What happens when two experienced clinicians get tired of working within a system that can’t move fast enough?
They go build something better.
In this episode of FoundHer Rising, Christine Hakkola sits down with Jodi Kapes and Valerie Lighthall, co-founders of Aligned Clinical LCSW Consulting. Together, they brought over 30 years of combined clinical experience out of hospital behavioral health and into their own practice, serving organizations, teams, and communities with clinical debriefings, mental health support, and risk management consulting.
Their story is compelling. But what makes this episode essential listening for women founders is what happens in the second half, when Christine calls out the two traps that quietly undermine the sustainability of most service-based businesses.
You know them well: under-marketing and undercharging.
From Institutional Work to Entrepreneurial Freedom
Jodi and Valerie didn’t plan their partnership around a spreadsheet. They built it on walks.
After leaving their roles in a hospital behavioral health system, Jodi after 14 years, Valerie after returning from maternity leave, they kept meeting to debrief, process, and problem-solve. What started as catch-up conversations gradually became something else: a business taking shape in real time.
“We talked it into being,” Jodi says.
The turning point came after two active shooter incidents in their small, rural community. Their clients were in the aftermath. The community needed debriefing. The resources weren’t there. And Jodi and Valerie both had the clinical training, including critical incident response, to provide exactly what was missing.
What the hospital system’s bureaucracy had prevented them from doing efficiently, they could now do on their own terms. Their business model was born from community need and lived expertise.
The lesson for you: The clearest path to a sustainable business often sits in the gap between what the market is doing and what it desperately needs.
The Real Barrier: Not Knowing How to Talk About What You Do
Here’s where Jodi and Valerie’s story gets honest.
Two experienced, credentialed clinicians. Over three decades of combined practice. And they’re still negotiating who has to post on Instagram.
“Selling ourselves, as women and as social workers, that’s not taught or encouraged,” Valerie says.
This is one of Christine’s favorite topics because it’s one she’s lived. And her reframe is direct:
You are not selling yourself. You are selling a service.
There is a fundamental difference between standing up and saying “I’m great, hire me” and speaking clearly about the problem you solve, who you help, and the transformation you provide. The first feels like bragging. The second is just good communication.
When Jodi describes managers approaching her at training breaks, thanking her for finally giving them the language to talk with employees about grief, addiction, and trauma, that is a marketing conversation. When Valerie explains how she helps businesses build step-by-step mental health response protocols, that is a sales pitch.
Neither of them hesitates when the conversation is about their impact. Both of them freeze when told to “market themselves.”
The reframe does not require doing anything differently. It requires thinking about it differently.
What Nobody Tells You About Undercharging
This is the part Christine feels most strongly about, and with good reason.
Jodi and Valerie are proactively avoiding a trap they can see in the distance. They’ve attended pricing trainings, joined a women’s business success circle, and regularly benchmark their rates against others in their market. They know that between them, they offer expert-level guidance and they are not charging like it, at least not yet.
But they’re asking the right questions early. Which puts them ahead of most.
Here is the hard truth Christine delivers without apology:
When you consistently undercharge, you feel like you’re being helpful. And you are, in the short term. But a business priced below sustainability has a shelf life. Burnout follows. And when you burn out, everyone who would have benefited from your work loses access to it.
Charging a sustainable rate is not greed. It is stewardship of your ability to serve.
A sliding scale makes sense in specific, intentional doses. But your pricing structure cannot be a sliding scale across the board. Getting clear on how many low-rate spots your business can actually carry, without compromising the revenue needed to operate at full capacity, is not just a math exercise. It’s a values exercise.
“When we charge what we’re worth, when we charge a sustainable income that allows us to keep doing this work and take care of ourselves, we actually help so many more people than by giving too freely at the beginning.” — Christine Hakkola
Three Insights Worth Keeping
1. Go get training on the hard things. Jodi and Valerie didn’t wait to figure out pricing alone. They found a training, joined a peer group, and got eyes on the problem. Whatever is hard in your business — pricing, marketing, operations — it is almost certainly less impossible than it feels. The people who get unstuck fastest are the ones who stop treating the hard thing as a personal failure and start treating it as a skill gap.
2. The elevator pitch lives in how you talk about your impact. Jodi can speak for twenty minutes about the organizations she’s served and the gaps she’s filled. But ask her for a formal elevator pitch and she laughs. The solution is not to write a tighter pitch. It is to recognize that the first version is already the pitch — it just needs to be given permission to show up that way.
