Ellie Mental Health co-founders Erin Pash and Kile Keller, in the middle, are surrounded by COO Haillie Corbett, far left, and Chris Pash, chief business officer.
Scott and Heather Kremer were close to signing contracts as the first recipients of the Ellie Mental Health franchise when they experienced the struggle to access first-hand therapy.
“Our high school graduate was really stressed out about making decisions about colleges and degrees and just needed someone to talk to,” recalls Scott Kremer, who then received some recommendations from the family’s primary care provider. “She gave us five recommendations. Two never invited us, two said they did not accept the recommendations, and one said it would be 120 days before we could enter.
“I can’t imagine someone finally at the end of their rope and that’s the answer they get.”
The ordeal, he said, made him even more confident in the need for an outpatient clinic for counseling and therapy such as Ellie Mental Health.
The Kramers plan to open their Ellie location in the Indianapolis suburb of Fishers, Indiana, in August. Since signing the contract, the brand has signed contracts for more than 125 clinics in cities such as Denver, Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta and Baltimore.
“There is a lack of quality mental health providers, and when I say quality, it’s not the clinicians’ fault,” Cramer said. “They light a candle at both ends and don’t even have time to return phone calls. “If you have clinicians under stress, your patients will not have good results.”
Scott Kramer is the first franchise user for Ellie Mental Health, opening a clinic in Fishers, Indiana.
Ellie Mental Health was born out of “frustration and passion,” said CEO Erin Pash, who founded the Minnesota-based company in 2015 with fellow therapist Kyle Keller. Pash was a district social worker at the time and said she “continued to face fairly strong barriers and bureaucracies”, especially when it came to her ability to fill gaps in client care and make sound mental health decisions. “.
Pash and Keller, along with Pash’s husband, Chris, developed Ellie at 16 corporate locations across the Minneapolis subway and elsewhere in the state. Services include therapy for individuals and families, counseling for couples, management of psychiatric medications, and community mental health services. The company recently attracted a strategic private equity investment from Princeton Equity Group, which is focused on new, fast-growing service companies.
Pash said clinicians are attracted to Ellie because of her “creative and flexible work opportunities,” which ultimately means focusing on making decisions that are best for the client. Flexible scheduling gives clinicians control over their number of cases, and Pash said the company is investing in “many things we know therapists want,” such as in-house training and comprehensive benefits. The recipients of the franchise, she noted, are able to offer different compensation packages for therapists.
Pash also wanted to improve customer support at the end of mental health services, and Ellie sites are using the company’s customer access team to pair customers with a service provider that best suits their therapeutic needs. “We know that the effectiveness of treatment outcomes is directly related to the relationship with the therapist,” she said.
Cramer, whose background is in healthcare technology, said that as a franchisee, he likes Eli’s focus on removing administrative burdens for operators, such as billing management and scheduling. “Managing the revenue cycle is very complicated, so they solve it,” he said. The role of health insurance in the model may prove equally complex, he continued, and Eli’s administrative team provides support, including helping franchisees determine which insurance contracts to follow in their area.
“The part that keeps me awake at night is that I don’t know what our insurance compensation rate will be,” he said, which ultimately affects profitability. “I was very conservative in the projections.”
Cramer is credited with creating a “really cool network behind the scenes” to facilitate connections among franchisees, and said he is able to ask questions and learn from those in other markets. He also teamed up with several mental health professionals in his field to get feedback on the model and the growing need for services, which further boosted his confidence in opening an Ellie franchise.
Although there is still a certain stigma related to mental health, Pash said the isolation and stress many people experienced during the pandemic highlighted the wider need for such services. Generational change also affects mental health conversations. “Over the last 10 years, I’ve really seen it get better because more and more young people are ready to get involved and have their own mental health,” she said.