Dr. Sherry Benton, Founder of TAO Connect, joins The Savvy Entrepreneur to share her digital health platform that provides
alternative ways to support mental health and wellness.
TAO Connect was first created to help support college students who needed mental health support but struggled to get it. Student need for support is significant, but is woefully underfunded and under-supported on campuses of all sizes.
TAO Connect is a robust digital mental health platform, consisting of more than 175 modules addressing all aspects of mental health and wellness. It also includes various assessments and exercises. The material can be combined in a variety of ways: to guide those seeking self-help, to aid therapists, or to create or enhance courses.
Mental health issues are chronically under-addressed in most Western countries, and TAO Connect is offering creative, cost-effective ways to meet those needs.
The company has grown rapidly, serving more than 200 colleges and universities. It has now branched out to offer its non-traditional mental health and wellness support to supplement small companies with their employee benefits. TAO Connect has also partnered with Canada as part of that country’s mental health offerings.
What follows is a transcript of my chat with Dr. Benton. If you’d prefer to listen to the on-demand podcast version of the interview, click here.
Doris Nagel 0:42
Welcome to The Savvy Entrepreneur show! We’re broadcasting from the Greater Chicago Milwaukee area.
If you’re an entrepreneur or small businessperson, or you’re thinking about becoming one, this show is for you!
I’m Doris Nagel, your host for the next hour. I’m a serial entrepreneur, and I’ve also advised startups and small businesses over the past 30 years. I’m here to share some of the hard lessons I’ve learned, and also to find others willing to share as well. I have guests to join me every week on the show to share their stories and advice.
This week’s guest is Dr. Sherry Benton. She’s the founder and Chief Science Officer of a digital mental health platform called TAO Connect. She created TAO Connect with the mission of offering accessible mental health care to underserved populations. In addition to providing supplemental material for therapists to offer their patients, the company also offers 24/7 evidence-based virtual mental health care to over 200 universities across the country. It has also recently entered the employer space as well with TAO Connect for employers through their Employee Benefits Program.
Dr. Benton, or Sherry, as she says we can call her, is a respected psychologist. With more than 25 years of clinical and research experience in counseling and psychology. Her experience as a director in the college counseling world revealed the need for a more efficient and effective way to deliver mental health therapy. She saw students in need of treatment sit on a waitlist, and by the time they received services, may have already lost an entire semester due to mental health issues.
She’s board-certified in counseling psychology by the American Board of Professional Psychology. And she’s also a fellow in the American Psychological Association. She’s well-published and a frequent presenter, and she’s also the co-author of a book entitled, “College Student Mental Health Services and Strategies Across Campus,” available on Amazon and elsewhere.
Sherry, thanks so much for being on the show today. Welcome to The Savvy Entrepreneur show!
Dr. Sherry Benton
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Doris Nagel
Talk a little bit more about TAO Connect — about what you do and who you help.
Dr. Sherry Benton 2:48
TAO Connect has about 175 therapy sessions. We have a mindfulness library, and we have a lot of assessments to help people evaluate how they’re doing and monitor progress. Just lots of tools.
All this material can be used in a lot of ways. They can be used for self-help, or they can be used as adjuncts to therapy. And the campuses that use them often create their own courses, some for a first-year experience class, others for a series for the athletic department, sometimes for conduct offices, sometimes as part of an academic course. So, the content gets used in a lot of ways in a lot of different departments across campus.
Doris Nagel
So the way you use TAO Connect’s material might depend on if a student is dealing with anxiety or whether you’re working with a sports team trying to visualize success? I’m just imagining some of the uses.
Dr. Sherry Benton
Yes, some of our material is very definitely targeting mental health problems, like anxiety or depression, or eating disorders or substance abuse. But other parts of it really focus on wellness, wholeness, personal development, improving leadership skills, and interpersonal communication. So it really covers a wide range of topics.
Doris Nagel
Would you say most of your clients do use the self-help aspect? Or do more use it in conjunction with a class or a therapy session?
Dr. Sherry Benton
The biggest chunk of users are using it for self-help. And during COVID, the country of Canada developed a platform for mental health for everyone across the country. And one of the tools they provide for self-help for Canadians is TAO Connect.
