We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Megan Mount a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, so we’re so thrilled to have Megan with us today – welcome and maybe we can jump right into it with a question about one of your qualities that we most admire. How did you develop your work ethic? Where do you think you get it from?
My business partner, JB Hewell, and I both grew up playing sports, which helped develop our work ethic qualities such as leadership, teamwork, communication, and discipline. Also, our parents are both hardworking individuals who taught us and emphasized the importance of work ethic. In addition to work ethic, we have always loved helping others. Whether it’s friends, family, or really just anyone. I think the urge to help others has also helped us to have such a great work ethic.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
Right now we are primarily focused on providing quality, consistent, and personable care to our current clientele, which we think is most important at this point. However, JB and I discuss other outlets to increase education and social skills for the autism community and how we can do that. We are still figuring that out but we hope to get something started very soon.
DART provides ABA therapy to children and adults diagnosed with autism. We are both board certified behavior analysts, or BCBA’s, who bring experience from all settings including the clinical, home, community and school settings. Some people have a negative outlook on ABA, which can be valid due to old school ABA tactics. However, we bring a modern approach to ABA. We teach around play or more natural environment teaching, we never use punishment as a teaching procedure, and really rely on reinforcement and child led activities to build skill acquisition. DART thrives on building positive relationships with our families and we really want our parents involved as much as possible. If our caregivers are learning what we do and how we do it then our clients will make the most progress. More recently, we held our first community family social and plan to continue more events that encourage social opportunities for our clients and create a support system for the families we serve. We accept most health insurance and recently became contracted with Medicaid. We are super excited to help with the Medicaid community. For years they were unable to gain access to ABA therapy due to the high cost it can sometimes have on families. Additionally, we are excited to announce we’re expanding our reach to serve the entire state of Texas!
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
I have always been curious about people, why they do certain things a certain way, and so forth. JB and I both pursued degrees in the fields of education, psychology, and applied behavior analysis to focus on learning and teaching others. So curiosity in others is a big quality of ours. Also, we have always had the desire to help others and started working with the special needs community early on through volunteer opportunities, summer camps, and school related functions. Third, we have always had the ambition to learn new skills and really enjoy learning about everything. Our advice to others is to keep learning and trying your best, failure is part of the process but even when we fail we learn something new.
Okay, so before we go, is there anyone you’d like to shoutout for the role they’ve played in helping you develop the essential skills or overcome challenges along the way?
Obviously our families have been very supportive of our goals throughout our lives and they have always been there for us when times are great but also when times were tough. Certain friends have also taught us different aspects of life skills. Additionally, just life experiences have also taught us a ton. However, our spouses, Ben and Alison, have been there and are there for us all day everyday to provide the support and encouragement we need. We are beyond grateful for them!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.dart-therapy.com
- Instagram: @dart-therapy
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