From Clinician to CEO: Ebony Green on Scaling with “Intentional Acceleration”
On this episode of Pivot to Profit, Pam Jordan welcomes Ebony Green, a multi–seven-figure founder, educator, and speaker who helps allied healthcare entrepreneurs scale with strategy and sustainability. Green built her speech-language pathology practice, The SpeakCenter, to $3.2M in five years and now teaches others through the SLP Business Suite—proof that clinical expertise and smart financial leadership can coexist.
Green shares how a burnout-inducing school assignment pushed her to bet on herself and bootstrap her practice—starting from a co-working desk, driving to patients’ homes, and wearing every hat from HR to marketing. A turning point came when she fixed a broken billing process and recovered $20,000 in unpaid claims, a cash flow lifeline that reinforced the power of hiring the right experts.
That lesson shaped her philosophy of “intentional acceleration”—growing quickly, but only in alignment with a clear mission. She warns against shiny-object detours, citing a misaligned insurance contract that cost her $10,000. The cure: focus, systems, and a leadership mindset. Green ultimately relinquished her caseload to step fully into the CEO role and built an admin backbone—clinical director, HR support, billing, and a fractional CFO—so the business could scale without her as the bottleneck.
Finances remain central. Green reviews weekly visits, cancellations, revenue, and A/R, and moved from cash-basis to accrual accounting to understand true performance and pipeline. That discipline has fueled growth in and beyond the clinic. During COVID, she secured school-district contracts, then began coaching peers through offerings like her School Contracting Masterclass. Today, she’s expanding community with the Made For More SLP Business Conference (where Pam will speak), and researching the business side of SLP for her dissertation—bridging the gap between clinical training and entrepreneurship.
Green’s story is a playbook for service-based founders: define the vision, hire for your gaps, measure what matters, and scale on purpose—not pressure.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Pam:
Hello, and welcome to today's episode of Pivot to Profit. I have the amazing powerhouse, Ebony Green, with me today. How are you, girl?
Ebony:
I am well, thanks for having me. I'm so excited. First of all, you called me a powerhouse in my intro. I'm just grateful to be here, so thank you, Pam, for having me on your podcast today.
Pam:
Absolutely. Well, let me share your bio with everyone so they’ll understand why I said you're a powerhouse.
Ebony is a multi–seven-figure founder, educator, and speaker who teaches allied healthcare entrepreneurs how to scale quickly and intentionally. After growing her own speech-language pathology practice to $3 million in five years, Ebony became known for her signature philosophy of intentional acceleration — the art of building speed with strategy and sustainability.
Through her company, The SLP Business Suite, Ebony empowers service-based CEOs to design businesses that run with purpose, not pressure. Her work bridges systems, leadership, and mindset to help women build freedom on purpose.
That's why you're a powerhouse. Come on now.
Ebony:
Thank you, thank you. Yes. I actually scaled my business to $3.2 million — I'm just saying. That was wrong in the bio, I need to change that.
But yeah, I am someone who did not come from a business background. I am a clinician by trade — I'm a speech-language pathologist. So what I'm excited about with this podcast is that I get to share my story as someone who was trained in a totally different field, who became an entrepreneur and has been able to scale successfully.
I think that there are a lot of stories about people who start businesses and don't know what they're doing, and it's very inspirational to hear when they succeed. But I also feel like in certain spaces, in my space in particular, there’s not a lot of examples of someone scaling past that seven-figure mark.
There are a few — I've helped a lot of people actually scale their business. But we need to see more examples of this in our industry. We also need to see more women across the board scaling to seven figures. So I'm really excited to have this conversation with you about money, which is a taboo subject in business.
Pam:
Isn't it funny? All right, so let's dive in, Ebony. To start with, what did you want to be when you were a little kid?
Ebony:
I wanted to be on TV. I wanted to be a meteorologist. And it turns out that I wasn't very good at math. To become a meteorologist, you have to know a lot of math and a lot of science. I loved science, but math was definitely not my forte.
So I pivoted, and I decided, “I'll have to be on TV another way.” I went into radio, television, and film — that was my undergraduate major in college. I loved radio, television, and film, but I did not like that it was more theory and a lot of film sessions late into the evening, and not a whole lot of me being in front of the camera, which is what I thought I wanted to do.
So I pivoted again. I thought, “What if I used my gift for speaking and encouraging other people to be a teacher?” So I went into teaching, and that pivoted from teaching into speech-language pathology.
Pam:
Okay, awesome. So as little Ebony was dreaming of being on TV, what were you taught about money? What did your parents or society teach you about money? Was it good? Is it bad? Should you want it, should you not?