Doris Nagel 5:41
I didn’t realize that. That’s amazing!
How is your business model unique? Are there other competitors out there? Or is this a pretty new idea?
Dr. Sherry Benton 6:14
There are a number of companies that provide online mental health resources. But I think one of the unique things about our offering is the ability to create courses — to take pieces and put them together the way you want as a therapist, or an instructor, or a student affairs professional. There are a lot of assessments that help someone to identify what it is they need to work on, and then recommend particular pieces of TAO.
You have companies that mostly focus on cognitive behavioral therapy or tools, others mostly focused on mindfulness. And what we have is really very broad in terms of what’s available.
Doris Nagel 6:58
I did a quick scan on Amazon before our interview, and the number of workbooks that are out there on a variety of wellness, and well-being, and mental health issues is a little overwhelming, actually. There are a lot of them.
Dr. Sherry Benton
Yes, there certainly are.
Doris Nagel
Well, I guess that shows that there are a lot of people who, at some level, are aware of mental health. And I want to ask you more about that.
But first, where does the name TAO Connect come from?
Dr. Sherry Benton 7:20
TAO stands for Therapy Assistance Online. But we also realized the dual meaning. Because Tao in Asian countries is a belief system that is all about accepting what’s happening, sort of rolling with it. And that’s kind of what TAO Connect is about as well — helping people to adjust and live in the life they have.
Doris Nagel 7:40
Certainly mental health issues are under-appreciated. During COVID, perhaps there was more awareness. Talk a little bit about mental health generally, in this country and North America, and some of the issues that are related to mental health, either in the academic setting or the workplace.
Dr. Sherry Benton 8:27
I think what I always stress is that taking care of your brain and nervous system is not more or less important than taking care of the rest of your body. We wouldn’t hesitate to get help if we had appendicitis. We would tell our friends, and we would get surgery, and we would do whatever we needed to do to get over the appendicitis.
But if the issue has to do with your brain and nervous system, then somehow that’s embarrassing, and you have to pretend like it’s not happening.
And when you think about it, that’s just plain silly. Your brain and nervous system is just a system of the body like anything else. And it requires being taken care of. For example, we know that attending to your diet has an effect on your physical well-being. And we know that exercise is really important for the health of your body.
So engaging in good mental health habits is very helpful to your brain and nervous system.
Doris Nagel 9:33
The two are often interrelated, right?
Dr. Sherry Benton
Yes, they’re not really separate. The one affects the other all the time.
Doris Nagel
I like working out, for example, and I learned at one point that that when you work out, it creates small amounts of endorphins and enkaphalins – kind of like natural dopamine — and that makes you feel better. It even gives you a little natural high.
Dr. Sherry Benton
That’s true. There’s actually very good research that for people with kind of mild to moderate depression, regular aerobic exercise works as well as most antidepressants.
Doris Nagel 10:28
How has the COVID pandemic affected your business and awareness of mental health? Do you think the increased awareness of mental health issues will be permanent? Or is that just a passing fad?
Dr. Sherry Benton 10:43
I think there is some awareness and just some adaptation.
I don’t think everybody developed mental health problems as a result of COVID. I don’t think that’s true at all. But I do think there’s some segments of the population who suffered pretty deeply through this.
Most everyone I know who works in the medical field was pretty traumatized by the whole thing, right? I think anyone who is a first responder has really struggled. There’s certainly a lot of people who have lost family members, and or who had very traumatic hospital experiences. So you’ve got a whole set of people out there who definitely were traumatized by this whole experience.
And there are people who lost jobs who like struggled with how to take care of their kids, or are struggling while working from home. So there’s a lot of issues that I think heightened awareness of the mental health ramifications of all that.
Doris Nagel
Do you think that heightened awareness will be permanent?
Dr. Sherry Benton 11:52
Probably not. We’re not good at permanently recognizing mental health issues.
Doris Nagel
You’ve thought about this topic a lot. Why do you think mental health has been so neglected or under emphasized, or just flat-out pushed down under the table? What are some of the reasons that that happens in our society?
