0:00:02 - Mark Henderson Leary

Welcome to Practice Freedom. What if you could hang out with owners and founders from all sorts of healthcare private practices, having rich conversations about their successes and their failures, and then take an insight or two to inspire your own growth? Each week on Practice Freedom, we take an in-depth look at how to get the most out of both the clinical side and the business side of the practice, get the most out of your people and, most of all, how to live the healthy life that you deserve. I'm Mark Henderson Leary. I'm a business coach and an entrepreneurial operating system implementer. I have a passion that everyone should feel in control of their life, and so what I do is I help you get control of your business. Part of how I do that is by letting you listen in on these conversations in order to make the biggest impact in your practice and, ultimately, live your best life. Let's get started. Welcome back, practice leaders. 

I hope you enjoyed part one of this two-part series we'll call it with Ben McCauley and psychedelic therapy. The first episode really talks about what psychedelic therapy is and how it works, and so if you want to understand the mode, the dynamic, the purpose, the experience, that's part one. It's a great one to check out. Part two is about what's it like to be a leader in an organization like this, and Ben is not just running a store. He's part of the wave of new therapies and he's running a solid business and having to teach people and built into the practice. He's teaching people how to do this therapy, building it into the business model. He's co-creator of the curriculum for where they teach this stuff to people, what psychedelic therapy is, and so you know this is very early stage stuff, but it's moving so quickly and there's a massive appetite for learning and monetizing. And, of course, there's going to be lots of challenges and issues and mistakes in an industry like that where there's so much innovation happening so fast. But Ben is at the forefront of it, really taking it very seriously as a responsible steward of doing something very meaningful, and I'm really excited that you get to hear into his mind a little bit about how he leads the organization and I think really his transparency, his vulnerability, what's so important about how his organization is on a journey that's similar to the journey of the patients and how that informs his leadership, and I just think he's a great leader to model for and and because his business, his practice is built around this transparency, this self-discovery, this personal growth as a business model. That's what they sell. That personal growth. You have to look in the mirror and so it's built into the culture and so it's unavoidable for him. 

But in your business, you have the same responsibility, even if it is easier to avoid. You have to grow the business, you have to be a great leader and your business will only ever grow this is something that Ben says right in the podcast your business will only ever grow to the degree that you grow as a leader. And he's just fortunate that his business forces that on him. Your business may not force that on you, but you have the same reality. So my hope is this is inspirational to you as a leader, as a great visionary leader. If that's your spot, or maybe how you can. If you're not the visionary side, if you're more of the integrator, business operations side, maybe this is something you can use to encourage your visionary to pursue and create a space for that. 

Looking forward to some feedback If you love this, I'd love to hear about it. If you don't, I'd love to hear about that as well. And also, don't forget I gotta say it every single time If you're stuck. You're envisioning a great, thriving practice where the culture's amazing, you're living the life that you wanna live and you're adding super high value with a great organization, but you're stuck there. You Please don't stay stuck. Please reach out Practicefreedomcom slash schedule Love to see what we can do to get you unstuck Without further ado. 

Part two of Ben McCauley from DeNovo Therapy. And we're back. Let's change the conversation in this episode and I want to be, I mean, the last episode. We could have gone on forever and I think it was fine to go on that length, but I want to boil this down to you've got an innovative business model. You're trying to heal people in ways that hasn't really been done in front of the public ever for commercial reasons. 

What's this business like for you? You're an entrepreneur, you're running a business. What's it like for you? You're an entrepreneur, you're running a business. What's it like for me? Founder, leader, visionary, individual healer those are the three, by the way. Those are the three sort of personas, roles that tear founding healthcare providers apart, not realizing they think they've got one job and they don't. They have to run a business, which is the sort of blocking and tackling. Then they have to envision and lead the business, which is a different role, a different thing entirely. And then there is oftentimes this well, I got work to do, I'm a healer, I have a skill, and I don't know exactly what your balance is, but I'm sure some degree of those is pulling at you. 