Ebony:
What I was taught about money was that you have to work hard to earn it. I grew up in a single-parent household. My mother is a first-generation immigrant who came to the United States at a very young age, early adulthood. So she had to figure out a lot on her own.
One of the things she had to figure out was how to raise me and my siblings as a single mother. She became a widow when we were still kids. So I witnessed her working two jobs. I witnessed how hard she had to work for her money and how we had to hold on to every cent that she earned.
I remember one time when I was little, we were at the laundromat washing clothes because we didn't even have our own washer and dryer. We lived in a very small house. She told me to watch her purse because she had just gotten her check. She had just cashed her check, so she had all her money in her purse. She said, “Watch my purse, I'm going to go to the dryer.” She moved the clothes from the washer to the dryer.
Well, I was probably only five or six. Of course, I wasn't paying attention, and someone took my mom's purse with her entire paycheck in it. I just remember how devastated my mom was because she worked so hard.
That money story stuck with me — you have to work really hard for your money and you have to hold on to all of your money because there's a chance that someone can take it and you won't ever get it back. That was something that stuck with me for a long time.
Pam:
That's crazy. Have you and your mom ever had a conversation about that memory?
Ebony:
We have. Yes, we have. And I tell her now how grateful I am that she was such a hard worker and that she figured out how she was going to pay the bills and how we were going to make ends meet until she got paid again.
But yeah, I think it was a lesson that taught me that — you know what parents always say — money doesn't grow on trees. You work hard for money; you need to hold on to it.
Pam:
So you went to college, went into teaching, then decided on speech pathology. How did that come about? How did you find out about this field? How did SLP become your passion?
Ebony:
I found out about this field when I was in the classroom. Some of my students received speech and language therapy. Speech pathology is an interesting field because you can work in the education setting, but you can also work in the medical setting. Some SLPs work in public schools and some work in hospital settings.
The first SLP I met was someone who worked on the campus where I was teaching. She encouraged me to look into speech pathology as a possible career change after I finished my teaching assignment. I was in a program called Teach for America, and you're assigned to teach for two years in an underserved community. Then you can either decide to stay in the classroom or do something else.
She encouraged me to look into speech-language pathology because she knew that I was bilingual. I taught bilingual, Spanish-speaking second graders and third graders when I was in the classroom. She said how important it was to have bilingual speech-language pathologists because a lot of the kids receiving services who were bilingual needed support in their native language or needed to be tested in their native language so they don't get misidentified as having a language disorder when it's just a language difference.
That was one of the main reasons. She also said she noticed how dedicated I was to helping the kids who were receiving speech services and that everything I was doing to reinforce what she was doing with them in therapy was really helping the students.
So I said, “Okay, I'll think about it.” Then I moved from Texas to Arizona. When I moved here, I thought, “I'm going to start something new,” and that’s how I found out about it and why I decided to go into speech.
Pam:
I love it. So you were a clinician after being a teacher. Were you in the schools or in the hospital setting when you first started out?
Ebony:
I was in the schools. I felt most comfortable being in the schools after teaching for four years. I actually stayed two years past my Teach for America assignment. So I felt comfortable working in the school setting as an SLP, and that's what I did.
But then I started to look more into the medical side as well because I was curious about what it was like to work in a clinic. I started working for someone who had a private clinic. This person was one of the very first mentors who inspired me to start my own clinic.
So after working for them for a number of years and working in the schools for a number of years, I decided that at some point I wanted to own my own clinic. And it happened very quickly after I finished all of my graduate coursework.
Pam:
Okay. So what inspired you to be a business owner? You said your mentor helped with that, but did you see that path and think, “This makes sense”? Where was the alignment or the light bulb that was like, “Yes, that's what I want”?
Ebony:
I had a bad experience working at the last school where I worked. This school was pretty new — new administration — and they had a lot of students on campus. It was K–8, lots of kids.
Because there were so many kids with IEPs who needed speech therapy services, they really needed two full-time people to manage all of the students that needed services. I was there part-time. I got hired as a part-time clinician to work at that school. Within the first couple of months, I burned out.
I didn’t even make it to Thanksgiving break. I quit before Thanksgiving break. That was the moment when I decided I was going to pivot and bet on myself and start my private practice.
Pam:
I love it. So did that mean you went and leased an office? Did you work out of your home? Did you go to students? What did that originally look like — “Ebony’s going to start a business, let's go”?
Ebony:
I bootstrapped my business, which means I started with just a few thousand dollars that I had in savings. While I was working for other people and working in the schools, my husband and I decided to start a debt-free journey.
