Today we’d like to introduce you to Gabrielle Juliano-Villani.
Hi Gabrielle, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I’m a licensed clinical social worker, and I started my career in child protective services. I burned out on that fairly quickly and moved into in-home care management for an insurance company. I loved that job, but I could see layoffs coming — so I started working toward my clinical license and quietly building a Medicare-based private practice on the side.
In the beginning I was seeing clients in their homes, 20 a week, while still working full time. Eventually I gave myself permission to quit and take the leap into full-time self-employment. I never looked back.
My caseload filled up faster than I expected, and I hit my ceiling much sooner than I thought I would. So I hired. My first therapist filled up, so I hired another, and she filled up, and that kept going until I had a 15-therapist, seven-figure group practice that I felt trapped in and dreaded showing up to every single day. That was the signal that something had to change.
In 2021 I got an unsolicited phone call from someone asking to buy the business. That’s exactly what I did — I sold in December of 2021, stayed on through the transition for a year, and then rebuilt everything around what I actually wanted.
Today I do B2B consulting and coaching, I’m a sound healer, I host retreats and in-person events, I sell digital products, and I’m a paid speaker all over the world.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It has not been a smooth road, and I don’t think I’d trust it if it had been. I built all of this myself. Neither of my parents went to college, I’ve been supporting myself since I was 18, and I took out loans to get through my BSW and my MSW, so I came into the field with a lot of clinical training and absolutely no business or entrepreneurial experience to lean on. That was a steep learning curve, and it stayed steep for a long time. Early in my career I never pictured myself as a small business owner or an entrepreneur, because that wasn’t the story I had been handed about what someone like me does, but working for myself kept calling to me until I finally listened.
The hardest part was probably leadership. There were enormous changes happening in mental health during those years, and I had never been in a CEO role or anything close to one, and yet there I was at the helm of a ship with 15 therapists who depended on me for their livelihoods. I was also learning how to run a business as someone with ADHD, which meant a lot of trial and error before I figured out that I needed systems built around how my brain actually works instead of how I thought a CEO’s brain was supposed to work. By the end of it I had a seven figure practice and a schedule I dreaded waking up to, which is its own particular kind of hard to explain to people who see the numbers and assume you’ve made it.
Starting over brought a completely different set of growing pains. Building a brand new business means building an audience, visibility, and offers from nothing, and marketing yourself as a coach and speaker is a wildly different animal than filling a clinical caseload. There are still ups and downs. There always will be. But I get to build this one around my capacity instead of against it, and that has made every bit of it worth it.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I run two sides of one business. On one side I do consulting and training for therapists and group practice owners who want to work with Medicare and Medicaid, which is a corner of this field that almost nobody wants to touch because the rules feel impenetrable and the horror stories are loud. On the other side I coach entrepreneurs and speak all over the world about burnout, nervous system capacity, and what sustainable growth actually looks like when you stop borrowing someone else’s definition of success. I’m also a certified sound healer, I create CE trainings that are ASWB and NBCC approved, I sell digital products, and I host retreats and in person events.
What I’m known for is probably making Medicare and Medicaid feel possible. I built a Medicare-based practice from nothing, grew it to 15 therapists and seven figures, and did all of the billing myself for years, so when I tell someone their credentialing timeline or their documentation is going to be fine, it’s because I have personally been in the weeds of it and not because I read about it. The other thing people know me for is talking honestly about burnout from the inside. I’m a therapist who burned out twice, once in child welfare and once in the practice I built myself, and I’d rather say that plainly than perform having it all figured out.
The thing I’m most proud of is not the seven figures or the sale. It’s that I noticed I had built something I dreaded, and I let myself dismantle it instead of white knuckling my way through another five years because it looked good from the outside. Selling in 2021 and rebuilding around my actual capacity was the hardest and best decision I’ve made, and it’s the decision I now help other people make when they come to me with a business that’s working on paper and eating them alive in practice.
What sets me apart is that I don’t separate the operational from the nervous system stuff. Most consultants will fix your systems and most coaches will talk about your mindset, and I think both approaches miss the point on their own, because a beautifully built practice will still make you miserable if you built it while running on empty. I’m also ADHD and neurodivergent myself, and I build everything I do to be neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+, and BIPOC affirming, which means the strategies I give people are designed for how brains and bodies actually work rather than how productivity culture insists they should.
Risk taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
Asking an ADHDer about risk might not get you the answer most people are expecting. I’m not risk averse at all, though I do think risks need to be calculated ones, and I’ve gotten better over the years at telling the difference between a leap and a flail. But I stand by the old line that there’s no reward without risk, and I think if you want something in life it is going to feel risky, because the places where we grow and expand are never the places where we already feel comfortable. Sometimes you just have to make the leap. It’s not a feeling, it’s a decision.
I’ve taken a few big ones. Quitting a stable full time job with benefits while I was seeing 20 clients a week on the side was the first, and it terrified me right up until the moment I did it. Hiring my first employee was another, because payroll makes the whole thing real in a way nothing else does, and every hire after that was a promise I was making to somebody’s livelihood. Selling a seven figure business that I had spent years building was probably the biggest, and it was also the one people understood the least, because from the outside there was no obvious reason to walk away from something that successful.
The riskiest thing I’ve done professionally, though, might be integrating sound healing and intuitive work into my career as a licensed clinical social worker. That one carried real reputational risk in a field that can be pretty quick to dismiss anything it can’t put in a treatment plan, and I sat with it for a while before I claimed it publicly. I’m glad I did. Every meaningful expansion in my life has come from doing the thing that felt exposing before it felt safe, and waiting for the fear to go away first would have meant waiting forever.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://gabriellejulianovillani.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/gjvconsulting
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gabrielle.villani
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabriellejulianovillani/
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@gabriellejulianovillani
- Other: https://medicareconsultingfortherapists.com