0:05:02 - Ben McCauley

Oh yeah, all of that is pulling at me and I feel obligated to let the audience know I'm not actually a therapist. I got into the space in a little bit of a unique way but it was for sure for my own healing and for healing of my loved ones. You know, I opened the clinic to create access to ketamine for people that I loved, that had PTSD, that in my area up here in Lubbock, texas we didn't have access to, and also for me. So what it's like for me is I feel pulled between all of those domains and we're creating a new model here. So like there is a lot of visionary component, a hundred percent Part of what I call I want to call that out. 

0:05:45 - Mark Henderson Leary

You is. That is the visionary, that's the massive calling. You want to make it bigger than you, and that's usually the comparison between the individual healer model. I'm going to one patient at a time help people, I'm a crass person. The visionary leader is no, I want an army or a collective, a way to really multiply this, and that mindset is so different. You can't get bogged down in the machinations of like working with your hands because you only can do one design that doesn't surprise you much, which is different than the person who's like okay, well, I'm going to go build the spreadsheet and I'm going to make sure this is working okay. And so, man, I'm there with a vision this big, with a vision this big, with a vision this big, it's got to be a big burden. 

0:06:27 - Ben McCauley

It is. I've always wanted to be a provider but I wasn't able to because of my untreated PTSD and ADD, even though I did really great in sciences. And so I ended up working in ancillary support all over the hospital and then did time in clinical informatics and then I worked in CRM, sales force design and implementation. So it gave me, like this really rounded perspective of healthcare administration from the ground. And I love patient care, I love being involved in patient care, and anytime in my life I've left patient care and tried to do something else. 

It hasn't gone well for me, so I learned I have to stay in patient care but at the same time, in order to grow a business. It's been a struggle for me because I want to be the one doing the thing and you know, sometimes I can be because I run the clinic here but actually that's not what serves my community. What serves my community is my ability to teach others how to do it. Because I can hire them, I can train more therapists. Actually we have a four-therapist cohort that's going through a 12-month apprenticeship with us right now. So they're learning didactic, there's an experiential component and they're learning how to do ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. 

0:07:42 - Mark Henderson Leary

Now, where do they go? Do they stay in your clinic or do they get scattered to the wind? 

0:07:45 - Ben McCauley

No, actually it's a distributed community model, so each one is a node out in the community and they keep their own psychotherapeutic practices. That's theirs, oh, wow, okay. And then they can bring their clients in to do the psychedelic work with us. They can be the therapeutics provider for that work and we're the medical infrastructure for it. 

0:08:03 - Mark Henderson Leary

Oh wow, so is that a tested model? I mean no, I made it up. 

0:08:08 - Ben McCauley

I mean, I'm sure other people are doing it too, but you know I was looking at the community going. How can we increase access to care? Well, we need more therapists that can do this work, and teaching a therapist to do this actually is pretty complicated because it's a completely different model In the future and this is already happening. There are post-masters, post-phd certificate programs at universities around the country teaching therapists how to do psychedelic therapy. That's happening more and more and you'll see more of that more fellowships around teaching providers and professionals how to do psychedelic therapy. 

But when we started in 2019, that didn't exist not very much. You couldn't get into a lot of training. So we DIY'd all of that and built our own therapist training program. Because what else were we going to do? Like in my mind at the time, it just wasn't a question. It was like, okay, well, let's get some resources, put them together and we'll start teaching people how to do this. And I did that ad hoc for many years where each therapist I taught one-on-one, and now it's sort of formalized into more of an apprentice program, which is a really serious commitment for people to make. They pay us a little bit every month. We have monthly sessions and we give them self-study didactics and they go through an experiential component at the same time. 

0:09:24 - Mark Henderson Leary

I wonder about the demand side of this. So I think Michael Pollan in I don't know one of the things I saw or listened to him. He talked about how the perception was like man, when this starts to go mainstream, there's going to be so much resistance from the traditional psychotherapists and psychiatrists and he was like no, it turns out everybody's frustrated and ready for something new and it's like let's just do this. 