Dr. Sherry Benton
I think there’s just been a historical tendency to see that as somehow some kind of weakness. We wouldn’t view it that way if you had appendicitis, and we wouldn’t see it if you had heart disease, or if you sprained your ankle, or whatever.
But for some reason, whether it’s anxiety, or depression, or some kind of mental health issue, we act like that is awful or a weakness. That somehow you’re less because of that, which is actually kind of ridiculous when you think about it.
Doris Nagel
In fact, we talked before the show about how even insurance companies downplay it.
You can certainly get into an emergency room for your appendicitis or your broken arm. But if you have mental health issues, the coverage is often quite, quite poor, or they make it very difficult to get treated or reimbursed.
Dr. Sherry Benton
I think there’s several pieces to that.
One is mental health care is expensive. The primary way we deliver it is 50-minute hour of psychotherapy once a week. And that’s expensive. Think about if you had that much time with a surgeon or with or any kind of physician. That is an expensive treatment. So I think that’s part of it.
Doris Nagel 13:54
I gather your business model is really a reflection of trying to push the boundaries of that, as well as some of those assumptions a little bit to say, “Look, we can do things that make a difference that don’t necessarily involve that.”
Dr. Sherry Benton
Right. The way we started is because we could never keep up with demand at the counseling center I ran. Even after we got several new positions. And all it did was buy me two more weeks without a waitlist. So I knew we were never going to hire our way out of our problem. And I had to find an alternative way to provide effective services to students that would get them in and get them help immediately.
So we created the first version of TAO really to solve my problem at the university. What we did was create these online educational modules and pair them with — instead of hour long sessions — 15 or 20 minute sessions with a therapist via video conferencing so that the therapist could then see two or three students an hour instead of one.
Then we compared students who were treated with traditional one-hour week psychotherapy with students who were treated with TAO and the very short 15 or 20 minutes sessions. And what we found was that students who were treated with TAO actually made more improvement, more quickly.
At that point, the University said, “This is a commercially viable product. And we want to commercialize it. How much do you want to be involved?”
Doris Nagel 15:47
And so what happened next?
Dr. Sherry Benton 16:03
I like to refer to myself as an accidental encore entrepreneur. I never took a business class and never meant to have a business.
But when they came to me and said, “We want to commercialize this,” I thought about it for a while, and realized, “You know, I really want to do this.”
So the university created a halftime position, a faculty position that was focused on creating online mental health resources. My entire obligation to the university was doing that. Meanwhile, I licensed the product I’d created from them.
And that was how TAO Connect got launched. I had been the president of couple national organizations, so a lot of people knew me, and my book was pretty widely read. So when I started out, I found pretty quickly a set of fellow counseling center directors who wanted to try TAO.
Doris Nagel
I’m sure that gave you a lot of credibility.
Dr. Sherry Benton
Yes, they knew me. So they were more willing to give it a try.
Doris Nagel 17:46
Untreated, mental illness has, I suspect, a lot of a lot of trickle-down consequences that maybe some of most of us even may not really be aware of.
In the university setting, it probably affects students’ self-esteem, their grades, maybe they drop out. In the workplace… talk a little bit about some of those things.
Dr. Sherry Benton
We know when people develop anxiety, or depression, the first things that are affected are memory and concentration. It is really hard to be a student when you’ve got impairment to your memory and concentration. But the same is true if you’re just a worker if you’re in business. Having a maximally effective memory and concentration is important. And the best way to make sure that you have that is to take care of your mental health.
Doris Nagel 19:07
What drove you to become so passionate about mental health? What led you into this whole career?
Dr. Sherry Benton
I was a senior in high school when Title Nine passed. And I think people think of Title Nine as mostly having to do with sports, but it actually had to do with everything in higher education.
Up until that point, they would let a few token women into medical school, dental, school and doctoral programs in psychology. But that year, having that happen my senior year in high school, and early in that year, I suddenly felt I had possibilities. And I’ve always been fascinated by psychology and mental health. So, I decided right then and there that I was going to get a PhD in psychology and devote my life to that. And that’s what I did.
Doris Nagel
That’s amazing. As a senior in high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do, and I’m sure that’s true for most of us. What we end up doing is often pretty different from what we started out thinking we wanted to do.