We followed Dave Ramsey and started paying off all of our debt. He had just completed his MBA in finance and was very dedicated to our long-term financial goals. We started living on a very tight budget, paying off credit card debt, paying off student loans, until we got to the point of not having any debt except for our house.
Right around the time that I decided to start my business, we had just gotten out of debt. Of course, I was not going to get us back in debt by taking out any loans. As I mentioned, my husband works in finance, very financially savvy, and he made sure that if this was what I was going to do, I was not going to put us back in debt.
So I used whatever I had in savings. I started working out of a co-working space. I was seeing most of my patients throughout the day. I was driving to their homes to see them instead of having them come to the co-working space because I didn't even have an office. It was just a seat at a table.
I would use their conference room to interview therapists I was hiring. I think I paid like $40 every time I used the conference room, and then I had a $25-a-month membership where I could go and work there.
That was how I started. I was doing all of the things: I was the therapist, but I was also HR, I was the marketing person, we were running payroll — I was doing basically everything.
Pam:
So tell me about a financial win early on in those days, Ebony, where you were like, “You know what? I think this is going to work. This is going to pay the bills.”
Ebony:
A financial win came when I finally hired someone to do my medical billing. Medical billing and coding is very complicated, and if you are not trained in it, you can spend a lot of time spinning your wheels trying to figure out how to get paid, which is very detrimental to your business when you have people working that you're paying, but you're not getting paid.
I had some therapists working for me, and we had a steady influx of referrals, but when it came to payments and reimbursement, that was a disaster. I was not able to figure out how to do billing. I hired someone who also did not know how to do billing. Even though I vetted them, they promised that they knew how to get us paid, and they did not know how to get us paid.
So I ended up hiring another person who had been reaching out to me. I decided, “If this other person isn't getting me paid, then I might as well try someone else.”
I remember the first time they sat down and audited all of the claims we had submitted that had been returned unpaid. Those claims went through again with this new person, and we got paid. Our first payment was $20,000. I was just like, “Oh my gosh, thank goodness,” because there wasn't very much left in my savings to continue to pay people while I was not getting paid.
Pam:
Yeah, it's crazy how with medical billing or even just invoicing clients — you've got to bank everything because you still have to pay your rent, your people, your materials and services. It either comes out of your pocket or it doesn't come out. So amazing that you made that switch.
What were some big steps you made to go from clinician to entrepreneur — mindset shifts? What did you do to get from “I'm fulfilling for clients” to “Now I'm building a multi-million dollar empire”?
Ebony:
I think the first major switch was understanding that I could not do both well. I had to pick: do I want to be a clinician, or do I want to be a business owner?
Early on, I decided that I wanted to be a business owner because nobody else on my team could do that. I had people who could be therapists and who could be trained to be good therapists, but I didn't have anybody else I could train to take on the role of CEO.
So I let my clients know, “Unfortunately, I'm going to have to pass you on to another therapist. I have a lot of responsibilities now that the business is growing.” These were people who had worked with me as their therapist for several years, but it was time for me to make that decision and delegate my caseload to other clinicians.
That was difficult, but that was the biggest mindset shift I had to make — that I could no longer operate as just a clinician. I needed to think about the future of my business and how I was going to step into that CEO role.
Pam:
That is so huge. I see entrepreneurs struggle with it all the time, because they start their business because they're passionate about whatever it is they do, and they just want to do that but do it their own way. So they start a business.
But there’s a point where it really does switch — you can't just be the provider; you've got to be the CEO. It is a huge mind shift because you have to delegate, and that's hard, especially when you've had those clients for years and then you're passing them off.
How did you handle that delegation? Were you like “done is better than perfect,” or “if they do it 80% as good as me, it's good”? What was your mindset around delegation? Because I see a lot of entrepreneurs struggling with that.
Ebony:
My mindset around delegation was to first model how the task needed to be done. I had a whole system of: this is how you have an initial visit, this is how you do your session notes, this is how you should be communicating with the patient regularly or with the parent.
I trained every single therapist who was assigned a caseload on how we do things at my company — how I would do it. So the training was the first step. Once I trained them and they were able to demonstrate competence through that training, then I was able to trust them to do it just like I would.
Pam:
I love it. What were some challenges you had around building a team? Because as you scale and step into your CEO seat, you've got to have a team around you that’s supporting you. What were some challenges? Running a multi–seven-figure firm means you’ve got a big headcount. Talk to me about your team.
Ebony:
I grew a lot of therapists on my team very quickly. I knew that the therapists were the moneymakers, so I was trying to get as many therapists through the door because they were making the money that impacted the bottom line.
But then I started to realize the more therapists I hired, the more responsibilities I was adding to my plate, because I had to be the contact person for them; I had to solve their problems; I had to put out their fires.
