Meet the Founders
Hi RightFit Community! We met in 2015 during onboarding for new careers in consulting. Over the last six years, Patrick’s career has been focused in technology and Spencer’s in healthcare and mental health. Outside of our careers, we stayed friends and found unity on many topics, one of those being that we had both tried and failed a couple of times to find the right therapist. We felt that so much of therapy is based on a trusting personal relationship between clients and therapists but didn’t know how to find a therapist that we naturally connected with. Finally, in late 2020, we started working with the therapist community in Atlanta to find a better way to thoughtfully connect clients and mental health professionals. Thus, RightFit was born!
How it All Started
Spencer Mitchell and Patrick Nevels met at their onboarding event as they began their careers as consultants at a large consulting firm.
They became fast friends and as their careers changed, they made it a habit to catch up for coffee every few months. They both had an interest in mental health and in potentially taking an entrepreneurial leap in their careers.
Fast forward to 2020 and they decided it was time to make a dent in the mental health space through technology. Since July 2020, they’ve been hard at work doing customer discovery work with mental health practitioners in the Atlanta area. Through this customer discovery, they’ve validated and tweaked the problem they want to address and how they want to go about doing it. They are so excited to make a difference in the mental health epidemic plaguing our society. It’s a problem they both care deeply about and they can’t wait to solve it while having a little fun along the way!
A Letter to Our Therapist Community
RightFit Counseling was built to create a better experience for both consumers and therapists in their search for effective therapy and mental health. We hope that shared vision of creating a better experience for consumers is enough to bring you into the RightFit vision, but we did a lot more work to make this a better experience for therapists as well.
We talked to a lot of therapists, and we found many were discouraged by the key directories in a number of ways. Here’s what they were and how we’re working with therapists to make finding the right patients easier.
First, many therapists we spoke with feel like sometimes when a patient reaches out, they might not be the ‘right fit’ for that client. This may be based on specialty, experience and backgrounds, or many other factors. We recognize that the ‘therapeutic alliance’ is one of the greatest determining factors in the success of therapy. Based on the research and literature reviews we conducted, we also believe that therapeutic alliance can be influenced by shared experiences and background, specialties, and perhaps in some cases personality. Even therapists looking for therapists have their ideal connection and therapist experience. The directory we’ve built is intended to help connect you with those clients where you together can best develop a strong alliance.
Secondly, we have built workflows that work better for therapists. We understand that when therapists are full or get a request that’s not right for them, the burden then falls on the therapist to provide a better option for the patient. With RightFit, we provide patients with a list of best matches for them, and then we encourage patients to reach out to a handful of the best matches with one single message. With this workflow, we are doing everything we can to help them find that right match for themselves.
Lastly, many therapists believe that there should be better communities for therapists. At RightFit, we’re committed to not just listing therapists in a directory but giving them a space to connect and be a part of a community of therapists that are growing in their practice as well. We have developed our first ‘Meetup Group’ for therapists where we hold monthly webinars on the topics that interest you. There is also space for therapists to have discussion and share in this group. Please check it out – it’s free and sponsored by RightFit. Here is the link!
– Patrick Nevels and Spencer Mitchell, RightFit Counseling