0:09:50 - Ben McCauley

It's more like an Eddie the way I experience it, because he's not wrong. If you look at it, zoomed out on a time frame long enough, that's what it's going to look like. But in real life, on the ground, each person is moving in or orienting towards the model of care in a different way and a lot of people I find some people are threatened by that. Their entire careers have been based on a certain model and now someone's saying that there's something else that actually works really well. Sometimes that can be threatening for people that are embedded into the models that they know. But other people, like you, say they're threatening for people that are embedded into the models that they know. 

But other people, like you, say they're thirsty for something that works, because a lot of what we do in mental health is symptom management. Really, you know even the DSM. It's like a description of depression, but not much else. And when we start talking like what's the etiology? Well, is it physical, is it psychological? And depending on who you're talking to, you're going to get a lot different answers. So, yeah, people are thirsty for something that works and psychedelics work really well, like actually for ketamine. It's a testimony to how well ketamine works, that there are clinics that aren't providing psychotherapeutic support, that aren't providing integration, that aren't doing set and setting education, and they're slinging medicine without maybe understanding the complete experience that the person's going through and they're running a cash paid business in a big city and they're able to stay open. 

0:11:18 - Mark Henderson Leary

Well, that reminds me my plastic surgery. One of my plastic surgery clients said hey, you got to understand something about our industry. The worst plastic surgeon in the world, like the worst one, is printing money right now Like they're making money. So to be really good, you got to have a different work ethic. You've got to have a purpose that makes, and so, to your point, there's a lot of latitude in how this can be done in a quality and a responsibility way, which is freaking dangerous, right, super dangerous for the optics and risk. 

0:11:47 - Ben McCauley

It makes it difficult to know often what we're talking about when we start talking about ketamine with someone. So our goal, out of the gate our goal open a clinic in September of 2018. I started working on the infrastructure and everything. I have a beautiful mentor that really helped me actually a bunch of them along the way and we wanted to. I wanted to open a clinic that was different, that operated on a psychedelic model of care from the beginning and you know, I say that a little tongue in cheek because at the time I was still learning what that was and so we opened with therapeutic support and we were doing IVs. And we opened in June with a soft open and worked out some of our policies and just throughput stuff, just the logistics of running a clinic, and really fine-tuned our dosing strategies a little bit. 

And then, in September of 19, a really pivotal paper came out about ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. They had three practices that were in communities that were doing ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, and one of the authors on that paper was Phil Wolfson, who I now work with at the Ketamine Training Center and he's a good friend, and another one was the Turnip Seeds and Jennifer Doerr down at Roots Behavioral Health in Austin. So shout out to those guys. They were their leaders in the field and I got to see them in November give a talk at a psychedelic science conference in Austin that MAPS put on Okay and from there I invited a therapist that was already doing integration support with our IV clients. I asked her if she'd move her office in with us. 

At the time in my mind that was like a total Hail Mary, like I thought there's no way and she's a dear friend now. And she did. She moved her office in with us and so from there, because we had the therapist, we were able to start doing ketamine-assisted psychotherapy and we were able to get the dosing strategy and some of the delivery mechanisms from that paper and from talking with Brent Turnipseed at the science conference. So we were really pretty early to the ketamine psychotherapy game and to psychedelics in general. And as much as I can and as much as I have been able to, I've been building the business from a psychedelic model of care where I see myself as the linchpin between the medical side because I can speak their language, the psychotherapeutic side because I can speak their language, and and the business side. That needs some soul and and some heart in it in order to be able to really deliver this in a community what's interesting about that is I don't work with, I operate. 

0:14:29 - Mark Henderson Leary

I don't work with any health care organization that doesn't need that hard soul. And there are lots that don't right, because when the margins are rich in any business you can sort of survive soullessly or loosely, you know, randomly chaotic solely. But every healthcare, from anything from primary care to plastic surgery and anything in between, I mean even like ophthalmology and optometry, having a sense of the human aspect, that is absolutely what glues it together. Just the lens is really strong in your situation. It's like that's. You can't get into that model without knowing that. That's the heart of the whole thing. 

0:15:06 - Ben McCauley

Yeah, yeah, we're opening people's psyche here and you know, an analogy I use with people is it's like opening a psycho-spiritual abscess and really there's mirroring in the neurology. That's happening there too, and it's delicate work and it requires an intense amount of self-care, actually, which is an important component. And to answer your question leading into this episode, what is it like for me? Well, it means that I see the clinic's growth and development as parallel to my own, and my job is to get the fuck out of the way. Yeah, you can absolutely. 