3. B2B is not selling out. It’s scaling impact. Jodi and Valerie are moving toward organizational contracts — serving companies as their embedded mental health resource. Christine is enthusiastic about this, and not by accident. When you serve a business instead of an individual, you touch the lives of everyone in their orbit. The ripple effect is exponentially larger.
What’s Next for Aligned Clinical
Jodi and Valerie see their future in B2B consulting, becoming the embedded mental health partner for local organizations that either don’t have an EAP or have one that isn’t delivering. From policy development and culture consulting to on-site trainings and crisis debriefing, the model they’re building fills a real and underserved gap.
If you work in an organization that lacks a mental health response infrastructure, or you’re a business owner wondering how to better support your team, you can learn more at alignedclinical.com.
Your Action This Week
Pick one conversation you’ve had recently where you described your work naturally, to a colleague, a client, a friend. Write down what you said.
That is your marketing. It is already there. Now give yourself permission to use it.
Connect with Jodi Kapes and Valerie Lighthall
Jodi Kapes and Valerie Lighthall are the co-founders of Aligned Clinical LCSW Consulting, providing clinical debriefings, mental health support, and risk management consulting for organizations and teams. Learn more at alignedclinical.com.
If this episode resonated with you, subscribe to FoundHer Rising wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you’re ready to move from consistent revenue to real scale, download Christine’s free guide, “From 10K to 40K Months,” in the show notes.
Full Transcript
Christine Hakkola: Welcome to FoundHer Rising, the podcast for women founders in wellness, coaching, and consulting who are ready to build businesses that create freedom, impact, and income. I’m your host, Christine Hakkola, business coach, former psychotherapist, and mentor to women scaling service-based businesses.
Today I’m joined by Jodi Kapes and Valerie Lighthall, co-founders of Aligned Clinical LCSW Consulting. They provide clinical debriefings and mental health support for organizations and teams. Jodi and Valerie, welcome to the show.
Jodi Kapes / Valerie Lighthall: Hi. Thank you so much for having us. We’re so happy to be here.
Christine Hakkola: Thank you both for coming and for taking the time to share your story and all of your wisdom. I’m so excited. And I want to mention — this is my first time interviewing two people at once. I know you’re colleagues, you have a business together, you’re also friends. I’m really excited for this experience for all of us.
Let’s go back a few years. You both worked together inside a hospital behavioral health system. What happened? What sparked the shift from that to where you are today?
Jodi Kapes: We worked together for a number of years and got to know each other quite well — supervising staff and responding to different crises, both in the hospital and ultimately in the community. I left first, and Val stayed around for a couple more months before she left too. COVID changed the landscape of behavioral health for everyone, and I had been in the hospital system for about 14 years before leaving. It was just time for a shift.
One of the things we used to do while working together was talk about what our community really needed. Maybe we should run this type of group, or address these people. We did that pretty regularly. Once we both left, it wasn’t very long before we started what we call our walk and talks and began planning what was going to be next for us in a partnership.
Christine Hakkola: So you were both inspired by being inside the mental health system, seeing what was and wasn’t working, and wanting to make changes. When you both left, Valerie — did you go straight into private practice?
Valerie Lighthall: Yes. I had already had a small private practice since late 2019, right before COVID. When I was deciding to leave, it was right around the same time Jodi had left. I was also just coming back from maternity leave, so it wasn’t super feasible to leave right then. But I built my practice over several months from a side hustle into a full-time gig — about six months after I came back from maternity leave, which was right around the same time Jodi had already gone.
Christine Hakkola: And Jodi, did you go right into private practice as well?
Jodi Kapes: I’ve had a private practice for about 20 years, in and out of how much time I spent there. I started it long before I had kids, primarily seeing children at first. Once I stepped back from that, I was mostly focused on my nine-to-five. Around the same point, I started doing more community-oriented presentations and trainings focused on wellness and mental health — even dealing with transitioning back from COVID. So yes, I started doing a lot more wellness work at that time.
Christine Hakkola: So you’re both in private practice, both bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, and going through what you call these walk and talks. Tell us how what you’ve built today emerged from those.
Jodi Kapes: I think it was very organic. We used to see each other every other day at work and talk constantly — we were pretty much side by side. When we both left, we said, let’s get together. I want to know how it’s going and what’s happening in your life. We were also friends.
