Strategic business coach for therapy practice owners.
I'm Cecilia. I built a seven-figure group practice in Canada — and I'm still running it. Creator of The Practice Growth Model™.
If you're here, you've already built a practice that works and you're being thoughtful about who you let into the next part. That's exactly the instinct I'd want you to have.
So this page isn't a highlight reel. It's the honest version — the wall I hit, the years I kept myself small, and the things that shaped how I actually lead.
If you're deciding who's sharp enough to help you build what's next, keep reading. This is who you'd be working with.
THE ORIGIN STORY
Finding power in rewriting an age-old story.
I wasn't born into certainty. I was born in Winnipeg, grew up in Chile from age five — my dad is Chilean — and came back to Canada at thirteen. Two countries, two cultures, two languages, two versions of belonging that never quite overlapped. I grew up first-generation Canadian in a biracial family, with parents who understood what it cost to build a life in a country that wasn't always sure it wanted you there.
That experience of being between worlds, never fully inside, never fully outside, turned out to be one of the most useful things that ever happened to me. It taught me early to question the dominant narrative. To notice whose rules were being enforced and whose experience was being left out.
I was the oldest of four, and achievement was the family currency. My dad used to say I'd either be a lawyer or a social worker — because I loved to talk, loved to debate, and had a critical mind that wouldn't quit. He wasn't wrong.
When I took my first social work class, something clicked into place. It felt like a homecoming — the same sensation I later had in narrative therapy training. I became a therapist because I wanted to help people rewrite their stories. What I didn't anticipate was that the most important story I'd eventually need to rewrite was my own.
That instinct — for noticing whose rules are being enforced, and whose experience is being left out — is the one I've used most in every room since. Including, eventually, my own business.
TWENTY YEARS IN THE OTHER CHAIR
What supervision taught me about business.
I've supervised over 100 therapists — from clinicians in their first year to people carrying cases that would keep anyone up at night. It's the greatest privilege of my professional life, and I still do it.
It's also where I learned the thing I use most in coaching.
A therapist can't see her own case clearly.
Not because she isn't skilled — because she's inside it. The entire value of supervision is stepping back far enough to see the shape of the thing. That's where the insight is. That's where the growth is.
Practice owners are inside their businesses in exactly the same way. Too close to see it, working hard on the part that's visible, missing the part that's actually holding everything else.
And a second thread, which took me longer to notice.
We're trained to be client-centred to the point of disappearing. The work isn't about us, so we learn not to take up room in the room. That's good clinical practice.
It becomes something else entirely when you own the business. The same instinct that makes you a careful therapist makes you an invisible business owner.
I've watched that pattern for two decades. It's most of why I can usually see what's happening in a practice within one conversation — and why I don't think it's a confidence problem.
THE HARD JOURNEY
The business books nobody warned me about.
I didn't go to business school. I went to the School of Social Work at Dalhousie. And when I started my private practice — full of hope, full of vision, excited to build something that reflected my values — I had exactly zero business strategy.
So I did what any good student does. I read the books. Took the courses. Implemented what the experts recommended. And when it didn't click, I assumed the problem was me — that there was some business competence everyone else had been issued and I'd somehow missed. So I read more. Researched more. Kept looking for the framework that would finally make me feel ready.
Here's what I slowly figured out: all of it was designed by men, for men. The leadership models were authoritative and hierarchical. The growth strategies prioritised competition over collaboration. The success metrics celebrated hustle over sustainability. And none of it honoured the feminist and anti-oppressive principles that guided my clinical work.
I was working fifty-hour weeks, sacrificing relationships, and staring at the ceiling at two in the morning. I hit a wall, hard — and I couldn't see a way forward if forward meant this.
The problem was never that I wasn't business-minded enough. The problem was that I was trying to become someone else's idea of a business owner instead of trusting the expertise I already had.
WHERE I KEPT MYSELF SMALL
The rate I couldn't say out loud.
