6 minute read
Talking Up 10 Years
By Elisabeth Silvester
Image: TalkHQ co-owners Jenna Mottin, Julie Sexton, Alex Hartley
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Image Credit: Hello Muse Photography
A small North Queensland business has emerged as leaders of the pack by removing the barrier of distance and creating a family orientated mindset.
It is a story of courage for speech pathology clinic TalkHQ Speech Pathology which was started by speech pathologist Julie Sexton a decade ago. After Julie migrated back from Ireland to Australia with just a suitcase in her hand and the clothes on her back in 2012, she was determined to build a business empire to help people. “I was able to borrow money from my Mum and Dad and use that money to buy the assessments and things that I needed to initially set up the practice,” she says. “I then rented a room from my dad, who had a dental surgery in Ayr and in those days, the best way to announce a new business was to put advertisements in the local newspaper, so I borrowed more money from Mum and Dad and did that.”
TalkHQ helps children close communication gaps with therapy services to improve their talking, listening, reading, and writing skills by using play to help make the learning fun. Julie says after growing up in Ayr she understood the barriers for families to access vital health services.
“I was aware of the lengths people had to go to, to be able to access speech pathology if you were in the country versus a city,” she says. “The unfairness of it all really drove me to start the practice, but I did not want to stop with one clinic. “Even when I opened our first clinic, I was strategising how to grow and open TalkHQ clinics all around North Queensland so that we could make it that no family would be disadvantaged just because they lived in a rural area.” The business is now proud to have clinics in Townsville, Ayr, Ingham and Mount Isa along with outreach programs on Palm Island, Hughenden, Middlemount and Dysart. With the growth of TalkHQ came the need to develop a plan to help sustainably expand the company for longevity. Julie says she attributes the expansion of TalkHQ to the team's commitment to building a strong organisational culture. “The growth of TalkHQ has always been about increasing access to quality speech pathology and that is what we still strive and pride ourselves on today,” she says. “We were very aware that in order for us to achieve our mission we needed a team of likeminded people and in order to attract the right team members, we needed to consciously focus on team culture.
“This is systematically embedded into the organisation, from recruitment to meeting structures.” Julie says the success of TalkHQ could also be attributed to identifying the need to nurture and treat all team members as family. “There is a national shortage of speech pathologists and research at a national level has shown the average time in each job is about two years, especially in the Millennial and Generation Z team members,” Julie says.
“So, like most organisations, we are listening to team members and potential team members to see what they value and strategically work out how we can incorporate this systematically into the organisation.” As the business grew stronger over the years, so did the team members at TalkHQ with Julie welcoming co-owners Jenna Mottin in 2014 and Alex Hartley in 2021 to the hierarchy. Julie says Jenna has brought a “unique charisma and energy” to the company. “Jen was my little sister's best friend so we had known each other for years and she was looking at going into practice herself and when we got to talking, it was obvious we both had pretty much the same vision of where the business was to go and we said let’s do it together,” she says. “I have four children and the amount of workload that is involved in running the business is a lot so being able to share the responsibilities and to have someone else to talk to about how to roll out the business was really good and I didn’t feel so isolated.” Julie says Alex has been a consistent heartbeat of the business since she joined TalkHQ as a university undergraduate. “Alex Hartley had joined TalkHQ when she was a speech pathology student at JCU and with her outstanding clinical skills and previous experience in management, Alex's career progressed from speech pathologist, branch leader to Chief Operations Officer,” she says. “The decision to offer Alex shares in the business was the logical next step as she brought a distinct set of skills to the leadership space that was evidently going to take TalkHQ to the next level. “Alex is very structured, organised and systemsbased in the way she approaches problems, and she loves creating efficient systems and training.” During the 2019 Townsville floods the team had to band together after the clinic was inundated with water causing extensive damage to the clinic. Julie says dealing with the aftermath of the carnage made the team even more committed to serving North Queensland. “The flood was a massive challenge for us as we needed alternative accommodation to house eight therapists and two administration team members,” she says. “The ripple effect from stress throughout the whole team was immense and we lost team members in the process, so we really had to strip things right back and revisit the purpose and values of the company while focusing on team support and rebuilding the company from there. “Our biggest challenge was rebuilding our confidence and trust in ourselves as business owners and there were things we did poorly during this time and we had to make sure we learned from those mistakes to make the pain in this time worth it.”
Looking to the future, Julie says her firm goal is to consistently support and develop her team of speech pathologists and TalkHQ franchisees while investing in training so children can succeed. “Speech pathologists can now be in business for themselves but not only by themselves by duplicating our systems to grow their business,” she says. “Over the last 10 years we have made some expensive mistakes and had some incredible wins and it is being able to package that so other speech pathologists can hit the ground running with their own successful speech pathology business.”