0:15:41 - Mark Henderson Leary

Yeah, we didn't cover that, but yeah. 

0:15:44 - Ben McCauley

And anything in me that needs to grow and change so that the clinic can grow and change. It's my job to do my work. 

0:15:51 - Mark Henderson Leary

That is such a great point. It is inescapable for you to see that. I think to some extent, but there is no business where that is not true, and so you've got the mirror like in massive clarity. So I love that model. There's nobody listening to this in any industry, in any fact. You know, healthcare or not, who is immune to what you just said. It's just you really feel that way heavy. 

0:16:14 - Ben McCauley

Yeah, if I give a constant growth curve, which isn't going to happen and hasn't happened. But if we just assume that, then if it stops, then it's my fault, it's because I'm in the way. Something about my ability to grow and change, my ability to delegate, my ability to work well with others, my ability to see the landscape, to innovate, to know my market, to pivot, to respond to changes like, and my ability to be flexible in what I thought was the right answer or what I think is right. And really it's listening. So, like I see the clinic as a living entity that's talking to me and all of the people in it are talking to me, it is literally true. 

0:16:57 - Mark Henderson Leary

There are actually people in it who actually say things, who actually feel things who evolve and learn as a community. That is 100% true. That's right. 

0:17:06 - Ben McCauley

And as they amalgamate, you know they're more than the sum of their parts, and so the entity of the business is more than its financial and legal structures. 

It's a breathing living thing, and we use the word organism here and we also use ecosystem, and those are two analogies that are really true in different ways. There's a lot of nuance to that, but I see myself almost more as a steward or a gardener or a cultivator of what's happening here, and that includes the human lives that are here, the people that are working through the clinic and the patients, and so my ability to grow and change, my ability to go inside with myself to face difficult things, is reflected in the clinic's ability to grow and change, and I don't mean that to be grandiose, but I am the owner operator, and so that is the case for me here anyway, and maybe there's a time when we move to a more corporate or a board structure. I don't see that happening anytime soon, but until we make that transition, however that happens, the clinic's success and my success and my ability to grow and change are tied together intricately and intimately, and the people here that I'm working with, they know that I've told them that. 

0:18:25 - Mark Henderson Leary

So it sounds like there's transparency and I'm you know, and I'm talking about this community, and it is sort of built on trust and transparency once you kind of know somebody knows that language. It's like this instant trust, connection, transparency. I'm curious. Anything come to mind recently is sort of like a growth realization for you in leading the business. 

0:18:45 - Ben McCauley

I'll mention briefly. You know, we had a death in our community. That was really hard, and what we saw was my processing of that experience personally was held inside of the community container and the people around me that are caring for me and that are doing this work with me together. And so this is a little bit of an inverse answer to your question, where the community supported me in my healing. But it happens the other way too, where the things that I need to grow and change and get out of the way affect the community, and the community actually, I hope, is empowered to come to me and be like hey, man, this is what we need from you. You're in the way, yeah. 

0:19:25 - Mark Henderson Leary

You know. 

Back to your first example, though, I think there's a lot, there's a lot of power, and I know you're kind of keeping that in a safe container, but the specific content, but Sure, we can talk, go ahead. 

But the point was or the point I took away as a leader, we're frequently feeling the pressure of being strong, stable, unflappable, getting it right, having the right answers, never having a bad day, and what you sort of described was you were transparent and open, a lot to do with having surrounded yourself with the right people in the first place, and that's a big thing. 

If you're like I don't have the trust in the people around me, there's two reasons that obviously that could be in play. One is that you are just not willing to let go. You don't have that vulnerability, or you really have the wrong people around you, and I can't tell you right now whether that's which one is the case. But but that assessment is part of the process. But you were describing you had curated the right people, you had the self-trust in yourself to be seen as strong enough, even though you probably I don't even know what happened exactly, but you probably weren't feeling very strong and had a way to survive with the support of others, which is a very powerful, healthy place to be as a leader so few people get to that equilibrium. 

