As a teenager, Christal (Chris) Wang was rebellious but never struggled academically. As long as she received what her mother considered to be good grades, then she wasn’t concerned about the behavioral issues. “What prompted my [ADHD] diagnosis was when I didn’t have that benchmark of grades anymore,” she says.
Now, Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Shimmer, a company that offers affordable, culturally-competent, behavioral care for people who have ADHD. Founding her company stemmed from her own difficulty finding appropriate treatment options after receiving an ADHD diagnosis as an adult. She was hesitant to take medication due to her Asian cultural upbringing. “Most Asian families are a little bit hesitant about Western medicine,” she says. “Even when I was growing up, when we were sick, we wouldn’t take medication.”
Wang researched behavioral solutions and then learned about ADHD coaching. This form of treatment sounded like a great fit for her, but there was a problem—the high cost and it’s not covered by health insurance. “When I saw the prices, they were just so expensive,” she says about the cost to see different coaches with whom she had consultations.
How one question resulted in a 1,000-person waitlist
She then posted a question in an ADHD coaching group asking, “Why is ADHD coaching so expensive?” Over 50 ADHD coaches responded. After hearing their replies, she decided to create a business offering ADHD coaching at a lower price. When she launched Shimmer, she had a waitlist of over 1,000 people.
Prior to creating Shimmer, Wang had another business that focused on people who had social anxiety. When that business ended, she approached those investors, and they agreed to invest in her new company since there was already an extensive waitlist of interested clients who had ADHD.
“ADHD coaching has been known as kind of elite,” explains Wang. Due to the high costs, people who use ADHD coaching were typically professionals who had their company pay for the expense. “We really want to change that narrative,” she says. To do this, she needed to evaluate ways to reduce the costs of ADHD coaching.
Most individual ADHD coaches spend over 50% of their time trying to sell their services or complete administrative tasks like billing or consultation calls. “That’s actually why the one-on-one costs are so high,” explains Wang. It isn’t due to the time only spent on ADHD coaching sessions.
The staff at Shimmer complete those tasks for the ADHD coaches, including matching clients with an appropriate coach. This frees up the ADHD coaches’ time to actually coach instead of doing sales or administrative tasks. Another added benefit is that clients will receive an appropriate coach match instead of researching one on their own. And if the client doesn’t think their coach is effective, they can request a different one.
Virtual care that’s a game changer for adults living with ADHD
The Shimmer platform offers all of the services to clients virtually. Wang thinks that this modality is a game changer for people with ADHD. She explains why offering virtual sessions helps people with ADHD due to a phenomenon called ADHD waiting mode. She says the meaning of this term is “when you have something that you need to do later that day, you actually can’t do anything else because you’re just in waiting mode for the thing in front of you.”
If someone with ADHD needs to go to an in-person appointment, they will need to get dressed, travel to the appointment and allow enough time to get there. All of these factors add to the ADHD waiting mode, leaving the person unable to accomplish other tasks—or they might cancel their appointment. A virtual appointment removes these related stresses.
A bonus of the virtual platform is that they offer body doubling accountability sessions, live events and educational modules. There is also in-app support. Clients can choose from three different membership levels that include various amounts of time with a coach, but all levels include the other services offered.
Wang’s advice on creating a new business
If you are thinking about starting your own business, Wang suggests that you should be passionate about it. She further explains that it’s important to “be passionate about the problem and not necessarily the solution.” When someone focuses mostly on the solution that is referred to as a Solution in Search of a Problem. Wang explains that when you focus on the problem, “it becomes more dynamic, because you’re constantly thinking about how else can I help them?”
She also says it’s important to find a community that supports your business and helps you when you are struggling with an issue. “When you have a really bad week, you just want someone to understand,” she says.
Photo courtesy of Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock
