believes that one can use failure to advance and understanding what doesn’t work is just as valuable as knowing what does. Risk-taking can change the landscape for companies, if done in an intelligent way, says Carla. Some of the technologies she has embraced include e-commerce, SMM, SEO, B2C, and other strategies to build out Mind Your Self as well as her other companies. COVID gave Carla an opportunity to explore and incorporate e-commerce, social media marketing, brand recognition, and social media algorithm comprehension into her practices. Carla continues to explore technological sources to improve organizational and operational performance and systemic capacity.

Carla is proud of the culture she has created, which can be especially difficult with a hybrid or remote workforce. Carla is calm, listens, self-reflects, doesn't take things personally, and realizes she doesn't know everything. She believes that even simple comments can be helpful in furthering service, satisfaction, and company progress. She has an open-door policy and checks in with her employees regularly to get their thoughts on changes or new programs, as well as to streamline and improve programs and processes.

Carla has developed other programs and companies that work together with Mind Your Self. She is passionate about fostering growth in others, and to this end she supervises and educates mental health workers, clinical licensees, and runs mentorship groups. She designed a health and wellness coaching program for C-suite leaders and entrepreneurial women that will launch fourth quarter 2022, and she currently works with retiring C-suite executives and business owners to understand and work through the concept of retirement. She also works with mid-level executives and management to increase cultural competency, boundaries, COVID stress, and morale. Nationally, this is largely done online.

Mind Your Self has market rivalry (all mental health systems are currently overtaxed), and there is a national scarcity of providers, but MYS has strong name recognition in Texas (soon to build an office in Las Vegas, where Carla is from).

She reports that she has never really had to “defeat" competition, and as the market is primed to expand exponentially, she really only worries about finding competent, licensed providers who understand her company culture and mission. By establishing ties and partnerships within the city, Carla is happy to be giving back to her community. Carla and Mind Your Self have earned excellent reputations among referral sources and organic brand recognition in the community. Carla markets her other businesses to a narrow niche and doesn't feel she needs to reinvent the wheel. Most of her revenue and recommendations come from satisfied previous clients, and she's used social media and sales funnels to scale her enterprises.

Carla plans to provide online health and wellness classes by fourth quarter 2022 in conjunction with mental health services through Mind Your Self. She is in the process of forming a non-profit in 2022 (The Wellness Initiative) to help people with overall physical and mental wellness. Her target demographics are at-risk teenagers, under-or uninsured patients, and veterans and their families. Through The Wellness Initiative, Carla seeks to optimize internet investment to help people across the country with their health and wellness needs. Carla is committed to driving change and pivoting from standard brick and mortar organizational structures to embracing an online culture and access. IE