0:20:43 - Ben McCauley

Yeah, thanks for saying that. I think the strength is in the vulnerability. I think the strength is in saying I don't know. And often in the business world, when I worked in the corporate world, there's a lot of posturing and obfuscating that happens with people and I think that's a mistake. I find it really empowering to be able to honestly say I don't know. 

0:21:03 - Mark Henderson Leary

You know, I've been thinking a lot about the vulnerability paradox, and what I mean by that is how weak can you be and still be strong? How does that work? And can you be vulnerable to certain things but not other things? And I think the way I would sum it up is that the illusion of vulnerability is that when you let the guard down of what you don't know and what is external, the fear is that there will be nothing there to be seen. And what is in real life? What happens when that vulnerability is 100% transparent? You only see the real person who's left over, and that is stable and immutable. There is a soul with that elegance, that purity, that is sort of unassaultable, that is left over. That when that vulnerability is truly there, that's when the safety goes up, that's when there's no more artifice and when the strength is at its highest. 

0:21:57 - Ben McCauley

The thing about vulnerability isn't necessarily just that you're vulnerable in the moment, although that certainly is a part of it. It's what you're doing with it after that and around it, and that you're showing resilience as you move through struggles and challenges and you're communicating with your people and your community, your team, how you're thinking about the struggles and challenges and how you're approaching them. In that you don't know, and you're asking them to share with you the things that they see that you don't see, and hopefully over time, what they see is your resilience as you move through. So then they can trust that well, ben doesn't know the answers and sometimes he messes stuff up and they can be frustrated with me, but hopefully they know that they can also sit down and share things with me that they're seeing and that I take that really seriously and that they see that their input informs how I move and grow as a person and how we move and grow as a clinic 100% and as a group. 

0:22:59 - Mark Henderson Leary

That was a total unlock in how to describe this. That openness, that vulnerability is maximum reception of the information that I don't have. Anything less is slowing down the learning. Anything you do to put the guard up just makes that harder. And so when you go to maximum learning, maximum reception, then you're like okay, now we're ready to take a step, Fully informed. 

0:23:26 - Ben McCauley

It helps. If your ego's out of the way and that's part of the problem is when your ego's in it and you think that you're the one that's supposed to have the answer, or you're the one who, and only your ideas are the good ideas, or whatever you think it is, then you're inhibiting a natural process, actually a relational process that's happening, I think, relationally, internally with yourself, but also with your group and your community moving out Well. 

0:23:51 - Mark Henderson Leary

The two are obviously linked right. So when we're trying to connect with people but we're unaware of our inability to connect with ourselves, it's a total block. 

0:23:59 - Ben McCauley

It just doesn't work. That's right, yeah, and how you're connecting and having insight and working with yourself is going to reflect how you do that with others externally insight and working with yourself is going to reflect how you do that with others externally. 

0:24:15 - Mark Henderson Leary

Wow, so powerful. I mean. This really helped me put the language to clarifying how vulnerability is the catalyst for great leadership, because it always. So often it seems like a paradox of like admitting weakness, admitting flaws, admitting bad decisions, and it is not. It is removing the obstacles to learning and receptiveness to information and the truth, but it is paired up with exactly what you said there's now a new responsibility. 

0:24:37 - Ben McCauley

I have received. Crucial Conversations is a great book about that, actually, if you've ever heard of it. 

0:24:42 - Mark Henderson Leary

Yeah, for sure that one comes up a lot. It's a great book. A lot of my clients and friends use that to inform how to have those hard conversations, but that is. I think it creates a massive contrast to the lay down and die, the give up. I have no will left to live. That's not necessarily vulnerability, in fact, oftentimes that's a defense mechanism. A defense like I can't do this, I'm a failure, I'm falling down. Like that's not vulnerable, that's actually a defense mechanism. 