It started naturally — talking about what we were seeing in the community, talking about what we’d done at the hospital, what wasn’t happening in our community. As things evolved, as traumas happened, noticing what could be improved, what was missing, what our clients were telling us they needed. It was very natural. And it was a lot of “we should do this, we should do this” — over and over — until finally we said, we are going to do this. We talked it into being.
Christine Hakkola: So you both maintained your own private practices and started building together. What is the business model today — is it a clinic, a brick and mortar space?
Jodi Kapes: We do have a space available to us where we’ve run some trainings and can work out of. But true to our walk and talk model, when we need to arrange or plan something, it’s pretty common for us to get together and walk while we hash it out.
After working together for so long, Valerie is very talented at the writing, packaging, and marketing side of things. And I’m more comfortable doing the talking and the training. We joke about it — it’s a great working rhythm. Val knows when I’m talking about something and can just package it, and then we come to a good balance together.
Christine Hakkola: That’s amazing. As you two were building this business, managing families, navigating COVID, you mentioned in our pre-interview that there was an active shooter scare — and that sounds like it was a real turning point for both of you and for what you were building together. Tell us about how that impacted your vision and the direction you’ve taken since.
Valerie Lighthall: We were both living and working in a small, rural community, and there were actually two active shooter scares within a short period of time. Jodi and I both know a lot of people here, and I personally had several clients who were involved — maybe adjacent to where it happened — who told me they just didn’t feel like they had the support they needed. They had me as a therapist, and we would process things. But they felt they needed a community debriefing. If it happened at their workplace or school, they said, “I need to heal with the people who went through this with me.”
We weren’t seeing that happen. It was a mix of not enough resources and the ones available being tapped. After that happening a few times, it was a real push for us. We had debriefed staff and patients at the hospital. Jodi is actually a critical incident response trainer. We thought — we need to make this skill available to our community so that when something like this inevitably happens again, we are here to support them.
Christine Hakkola: This sounds like a very different experience than what you had inside the hospital, where you were working within the confines of the system. After this incident, it sounds like this was maybe the first time you really had the freedom to show up and respond in the way you felt was right — truly meeting the needs of the community. Jodi, can you speak to how that changed the course of your business?
Jodi Kapes: One thing that happened as a result was our local police department reached out and asked if we could provide some support, recognizing that there’s not really a lot of mental health training — even though about 90% of their calls are mental health-related. Dovetailing off what happens in hospital emergency response, there are EMS workers and firefighters who show up for awful traumas and then have no system to help them process it. They were just expected to move forward with whatever was next.
Understanding what that looks like for people in terms of job longevity and even just being able to show up to work — it gave us a real opportunity to use our skills to support our community.
Christine Hakkola: That’s fantastic. You’re both clearly very experienced and skilled clinicians. Part of the benefit of being in business for yourselves is that you get to see the need in the community and figure out how to respond in a way that’s more aligned with how you want to work and serve.
One thing I notice speaking with many female service providers is this feeling of being pulled in two directions — wanting to serve and do the work you were trained to do, while also wearing the hat of business owner. There’s a lot to consider running a business that doesn’t always jive with being a service provider. Can you each share your experience — what’s been good or challenging about being both a business owner and a service provider?
Jodi Kapes: I think we do a good job of identifying what we’re lacking and talking each other up to figure it out. Who is going to handle the marketing? That’s definitely something we struggle with. We keep negotiating who’s going to do our social media posts. Neither one of us likes talking ourselves up.
Valerie Lighthall: That is our biggest struggle — the marketing piece. We both know a lot of people, especially in the community mental health space. But getting the word out, selling ourselves — as women and as social workers, that’s not something we were taught or encouraged to do. We’re building ourselves up to get there. We give each other pep talks: we know how to do this, we have the skills, we have the experience, we have the credentials. And we’re getting there.
And then there’s the pricing. Add to that layer being female, being a social worker, and this cultural mentality around not talking about money. When we put a price on our services, a lot of times we look back and think, why? We should have charged more. We gave them a lot. We delivered real value and didn’t price accordingly.
Christine Hakkola: Quick resource for you. If you’ve hit consistent revenue but working harder isn’t creating more growth, I put together a free guide called From 10K to 40K Months. It breaks down what actually has to change when you move from solopreneur energy into real scaling — structure, profit, team, capacity — not just marketing tactics. If you’re ready for growth that feels sustainable instead of chaotic, go download it. It’s free. The link is in the show notes.