So back to the story of your business. You licensed the product from the university, and then under that umbrella you created some of the original content and then started marketing it, I guess, to other universities?
Dr. Sherry Benton
It’s probably useful to know that, at that point, when I decided to start a business, I like to joke that I owned 100% of the business that was worth $10. So, I filed my little paperwork to be a C corp, opened a bank account, and there I went.
But I did some really important things early on that really helped me. Because I never had a business class, I really couldn’t tell you I had any idea what I was getting into!
But I figured I can always find people who can help me. And that is definitely what happened. I applied for and got into a healthcare incubator, and learned a ton doing that and got lots and lots of help and advice.
And as soon as I had mustered enough initial investment, I went out looking for a good CEO who had that business background, who could help me with developing this. And I found a great person who was actually a mentor at the incubator.
Doris Nagel
So you created some of the initial content under the university umbrella. But was that everything that you offer today?
Dr. Sherry Benton
Oh, no. It was about, I would say at this point, less than 5% of what we offer today. But the platform we created for delivery and the initial content — all of that was licensed from the university.
Doris Nagel 22:35
I’m guessing, though, that you probably needed to create your own platform to support the number of clients you have today?
Dr. Sherry Benton 22:53
I mean, yes. Are you going through? Use the universities IT system to do all that right. Now. We, we’ve been through several iterations of platforms, and AR, and it’s changed pretty dramatically over that time.
Doris Nagel
How did you even find out about the options? I think I speak for a lot of entrepreneurs: for those of us who don’t have a background in IT or technology or computers, or maybe we know something about it, but it’s not really our forte, it’s pretty daunting. There’s just so many decisions to make. Talk a little bit about that journey.
Dr. Sherry Benton
I share with people regularly that Steve Jobs never wrote a line of code.
It’s true. And so you don’t have to know, technology to do this.
But you do have to have a vision for where you want to go with it. And then you have to hire good people who will help you get there. Steve Jobs would never have gotten where he got without Steve Wozyniak. I have really good developers, and a good partner and CEO. And that has really helped me to get to where we are today.
Doris Nagel 24:23
Talk about the financing side. Were you able to essentially self-finance by marketing this program to universities?
Dr. Sherry Benton 24:45
That is probably the most challenging thing when you’re first getting started. That first friends and family round.
As a university person, I had written grants. And so one of the things I did early on was to write a Phase One SBR grant to the National Science Foundation. And that got me some Initial money. And then I really hit up my friends and family, and they invested a little bit of money. We — my husband and I – also put in some money ourselves. And that got us launched. Getting the NSF grant was huge in terms of having credibility with angel investors.
After that, I went to angel investors, and I got several to come on fairly quickly. I say “fairly quickly” now, but it took a year. When you’re in the middle of it, it didn’t feel “fairly quickly.” It felt like a real slog.
Doris Nagel 25:49
So, you had a wonderful concept. You had great connections to your community of fellow counselors and other university programs ,and lots of credibility. And because you had those connections, I’m sure you were able to kind of bounce the ideas off of them and make sure you had a concept that could really work at multiple universities.
But then to really sell it, you almost needed to build the IT platform, because otherwise, how do you deploy it, right?
Dr. Sherry Benton
The first version that we built, sort of the beta, was really built at the university. And the student government fund is where we got the money to build the initial platform for the first anxiety treatment program that we built while I was there and tested while I was there. It was wonderful that the support really came from the students.
And so with that, we had a prototype platform. And we had a prototype treatment program for anxiety that we could put out there. Next, nine of my professional colleagues agreed to pay a beta price to test it and use it that first year before we commercially launched. So I actually had revenue before I had any investment money.
Doris Nagel
What a unique and wonderful situation to be in!
Dr. Sherry Benton
Yeah, that’s kind of backwards from what most people experience. It was nice.
Doris Nagel
What happened next, after the first few clients you had?
You mentioned angel investors. How did you go about doing that?