0:25:06 - Ben McCauley

It can be a defense mechanism. It can also be an admission of what's honestly happening, like I'm overwhelmed. I've reached the max capacity I have to be able to operate at this domain and as a solo entrepreneur, that's happening to me all of the time. Like you know, I was running our accounting for a period and now I have to pass it off to professionals. That's not weakness, that's an admission of where my strengths lie, actually. And having someone come along and go hey, man, you're doing too much, stop doing the accounting, you hate it. It's not where your skills are. Get some help. And being willing to accept that and listen to that and go yeah. 

0:25:44 - Mark Henderson Leary

And I think the difference is there's an opportunity to sort of wear the badge of victimhood. Looks very similar to surrender, but it's not. One is like I'm the victim, I'm going to stay the victim, I can't do this and I'm not going to allow change, I'm going to stay stuck here, as opposed to like what is the message here? The message is I got to change, I got to stop doing this. What am I open to? What are the options? Okay, let's let somebody else do this, and now we can grow. Now we can move through this. 

0:26:10 - Ben McCauley

Yeah, Moving through builds resilience and that builds trust within your community. Because then people see like, okay, Ben's in this and he's serious and he listens Hopefully you know that's my work and then we grow and change and it's like, okay, this community and this business and the people here are trustworthy and reliable Awesome. They don't know everything all the time, they make mistakes, but I can trust that they're going to continue to grow and change. 

0:26:35 - Mark Henderson Leary

That's the whole. So so good. I you know I could have another conversation about other things and talk with you all day long. I want to end it here to make this episode digestible. Anything you feel like we missed on the subject. 

0:26:47 - Ben McCauley

Oh man, there's all kinds of stuff we didn't cover. I think I would sum up by saying, like the way that I think about this stuff and the way that I think about how to implement in this clinic is really, really influenced by psychedelics as a model of care. Looking to the client's internal healing wisdom and trusting that to come out and guide and give us material for how to work and grow, and designing clinic systems and how patients flow through the system. Designing those things based on the psychedelic model of care is a really big part of how I operate. So there's a whole bunch of stuff I could say about that. 

0:27:27 - Mark Henderson Leary

Maybe on a future episode, which I would love to do. Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's talk For sure, man. So if anybody wants to keep up with what you're doing, obviously we can put stuff in the show notes. What's the easiest way to kind of keep up with you? The website. 

0:27:38 - Ben McCauley

Yeah, we post some stuff on Instagram and Facebook, DeNovo Therapy, and then our website is denovotherapycom. Those are the best ways. If someone wants to chat with me or reach out, just fill out the form on the website or call the clinic and talk with the front office. Let them know who they are and I'll get back with them. I just got back from teaching at Ketamine Training Center in New York, at a Buddhist retreat center up there called Minla, and then after that I was in Florida doing a clinic opening. So shout out to New Path that clinic there. They're going to do beautiful work and we did a training for their staff so you can see some pictures and stuff from that. That was just the last few weeks. I've only been in town for about four days from that. Oh man, yeah. 

0:28:20 - Mark Henderson Leary

Well, man, I'm so grateful for the time. I'm grateful for what you're doing in the business. I'm grateful for who you are, grateful for your personal guidance in our conversations offline, so I'm so, so happy to have met. It's just great hope to see that there's really cool things happening out there that can help so many people. Yeah, and it's a scalable business. You know, we're transforming in a commercial free market economy, and there's always so much pessimism rolling around, and there's plenty of reason for this massive optimism, though, and you're part of that man. So thank you, absolutely. Thank you. Well, that is our time of. 

If you like this, feel like this is useful, please share it. Give us the feedback, give us the likes, give us the negative feedback. Whatever you got, hit us with the speak pipe. Give us some voice memo feedback. I said feedback like 10 times, didn't I? We love the feedback. I think there's nothing else to say. If you get stuck, though, of course, if you're on the path to running a great business, if you feel like you want to make a big impact with your organization, your clinic, your practice and you're imagining an amazing leadership team and an amazing culture, who is just so plugged in and fired up and grateful, but you're somehow stuck. You don't feel like it's working. Please don't stay stuck. Please reach out. Practicefreedomcom slash schedule. Love to get a few minutes to talk about what a first step could look like for you, or a next step, or whatever. You need to get unstuck. It's a privilege. We'll see you next time on Practice Freedom with me, mark Henderson.

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