Now back to the conversation.
You may or may not know this, but you’ve touched on two of my favorite topics — marketing and finances. And the reason I love them is not because I haven’t experienced the same things as both of you. There’s an inherent conflict I’ve experienced over the decades I’ve done this work, especially for women service providers.
We’re all what I call heart-centered. We’re mission-driven. We want to help. And many women in our society are raised to be helpful by being generous, by providing value, by putting others first. Yet our livelihood depends on that same service. We’ve built our businesses around it. And there’s an inherent tension between selling ourselves, putting ourselves out there, charging money for our services, and also reconciling that with wanting to be helpful in the world.
One of the ways I’ve approached this — and that I work through with people — is that this isn’t about selling ourselves. It’s about being of service. It’s about providing value in a sustainable way.
Let’s talk about the marketing piece first. I so often hear female service providers say, “I’m not good at selling myself. I don’t want to have to sell myself.” And one of the ways I look at this is: we’re not selling ourselves. We’re selling a service. And we’re providing significant value to the people we’re helping.
What experiences have you had out in the community where you can see the impact of what you provide?
Jodi Kapes: We’ve done a number of trainings and supports for organizations. Just to see the benefit during the training itself — people getting to practice the skills, managers approaching us at breaks and expressing real gratitude. We’re giving them language and support to talk with their employees about hard topics: mental health, trauma, how to handle it at work. They don’t have that skill set. When you promote someone to supervisor, you don’t really train them on how to talk to an employee who’s lost a parent or is struggling with addiction. We get real, in-the-moment feedback. And for me, that makes me feel deeply valued. It confirms that what we offer is extremely valuable.
Valerie Lighthall: Absolutely. After those sessions, it lifts us up. Talking about the next session, the next group we’re going to help — it gives us momentum.
And we haven’t touched on it much yet, but the risk management piece of what we offer is significant. A lot of smaller businesses in our area don’t have real resources around mental health. If an employee tells their HR leader “I need to see a therapist” or “I’m having thoughts of hurting myself,” they often don’t have a plan — and that’s no fault of their own. It’s just never been talked about this directly in the workplace.
Part of what we do is help businesses create a step-by-step decision tree for exactly those situations. Not just “call the insurance company,” but giving them local connections, knowing what’s actually available and what’s needed. I get a lot of joy out of that. So many people have come to me personally — family, friends, colleagues — saying, “I don’t know how to help this person.” That’s not really out there and talked about. That part gives me a real boost.
Christine Hakkola: You get to be a real connector in the community and also deliver the transformation yourself. I feel the impact of this work deeply.
And I want to hold something up — notice how easily you both speak about who you serve, the problems you solve, and the transformation you provide. That is the essence of good marketing. Selling in integrity and authenticity is not about touting your own horn. It’s not “look at me, here’s my resume.” It’s: here’s my track record. Here’s the experience I’ve had working with people who were facing this specific challenge. And here’s the outcome.
In mental health, testimonials can be tricky. But you can absolutely talk about the transformation you provide. Does hearing it framed that way feel different than thinking you have to sell yourself?
Jodi Kapes: Absolutely. We do talk about what we do well. That’s usually what happens when someone sees us out on a walk and talk. We say, we can do this — this is what we know, this is what’s happening. And then we ask each other, okay, what’s our elevator pitch? And we laugh because we don’t know how to answer that formally. But we clearly can when we just let ourselves talk.
Christine Hakkola: It’s so common to overthink this. If you can just get talking about the thing that lights you up, that is what you need to do. The articulate way you both speak about your service — that’s what people need to hear. There really is no difference between speaking clearly about the problem you solve, who you help, and the transformation you provide, and “selling yourself.” Nothing different needs to happen there.
Now, the financial piece. One conversation I have regularly — because I’ve seen it so often — is the pattern of underpricing. When we consistently undercharge, charge rates we know are too low, or in hindsight realize we left money on the table, what tends to happen over time is burnout. The business becomes unsustainable. People are working 60, 80 hours a week, and the bank account doesn’t show for it. Can you each say a little more about your experience around pricing?
Jodi Kapes: I think we’re not quite there yet, but we’re recognizing we need to be cautious not to get there. We did a couple of things to address this proactively. We signed up for a training where someone spoke specifically about pricing, and we attended a success circle for other women in business in our community. Both of those helped us recognize we need to be very intentional about not underpricing what we offer.