I started my practice, in 2008,at $80 an hour. Most people around me were charging $95.
By the time I'd done enough training to justify $100, I sat with the decision for months. Not because I doubted the work — I knew exactly what I was providing and I knew it was worth it.
Because of what I imagined my colleagues would say.
Who does she think she is?
Nobody ever said it. They didn't have to. I'd absorbed it well enough to say it to myself, and it kept me small for longer than I'd like to admit.
It showed up everywhere after that. I carried more sliding scale than the practice could hold, and more pro bono than was sustainable. I told myself this was my social work values in action — generosity, giving back, staying humble. Some of it was. And some of it was insurance against anyone deciding I wanted too much.
I didn't set a revenue goal for the group practice for years. Not because I didn't have one. Because saying it out loud would have made me a woman who wanted that.
Here's what I know now. A business has to be profitable to be stable. Stability is what keeps the doors open, pays people properly, and means you're still here in five years for the clients who need you. The generosity I thought I was practising was quietly making the whole thing more fragile — for everyone.
Staying visible enough to grow, but never so visible that anyone would notice. I did that for years.
If you recognize yourself in any of it, you're in the right place. It's most of what I do now.
The year I started leading like myself.
In 2019 I bought out my business partner and started fresh. It was terrifying. It was also the best thing I've ever done.
For the first time I asked myself: what if I built my practice the way I approach therapy? What if narrative principles — challenging dominant stories, externalizing problems, re-authoring — applied to business building? What if I stopped trying to lead like the men who wrote those books, and started leading like myself?
I raised our fees
Properly, not apologetically.
I changed the split structure
The old one was generous to associates and unsustainable for the practice — which meant it wasn't really generous to anyone. A practice that can't fund itself can't keep employing people.
I made the practice the steward of care
For clients, and for the clinicians who work here. That one sentence changed almost every decision that followed.
I stopped doing it all myself
And hired people who were better than me at the things I couldn't hold.
Not because I'd found a better framework to copy. Because I finally trusted the one I'd had all along.
THE YEAR THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT SUSTAINABILITY
I became a widow at 37.
I was in the middle of building what looked like the perfect life. A thriving practice. A beautiful home. A marriage. I had the vision, I had the momentum, I had the plan. And then my husband died suddenly — an undiagnosed health condition, without warning — and everything stopped.
I didn't work for five months.
Here's what that taught me about sustainable practice that no business book ever could: my practice held. Not perfectly. Not without difficulty. But it held — because I had spent years building systems, developing a team, and creating structures that didn't require my constant presence to function. The work I'd done to make my practice sustainable wasn't just a business strategy. It was a form of protection I hadn't known I was building.
Grief changed how I show up as a therapist. It changed how I lead. It taught me that life is profoundly messy and that no matter how carefully you plan, things can fall apart without warning.
Because I had survived the most devastating experience of my life, the risks of building differently, leading differently, charging what I was worth, letting go of control — all of it became smaller. If I can survive this, I can survive trying something that might not work.
A sustainable practice isn't a luxury. It's the thing that allows your life to keep going when life decides to get hard without asking your permission.
That's not theoretical for me. I lived it.
It held because of systems, a team, and structures that didn't need me present to work. Four years later I'd have language for that — carrying capacity, the thing a practice can sustain rather than the thing it can reach by consuming itself. At the time I only knew it had held.
THE PRACTICE GROWTH MODEL
FORMULATION, NOT FORMULA
The model that came out of all of it.
When I crossed into seven figures without abandoning my values or burning myself out, something became clear: other Canadian practice owners were struggling with exactly what I'd struggled with. And nobody was addressing the actual problem — which isn't motivation, and isn't information. It's that nobody hands you a working model of the business you're running.
So I built one. The Practice Growth Model™ reads a practice as an ecosystem with four domains — Purpose, Profit, People and Process — that feed each other. A pricing problem is often a leadership problem wearing a spreadsheet. A hire who didn't work out is usually a Process failure, because nobody succeeds at a role that was never defined. At any moment one domain is governing what the whole system can do. The work is finding which one — and expecting it to move once you've solved it.