Dr. Sherry Benton 29:14
I think the biggest thing with getting angel money is having a good idea and being persistent. They look at whether you can really pull this off. And I think that initially, there was a lot of skepticism because I came from being an academic, or and there’s a lot of feeling that academics have this kind of magical thinking that this will be easy. They liked the idea, but they were kind of like, “Let’s see if she really wants to do this.” You know, let’s make you work for it.
Doris Nagel 30:00
And you had no track record before, either. It’s not like you had past businesses, or even a successful t shirt selling business in high school and sold it for a bunch of money or whatever. You were, as you say, an unlikely entrepreneur in some ways.
Dr. Sherry Benton
Definitely. And at that point, I was turning 60. So I was a 60 year old academic who’s taking her first stab at developing a business.
But I do have a lot of passion for it. And I knew I really wanted to do this. And I knew I could put together a team who could do this, even if I didn’t know that much about technology. I know an awful lot about psychology and mental health and what works with people.
So I started off getting the friends and family getting the first NSF grant and getting some initial Angel fund money. All together I cobbled together, including the money that my husband and I put in ourselves, about $300,000.
Doris Nagel
That sounds like a lot, but it goes mighty fast. Especially when you need to invest in software and a platform.
Dr. Sherry Benton 31:24
But at least we had that. And then we got the NSF first grant, which was $250,000. So at that point, I had a little over half a million. I hired my partner, the CEO of TAO, at that point. And I worked for it as a volunteer rather than actually paying myself.
So we got started working together, both getting investors and selling at the same time, because we had a product we could actually sell. We went from nine beta testers, and revenue of about $150,000 that could add to what we had in investment.
We beta tested that whole first year. Then in July of 2015, we commercially launched and we just grew from there. And we just developed more content and more content, and it became much easier to develop content with NSF grant money, because as long as you do what you said you were going to do, it’s free money.
Doris Nagel
But looked at in a different way, it was really about scaling at that point. You had put together the initial modules, and you were able to test it, you learned what worked and what didn’t work, what people responded to and what they didn’t, both in terms of the users, but also the buyers of it.
So I’m sure building additional content with all that feedback became a lot easier. It was a process you could probably replicate in some ways, right?
Dr. Sherry Benton
Absolutely. And we did — over and over and over again.
I should add that we created and tested the very first set of sessions when I was still at the university. The feedback from the students came back that this is good information, but it’s really boring.
That was really important to know. And so we redid the whole thing. We tested different kinds of materials — animations, actress and scenes, someone giving a little feedback, talking heads, interactive exercises, some gamification. So we tried a lot of different things to come up the mix that seems to keep people engaged in moving forward.
Doris Nagel
You started in the university setting, trying to help students with mental health issues. You didn’t mention whether it was also for staff and faculty who, I’m sure, also suffer from, from mental health issues, but then you branched off into the employment world. How did that happen?
Dr. Sherry Benton 34:27
You’ve kind of guessed the evolution. One of the first things that happened was that faculty and staff wanted to use the tools and content in TAO. So we worked with a lot of Employee Assistance Programs at universities who wanted to extend the benefits of TAO to all of their faculty and staff, not just their students. We started there, and it worked pretty well.
So we thought this really should go out to other kinds of businesses. You know, there’s some companies that provide wellness and mental health resources to companies, but they’re really focusing on the Coca Colas and Microsofts and other really big businesses.
Meanwhile, there are hundreds of thousands of small businesses and startups and companies that would love to have those resources for their employees, but the offerings those big companies have are completely financially out of reach. So we really try to focus on giving affordable but really effective resources to small and middle-sized businesses.
Doris Nagel
You mentioned the cost. I gather that really have to have pretty deep pockets to afford the services that the Coca Colas or Amazons of the world are offering.
Dr. Sherry Benton 36:26
Yes. And in contrast, universities don’t have much money. So we did a really good job of building excellent materials that are on kind of a shoestring budget, but sort of recognizing that student affairs is not the deep pocket on most university campuses. And that’s who’s usually paying for TAO.
As a result, we got good at being really effective and really agile, making this affordable to schools both large or small. And so as we’re extending this into the business world, if you’re a small company with a small staff, you can probably still afford TAO.