We regularly look at what others are charging for individual behavioral health services, and we recognize that between us we have over 30 years of combined clinical experience. What we have to say is expert-level guidance. It’s uncomfortable. But we shouldn’t let that stop us. A lot of business growth is uncomfortable.
Christine Hakkola: I love that. You went and got training. Marketing was hard, finances were hard, and you went out and got support. For anyone listening — insert whatever is hard for you in business, because there’s always going to be something. And what we often find is that the thing we think is impossible or overwhelming turns out not to be. We kick the can down the road, we suffer for it, and then when we actually dive in — read a book, get a mentor, go to a training — we think, oh, this was not so hard.
Valerie, what has your experience been around pricing and charging what you’re worth?
Valerie Lighthall: I go through this in my private practice regularly as well. I do hold space for long-term clients who are now in different financial situations — some sliding scale spots. And I try to apply the same thinking to the business Jodi and I are building. I can’t put everyone on a sliding scale because I have to provide for my own life too. The same goes for our consulting work. We both have full-time private practices. This consulting business is our future plan. So how do we price it so we can actually get there?
We’ve come up with a price list, and we have defined offerings. But every business and every situation is a little different, so the pricing discussions still happen — texting each other, is this too low? Is that too high? And then afterward thinking we probably should have charged more.
Christine Hakkola: I really appreciate what you said, Valerie, about it not being all or nothing. When women service providers recognize they need to charge more, it doesn’t mean you have to do that across the board. What it does mean is getting clear about how many spots or what percentage of your business can absorb reduced rates — and what percentage needs to be full price to make the business sustainable.
I want to say something I feel passionately about. I have seen so many women service providers, especially in mental health, burn out in part because they weren’t charging enough. And what I want to say to you both and to everyone listening is this: when you undercharge, when you consistently give discounts or don’t hold your rate, yes, you’re helping people in that moment. But in a year, two years, three years — if you burn out, if you can’t do this work anymore — so many more people are going to miss out on the support you could have provided.
When we charge a sustainable rate that allows us to keep doing this work and take care of ourselves, we actually help more people in the long run — not fewer.
All right, I’ll step down from my soapbox. I want to hear from you both — where are you taking this in the next one to three years?
Jodi Kapes: I was thinking about this this morning in preparation for today. What I would love to see is us working with local businesses as their mental health and wellness providers — similar to what an EAP provides, but thinking a bit more outside the box. More on-site training, a menu of available trainings for staff, alongside the behavioral health support and community linkage piece.
We’ve both been in situations where EAPs either overcharge and underdeliver, or simply don’t know how to respond. I can’t count the number of times the hospital’s EAP didn’t show up for a staff trauma — and it was our team doing the work. That just reinforces that we have this skill set and that we could offer it to area businesses. I’d love to land a couple of bigger contracts to supply that service.
Valerie Lighthall: I wholeheartedly agree. I also see a space for us even with businesses that already have an EAP. Let’s look at your policies. Do they reflect that you support mental wellness? That you’re reducing stigma and liability and actually supporting your employees? Let’s help you create those policies. Let’s help improve your culture around mental wellness and integrate it into your everyday operations. There’s space for us in a lot of places.
Christine Hakkola: I completely agree. It’s such a natural evolution for both of you, given your background and current skill set. And I am a huge fan of the B2B model for exactly the reason you’re describing — when you partner with a business or a larger organization, you touch the lives of so many more people at once. The ripple effect is enormous. I’m so excited for both of you, and I’m so glad for the community that is going to receive your work.
If anyone listening wants to learn more about your business and what you offer, how do they find you?
Valerie Lighthall: The best way is through our website — it’s alignedclinical.com. You can contact us from there and also visit each of our individual practice pages if you’d like to learn more about us individually.
Christine Hakkola: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Valerie. Thank you, Jodi, for being on the show and for sharing so candidly — your successes so far and your challenges.
And thank you, listener, for tuning in to FoundHer Rising. If today’s episode resonated with you, follow the show, share it with another founder, and leave a quick review. It helps more women find these conversations. You can connect with me on LinkedIn or learn more at HakkolaHorizons.com.
Until next time, keep rising and keep building the business that gives you the freedom to live, lead, and create on your terms.