So now I had a team of 15 or 20 therapists all depending on me for everything. And as I mentioned, I was doing all the admin in my business at first. I was running payroll, doing all the marketing, all the hiring and recruiting.
There came a point where I didn't even have time to hire more people. I became a bottleneck in my business. I could not grow any further because I had hired all these therapists, but I didn't have the admin support to help take things off my plate so I could continue to grow the business.
I can't remember if it was 2021 — I believe it was 2021 — I just realized, “I can't keep doing this.” I was like an IKEA cabinet that looks good because I have all these therapists, but on the inside the structure is not there. This cabinet’s going to break, right? If I add one more plate, it's going to break.
So I thought about all the things someone else could be doing that I was doing. I was determined that by the end of that year, I was going to have four people. I don't know why the number four stood out to me, but I knew I needed four solid people in admin roles to support me because I could no longer oversee all these therapists alone.
Even though I had given up all of my patients for the home health visits we were doing and our clinic, I got a school contract. I was contracted by a school district to do some of their therapy services, and it was really good money. I didn't turn it down. I said, “Sure, I'll do it.” I didn't have a caseload in the clinic or home health, so I took on that responsibility too, in addition to hiring all these therapists.
By the end of that year, I hired those four admin people. I hired a clinical director. I hired a fractional CFO. I hired someone to manage HR. I think billing was the fourth — I already had some billing support, but I rounded out that area.
I had four people on my admin team to support me, and that was a game changer.
Pam:
I love it. I love it. You talk about intentional acceleration. Define that for us and how it's played a role in your story.
Ebony:
When you're building, you have to be intentional about what you're building and where you're going. You'll get a lot of distractions along the way as your business starts to grow, because it's hard. It's hard to build a company. It's hard to scale.
A lot of times, we want to take the easy route or the path of least resistance. We'll see shiny objects that we feel are going to get us to our destination faster, or “This is the new thing everybody's doing, so I need to start doing it too.”
You need to remember what your vision and mission are for your company and stick to that. That's what I mean by building intentionally.
We were approached by an insurance company to start doing services outside of what we were already doing, and it wasn't really in alignment with the team I had in place or the vision of the company. But I was like, “Sure, why not? Let's just see.”
That whole side project ended up costing us $10,000. We ended the contract with the insurance company with a deficit of $10,000 because for whatever reason, we just couldn't get it off the ground. It just wasn't working out the way we thought it would.
So when I say “build intentionally,” I mean always refer back to your mission and your vision and what it is you actually want to do. Do not get distracted by the shiny objects that are going to appear out of nowhere that could potentially end up costing you money or slowing you down on your way to your destination.
Pam:
I love that. I see it far too often in entrepreneurs. They get the shiny object — or I call it “squirrel.” I feel like most entrepreneurs might not be ADHD, but we kind of are just a little bit. Like, “Oh, Ebony, you want to go start this?” or “Let's go have a retreat,” or “Let's go do this and this.” There are so many options.
Successful entrepreneurs — there’s a season where you just have to put your head down and focus and understand what your goals are and just get it done. So “intentional acceleration” — I love that. That's beautifully wordsmithed. That's magical.
You mentioned that one of the hires you had was a fractional CFO. How has understanding your finances played a role in your ability to scale your service-based business?
Ebony:
One of the tasks I was doing in the early stages of my business was all the bookkeeping. It was a disaster because I'm not a bookkeeper. I'm not a financial-person — I don't even balance my own personal budget.
So to have to do that for my business and make sure everything's categorized, and to learn how to use QuickBooks — my head was spinning. I did it because I didn't have the money to hire initially, or so I thought. I probably could have hired someone a lot sooner.
My husband works in finance, so he kind of managed the books whenever he had time, but every month I’d be like, “Oh my God, I need to go categorize all these transactions.” It became very cumbersome.
So in 2021, when I decided I was no longer going to do all these tasks that were not things I should be doing, I hired a fractional CFO. Having that fractional CFO really changed the game for me because not only were they doing all of the bookkeeping and making sure everything was categorized, they were now giving me reports.
They’re sending me budgets. They’re making sure that when payroll gets run there’s no extra stuff getting taken out, or if an audit needs to be done, we can do the audit and I don’t feel like, “Oh my gosh, this is too overwhelming for me to do by myself.”
They just made sure that financially, my company was healthy and sound. It was extra reassurance that I could continue to build and grow and not slow down because the money was there, and they were keeping track of it for me.
Pam:
I love it. So where you are in your business now, what are some key metrics or numbers that you track on a weekly or monthly basis to know, “Am I good, or do I have a problem?” What are some key numbers that that CFO is sharing with you and that you're looking at?
