At 6:55 Friday morning, our 22 Silver Creek Area CEO students walked into Mascoutah Wellness Center. There were doughnuts and water waiting for us, which was a pretty good way to start a morning with 22 teenagers. The room was set up with 25 chairs in a large circle, intentionally arranged to mirror a group therapy setting. The idea was to create a space where everyone could sit together, talk, listen and feel comfortable sharing, rather than sitting behind desks or in rows.
Chris was our student CEO of the day and introduced Stacy Stein, LCPC, the founder of Mascoutah Wellness Center and one of our Silver Creek Area CEO mentors and investors. Emma was our photographer for the morning, so while Chris handled the introduction, she was busy capturing the little moments happening around us.
Stacy then began telling our students about her journey, and I think this was one of the most important parts of the morning. She talked about starting her practice and how being good at counseling didn’t automatically mean she knew how to run a business. She had to figure out accounting, marketing, HR, hiring, managing a building and all of the other things that come with being responsible for a business. She talked about growth, COVID and eventually building a team, and she was very honest about how difficult some of those decisions can be. Hiring people, trusting people, realizing when someone isn’t the right fit and sometimes having to let people go. She talked about Amber, her office manager, and called her the “peanut butter to my jelly.” You could hear how much she values the team she has built.
The students had a lot of questions throughout the conversation, and I loved that they kept coming. They asked about employees and independent contractors, finding clients, growing a business, making mistakes and figuring out things you don’t know how to do. Teagan asked Stacy about AI and what it might mean for a business built around such personal, human relationships. It wasn’t a presentation where Stacy talked and the students quietly listened. It really was a conversation.
Then one of the students asked how Stacy came up with the butterfly in her logo, and that opened up one of the most personal parts of the morning. Stacy explained the meaning of the butterfly in hospitals and how it can be used to quietly identify a family who has experienced the loss of a baby. She then shared her own story of losing her baby and what it was like to return to work afterward, when people often didn’t know what to say or how to talk about what had happened. That experience became part of the meaning behind her butterfly and helped shape the kind of environment she wanted to create for other people.
I loved that this came from a student question. They weren’t asking Stacy to tell them something emotional. They were curious about a logo. But because she was willing to answer honestly, they got to see the person behind the business and understand that sometimes the things we see in a business have a much deeper story behind them.
After their conversation, Stacy introduced them to the waiting area and then handed them a scavenger hunt. This wasn’t a worksheet they filled out while Stacy walked around telling them what to notice. She turned them loose and asked them to look at the building and business like owners. They moved through the counseling spaces looking for things that were intentionally designed to make people comfortable, things that protected patient privacy, hidden costs, first impressions and little details they might otherwise have walked right past. Stacy also showed them some of the ways she intentionally designed the space to protect privacy, including side doors that allow clients to leave toward the parking lot instead of having to walk back through the waiting room.
Eventually, we all went to the unfinished basement, and the difference was pretty dramatic. Stacy and her family had taken an old telephone company building that had sat vacant for seven years and completely rehabbed it into Mascoutah Wellness Center. After seeing the finished spaces, the students were suddenly standing in a large, unfinished basement. Right now, it is used for storage because there isn’t an elevator or an entrance on the lower level, which means the space isn’t ADA compliant and can’t be used for clients.
The students immediately started thinking about that space and how they could make it usable. Then later, when Stacy gave them the $5,000 challenge and asked what they would change if they had that money to spend on the business, Nick came back to the basement problem. He suggested redoing the parking lot and configuring a new entrance to the basement so that the space could eventually be used. Stacy immediately agreed with him. Other students had ideas, too, including changing the basement, adding things to make the space more inviting, looking at the lighting and repainting the exterior. Luke noticed the stairs were a little slick and suggested remodeling them.
I don’t know that the students have any idea how far $5,000 would actually go on some of those projects, and that really wasn’t the point. What I loved was watching them connect the dots. They saw a problem in the basement and later came back to it with a possible solution. They noticed something they would change. They questioned why something was designed a certain way. They started looking at a building not just as a place, but as a business with customers, employees, expenses, problems and possibilities.
And that is one of the things I value most about the people who open their doors to Silver Creek Area CEO. They aren’t just giving our students a tour of the finished product. They are giving them a look at what it really took to get there. Stacy shared the parts of her story that were painful, the things she didn’t know when she started, the mistakes, the hard decisions and the people who helped her along the way. She showed them a building that had once been a telephone company, sat empty for seven years and then became a wellness center through a year of hard work by her family. She let them see the beautiful, finished spaces, but she also let them see the unfinished basement and think about what could come next.
That is a pretty generous thing to give our students. Thank you, Stacy, for welcoming Silver Creek Area CEO into your business, for feeding our class, answering all of their questions and, most of all, for being willing to share the real story behind what you have built. Our students got to see that business ownership isn’t always about having all the answers. Sometimes it’s about being willing to figure things out, keep going and build something that means something to you.