Doris Nagel 37:12
Give me an idea of the the scale that we’re talking about. I mean, what what does a traditional Coca Cola wellness program cost? Either it for I guess, per employee is how a lot of HR people think to think about it.
Dr. Sherry Benton 37:32
A lot of them are like $50 or more per employee, and we are more like four or $5 an employee per year. We really work hard at making this absolutely doable. Our mission after all is to bring effective mental health resources to underserved populations.
And all of those small businesses — all those places people work that aren’t huge and don’t have huge budgets — need resources just as much as the giant corporations.
Doris Nagel
Where do you see your business and say, three years? What’s next for TAO?
Dr. Sherry Benton 38:24
There’s a lot of directions we can grow. I really am excited about growing in the business world, because I think that that’s a big one for so many small companies with so many employees that don’t have access to those resources or haven’t in the past.
We’re also thinking about things like justice systems and corrections. Unfortunately, in the US, because mental health is so underfunded, the single largest provider of mental health resources is the prison system. And getting effective services out to that population is pretty critical.
The other thing is, there’s not comparable kind of programs in for kids K through 12. And I would really like to grow in that direction, too.
Doris Nagel 39:31
Not to mention there are other things you could probably do in the employment field. For example, when I first heard about your business, I thought it was telehealth — you know, mental health sessions via telephony. But it’s really not that at all. Is that an angle you’ve thought about, or have you decided that’s just not where you want to head this business?
Dr. Sherry Bneton 39:52
Yes, we think about that a lot. We get used in Canada as part of Step Care, where rather than everybody getting the one hour once a week with the therapist, you do an assessment and evaluate what level of care does somebody need. They evaluate whether somebody likely to respond to self help? Do they need a little peer support? Would paraprofessional support be enough with the very short sessions like those that we started out with in TAO university work, so that you that you use a lot of different levels of care, depending on acuity, chronicity, and just what the presenting problems are.
And that’s really, I think, a model that’s caught on in the world. It’s the dominant model in Australia and New Zealand, as well as most European countries and Canada. It’s been slower to get adopted in the US.
But if we’re really going to meet the needs, we have to go there.
And I can see TAO growing into being an effective tool in stepped care, along with developing maybe a peer support network and a network of coaches rather than just therapists. The client will get selected into a level of care, based on how severe their problems are, how long they’ve had them, what they are most likely to benefit from, and then regularly do progress measures so that you can move people up or down in terms of the intensity of care, based on what they’re needing in that moment.
Doris Nagel
I’m even envisioning that it might vary based on the personality of the individual and their preferences. I mean, there are people who absolutely love workbooks and self-help books and will do the online classes and will benefit from those. And maybe those people only need a little accountability or a helping hand or occasional support. And then there are others — you can give them a whole huge pile of workbooks. And they’ll think about it, but they never touch them.
So looking back, what would you say has been the hardest thing about starting and running your own business?
Dr. Sherry Benton 43:05
Oh, my goodness.
Where do I even start? It’s nerve racking. It’s so different from anything else I’ve done. I think the sweating it out the financial aspects in the early years was probably the most tense part of it.
Another challenge: finding good people. If you find them, then you can move forward pretty well. But it’s the economic part of getting through those first two or three years. That was the most harrowing.
Doris Nagel 44:18
Is it just the pressure of trying to make sure that every single dollar counts and deciding among all the different places you could spend money where to actually spend it to maximize the impact?
Dr. Sherry Benton
Here’s one of the moments I’ll always remember. We’ve really operated on pretty much a shoestring. We’ve had, I think, three and a half million in investment — a little over 2 million in NSF grants, and then revenue.
Early on, we heard about a company doing something very similar to us. They had 29 million in investment out in Silicon Valley. And they managed to spend the entire thing in about a year and a half and went bust. And we were all sitting in Florida going, “How the hell do you blow $29 million?”
Whereas we were starting with thinly funded angel money and trying to do this almost bootstrapping, but not quite. That was stressful. It was tough. But it was also worth it in that we weren’t given away that much equity early on.
And it really forced us to focus on sales and bringing a product that our customers really wanted. And I think we became really well known for customer service — listening to our customers, listening to what they want, and listening to what they wish we would build, and then building that.