Ebony:
On a weekly basis, we look at how many visits we have on the schedule. We look at how many visits were kept, how many visits were canceled. We look at revenue on a weekly basis. We look at our AR on a weekly basis.
Those are just some of the key things right off the bat. I tell a lot of the people that I coach — because I coach women, or really SLPs in my program — your finances are like the backbone of your business. You have to know these numbers.
Even though we're a multi-million dollar company, I never stop looking at the numbers, because at any given point things can go left, right? You have to anticipate things before they come up, and looking at your numbers is the best way to do that.
One of the things my CFO did — which at first I didn't like because I didn't understand it — was switching me from a cash basis to an accrual basis on my accounting and my P&Ls. At first I didn't understand why we had to do it this way; it was confusing.
But it actually makes a lot of sense because now we have invoices reflected in QuickBooks so I know when people owe me money. I know when those invoices are paid off, and it's not confusing because we sent out an invoice in January but the payment didn't come in until February.
So now my February isn't looking like I made more money than I did. This is a common occurrence in my industry especially — people will say, “Well, I don't understand my numbers because I invoiced this school this month, but it didn't come in until two months later.”
I'm just like, you have to have a good financial person to explain this to you and to manage that. That's not supposed to be your job.
Pam:
Yeah, I love it. So you just mentioned you also do mentoring. Explain that, because you have a successful practice with therapists serving clients, but then you started to coach others. Help us understand that.
Ebony:
In 2020, I started coaching, and I was only two years into my private practice. One of the things that helped save my business during COVID was getting contracts with school districts who were in desperate need of speech-language pathologists.
A lot of their SLPs went on leave or decided they didn't want to work during COVID. So school districts went virtual and hired contract companies to provide services while their teachers were not working or while they couldn't find people to provide those virtual services for students.
So 2020 was one of the biggest years for my company. I was only in business for two years, but between year one and year two there was a significant amount of growth because of the school contracts I was getting.
I decided I was going to teach other people how to get contracts with school districts because that could potentially save their whole practice. I started teaching a course online called the School Contracting Masterclass.
People kept asking for more classes, more information. They wanted to learn more about growing and scaling their business besides just getting school contracts. That's how I started coaching. That's how I started mentoring other people.
I've now been coaching and mentoring online for over five years. I've helped hundreds of speech-language pathologists and other allied health professionals in private practice. It's something I truly enjoy. I think this will be something I do even beyond owning my private practice.
Pam:
I love it. I love it — investing in others. Because in school they teach you how to be a speech pathologist; they don't teach you how to run a business and be a speech pathologist. So I love that you're doing that.
So what's on the horizon for you? What's coming up?
Ebony:
What's on the horizon for me is I will be hosting a live conference for all of the SLPs that I coach and mentor — and all of those I haven't had a chance to work with yet but want to be in a room and attend a conference for people who are just like them and want to learn more about business.
As I mentioned, one of my goals is to close that gap between the clinical knowledge and the business knowledge — or lack thereof — in our field. I'm writing a whole dissertation about this. This is the research I’m doing for my dissertation.
And I'm actually out there, boots on the ground, trying to provide the education, the resources, and the community for people in my field who want to start a business but don't even know where to start — or who want to start a business but need mentorship because they don't have a business background, like most of us.
So the next thing is my conference and, hopefully, continuing to grow my community.
Pam:
Amazing. This is awesome. Ebony, where can people connect with you to learn more about your practice and your events?
Ebony:
They can connect with me on LinkedIn — I'm Ebony Green. My practice is The Speak Center, so we’re online on Instagram as @thespeakcenter or on Facebook.
And my conference is called the Made For More SLP Business Conference, and we’re online on Instagram — our handle is @madeformoreslp.
Pam:
I love it. Ebony, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing your profit story with us and your amazing journey. I'm super excited that you are part of our community now and looking forward to your events in July of 2026.
Ebony:
Yes.
Pam:
So looking forward to your amazing event in July of 2026. I will actually be there as a speaker, so I'm super proud to be sharing and to help these entrepreneurs learn about the money side of their business, because it is so important when you're running your business to have a strong handle on the money — because you can help more people if there's money in the bank.
Ebony:
Yes, I agree. Well, thank you so much, Pam. I'm looking forward to having you speak at the conference as well.
Pam:
Awesome. Well, thank you so much again. I appreciate it.
That's all for today's episode. Make sure you like and subscribe. And if you need help understanding your numbers, just go to pamjordan.com — my team would love to speak to you. And remember, it's not what you make that matters; it's what you keep.