Changing lives with tailored mental health care
Sometimes when it comes to setting up your own business, it can take a personal experience to push you into action, as it did with one of our newest to Churchill Square Business Centre customers, Devon McDonald, founder of Devon McDonald Counselling. She shares how she retrained, found her niche, built her business and has generated a sustained customer base since she set up the company in 2014 – and how her move to Capital Space’s Kings Hill business centre is helping her to retain her clients.
Retraining and specialising in a new field
After a personal setback with postnatal depression following the birth of her first child, Devon explained: “The support offered wasn’t targeted and counsellors didn’t fully understand the issue. I had wanted to be a counsellor for years as my father suffered with PTSD, so this really triggered me to decide now was the time.” Previously, Devon had worked in the corporate world in sales and marketing, so she retrained and gained qualifications to support children, young people and adults with two distinct therapies: psychodynamic counselling and EMDR.
Retraining in these two fields gave Devon specialist knowledge which provided her business with strong foundations for success. Psychodynamic counselling helps children process what they have learnt about the world. Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing is a type of trauma therapy recommended by the World Health Organisation, which aims to help people recover from traumatic events in their life using eye movement to help them process their memories.
Filling the gap with a niche counselling offering
The number of people needing counselling for generalised anxiety disorders has been increasing in recent years and Devon highlighted how it often goes unnoticed in children: “They often hold things in because they don’t want to worry their parents, or they don’t know how to express how they are feeling to their parents.” She therefore decided to offer tailored EDMR counselling for children and adolescents, sharing: “We see transformative change in our patients whose lives have been restricted by their anxiety; by giving them a safe space to talk and process things they become able to do things that had previously been beyond their reach.”
Devon has been able to find a niche, by offering EMDR counselling to adolescents and children: “Lots of people offer EMDR to adults, although – as it isn’t a regulated industry – it is important to look to the main membership bodies to locate your counsellor. But offering EMDR to adolescents and children I would say is quite niche.”
Relocation to professional serviced offices to improve client retention
Devon moved into Churchill Square Business Centre in Kings Hill in January this year, and already loves the centre. She has already seen benefits from her relocation and hopes it will resolve the client retention issues she had in her last workspace, where she lost a couple of clients because the thin walls presented privacy issues: “The buildings are well maintained and really solid, which I know sounds ridiculous, but it means the noise doesn’t travel so much, which is really important in my work as when I’m with a client we don’t want to be hearing what is being said in the room next door.”
In terms of the logistical benefits, Devon also explained how the “free parking and the facilities on offer from the business management side, as well as the fact that my clients can find the centre really easily has been really beneficial.”
Plans for future business success
Devon has worked hard to achieve an equal balance between male and female patients as well as reaching older generations, both of which are trends she is keen to maintain. She is now eager to keep taking her business further. She is looking to integrate her years of knowledge and utilise “all the tools in my toolbox” by remodelling the way the business works so she can provide the most tailored service possible to her clients.