Doris Nagel
It’s interesting. You don’t have a background in customer service, either. Although, I guess listening is probably a pretty valuable skill for someone in psychology, and really to do good customer service, you need to listen. So maybe I’m answering my own question.
But sales is even farther from being a college counselor providing counseling services. And yet you succeeded in both sales and customer service. How did that happen?
Dr. Sherry Benton 46:08
Darned if I know.
But if you think about it, certainly what you’re doing when you’re in psychology is interpersonal influence. And I definitely brought to the task. But I also found good people to work with. And that includes people in sales and customer service.
Doris Nagel 46:17
That was the hardest thing. What’s been the best thing about running your own business?
Dr. Sherry Benton 46:40
I’m really proud of what we’ve built. And just how many people we have helped. It’s really pretty amazing.
Over the years that we’ve been in business, we get lots of comments. People fill out a little form at the end of each session in terms of what they thought of it, and people will send us notes about the difference that it made. And those things are just so huge. It makes it really worthwhile.
Doris Nagel
What you’re doing really is touching people in a very deep and important way. I mean it’s nice if you make great T shirts or candles that people like, but this is this is affecting their mental and maybe even physical well being – it’s affecting their whole life.
Dr. Sherry Benton 47:34
Yes, it’s very satisfying.
Doris Nagel 47:39
Looking back, what advice would you offer to other entrepreneurs who are just getting started?
Dr. Sherry Benton 47:48
I think that one of the smartest things I did was to get into an incubator. NSF did a huge amount of training in how to start a business. And that was really, really helpful. So don’t assume you know how to do things. Go learn. Take advantage of those people who are out there who can help you apply to incubators and accelerators.
Those things make an enormous difference, and really cut out a lot of the early mistakes and missteps that first time businesspeople can make.
The other thing I have to say about being part of an incubator is that it’s so normalizing. For example, you get a bad developer and all kinds of chaos happens as a result. And then you talk to other people who are also starting businesses or people who are mentoring folks starting businesses. And they’ll say, “Oh, yeah, that happened to us, too.” Suddenly you don’t feel like you’re this disastrous failure who has made this terrible mistake. It’s more like, “Oh yes, this is normal.” That’s so helpful. It is just so helpful to be connected to other entrepreneurs.
Doris Nagel 49:25
It sounds like you really made some great hires. What advice would you give to entrepreneurs who are trying to figure out who to hire and how to hire the right contractors and employees to help them?
Dr. Sherry Benton 49:38
A lot of times when you’re just starting out, you don’t have the big salaries or the benefits to give people. So stock options are a good option to attract people who are invested in your succes. My business partner often says be slow to hire and quick to fire. And that’s not how you ever operated at a university, but it’s really important as a new business.
Doris Nagel
If people are interested in connecting with you or learning more about TAO Connect services, what’s the best way for them to find you?
Dr. Sherry Benton 50:26
My email address is sherry.benton@taoconnect.org.
Doris Nagel
And I’m sure the website is full of some good teasers or resources that are in front of the paywall that people can access to get an idea of what you have to offer?
Dr. Sherry Benton
Yes, and that is www.taoconnect.org. That’ll get you there.
Doris Nagel 51:02
Sherry, thank you for being on the show this week. It was great having you and also great to shine a little spotlight on the great things that you and Tao Connect are doing, as well as some of the very important issues related to mental health. So thanks again for your time today, and for being on the show.
Dr. Sherry Benton
And thank you for having me.
Doris Nagel 51:30
Thanks everyone for listening!
Check out my website — there are lots of resources on my website, www dot global acity services.com for their blogs, tools, podcasts and other resources there for entrepreneurs.
And because the show is for you, my listeners, the door’s always open for comments, questions and suggestions, or just to shoot the breeze. You can always email me at D Nagel and ag yell at lakes radio.org. And I promise I’ll respond and especial
Thank you one more time to my guest this week, Dr. Sherry Benton. She’s the founder and Chief Science Officer of the digital mental health platform called TAO Connect.
Be sure to join me again next Saturday at 11am Central noon Eastern.
But until then, I’m Doris Nagel, wishing you happy entrepreneuring!
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