Purpose
Profit
People
Process
I work exclusively with Canadian therapy and wellness practice owners. The provincial regulations, tax implications, governance structures and cultural context of our market are specific enough that generic business coaching keeps missing what matters most.
WHERE I AM NOW
What sustainable actually looks like.
I have a leadership team that runs the practice alongside me — an operations manager and a clinical supervisor, both working in their zone of genius, both doing things I can't. I stopped being the answer to every question of the day.
I still see a handful of clinical clients, because I love the work. But the practice no longer depends on my income to survive — I'm a small percentage of its revenue now. I'm in the office about two days a week. I take around three months of holiday a year, most of it at a small place up at the lake that is my haven.
Mornings are slow. There's time for the people I love, for reading, for writing, for the podcast. And for this — coaching other therapists toward the thing they can see and haven't started.
I get paid to be the visionary of my practice rather than its operator. That's the whole distinction, and it took me seventeen years to build.
THE WORKING RELATIONSHIP
Who you'll be working with.
A coach — not your therapist, and not your supervisor
I bring narrative therapy, feminist theory and trauma-informed thinking into the business work. But to be clear about the relationship: here, I'm your strategic business coach. The clinical lens is the method, not the container. If you're looking for supervision or therapy, that's a different door and I'll point you to it.
Clinical wisdom applied to business problems
Narrative principles, systems thinking and trauma-informed approaches, used on your practice. Yes, we're bringing therapeutic concepts into the boardroom.
Someone who gets it because I've lived it
The hopeful beginning with no strategy. The draining partnership. The wall. The terrifying decision to start over, and the freedom of building something that actually works.
Real talk about what the change requires
No corporate language and no toxic positivity. I'm not going to tell you to just delegate or set boundaries without addressing why that feels impossible right now.
Feminist and anti-oppressive, as method
Your growth plan will challenge patriarchal business norms and build systems rooted in equity and collective care — not because that's ideologically correct, but because it produces better outcomes.
THE CREDENTIALS
What's behind it.
28
Years · Education
Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Social Work, with 28 years in mental health and 17 years building my own practice — through the whole evolution from practitioner to CEO.
17
Years · Practice
Founder and CEO of Eterna Counselling & Wellness Inc., a seven-figure group practice in British Columbia. Built from solo practice to an established group model using the same principles I bring to coaching.
20
Years · Supervision
Two decades supervising clinicians, and over 100 therapists supervised — from first-year practitioners to people carrying the hardest cases. It's where I learned that people can't see clearly what they're standing inside.
80+
Coaching
Over 80 Canadian therapy and wellness practitioners across coaching, programs and mentorship — which means I understand the provincial regulations, tax structures and governance requirements of this market.
12
Years · Teaching
Twelve years as a professor teaching social work and mental health — so I don't just know this material, I know how to teach it. Complex frameworks become usable. Strategic concepts become decisions.
The Model
And the approach
Creator of The Practice Growth Model™ — four domains, one limiting factor at a time. Explicitly feminist, anti-oppressive and anti-hustle: not as positioning, but as an approach that produces better outcomes than the conventional alternative.
Why I do this.
Because women deserve to be the leaders they already know they can be — and to build businesses that are properly profitable while they do it.
We all came into this work to help people change their lives. Coaching lets me do it one layer up: supporting leaders whose practices go on to change lives in communities I'll never visit, long after our six months together end.
That's the multiplier, and it's the part I'd do for free. The rest is strategy.
If something here sounded like your own practice — the rate you haven't raised, the goal you haven't said out loud, the decision you've been circling since spring — the next step is a conversation.
Not sure which? The Accelerator is one to one, six months, built entirely around your practice. The Circle is a room of ten group practice owners at the same point in the build. Same work, different company.