April 23, 2021
El Futuro, a nonprofit outpatient clinic in North Carolina, provides comprehensive mental health services for Latino families. Since 2001, El Futuro has been a resource for trauma-informed, culturally-responsive mental health services for North Carolina’s growing Latinx community. In addition, the organization supports the La Mesita Mental Health Professional Network, which provides training and learning opportunities to practicing behavioral health clinicians and other community stakeholders.
The Opportunity
As of 2019, the activities offered by La Mesita were supported by funds from its parent organization, El Futuro, and third-party grants. With the continued growth of La Mesita membership and increased participation in its varied services, El Futuro recognized a need to identify new revenue sources to sustain La Mesita’s operations.
Goals
Leadership at La Mesita wanted to develop a three-year plan to introduce competitive pricing models for each La Mesita service to ensure the long-term sustainability of the network’s education, training, and support program opportunities.
Approach
Atrómitos began the engagement by completing a review of La Mesita operations to understand the network’s current capacity to support its members and identify opportunities the network had to expand capacity. Informed by a document review and key informant interviews with La Mesita staff and network members, it included the activities offered with each service, the network’s operating budget (including funding sources), how La Mesita fit within the larger El Futuro organization, and those served by the network’s programming.
This review informed how Atrómitos progressed with the project’s next phase: a Market Analysis. Before making recommendations on how La Mesita could bring in revenue for its services, it was essential to understand a few key factors:
- the size of the market for potential network members
- who was offering services that competed with and complemented those provided by La Mesita
- the cost of services offered by competitors. Atrómitos leveraged myriad publicly available data sources to inform the Market Analysis.
The first deliverable for El Futuro included an overview of the Market Analysis findings and a summary of potential business models for each network service, informed by profiling seven competitors.
The final phase of the engagement was developing a three-year business plan for La Mesita, outlining a step-wise approach to moving each service offering away from complete reliance on grant funding and other support from El Futuro. During the review of La Mesita operations and the Market Analysis, Atrómitos presented iterative findings to La Mesita leadership to elicit feedback on methods to identify the network’s potential membership pool and competitive and comparative models.
Feedback from La Mesita on these findings assisted Atrómitos in specifying whom the network wished to target for membership specifically. Reactions to identified pricing models and input received during the critical informant interviews guided Atrómitos on which services members would and did support paying for and which needed to remain a low or no-cost service. The resulting business plan identified price points for each service and areas where El Futuro’s support for operations remained relevant.
Conclusion
The business plan for El Futuro’s La Mesita Mental Health Professional Network developed by Atrómitos in collaboration with the La Mesita team identified how the network could transition to generating revenue for its services over the following three years. The growth projected within the business plan was based on the then-current staffing model for La Mesita. It included recommendations on how the team could grow to keep pace with the anticipated increased utilization of network services. Within one year of the conclusion of the engagement, La Mesita began enacting recommendations from the business plan and bringing in member-based revenue for their services.
“The Atrómitos team does a great job of communicating around progress and coordinating work flows. We found it very helpful to see weekly reports of where we were in terms of budget, schedule, etc. [Atrómitos] was so easy to coordinate meetings with and flexible to our schedules. We also felt like they took the time to have a solid understanding of our programming and what we offered and didn’t cut any corners.”
