From Deloitte to Speech Pathology: How Corinne Vargas Built Two Businesses That Bridge the Gap
Corinne Vargas spent years crunching numbers at Deloitte Consulting before she realized the thing that actually lit her up wasn't on any spreadsheet. It was the mentoring. The coaching. The moments when she helped someone communicate better and watched everything else click into place.
That realization led her to grad school, a speech-language pathology license, and eventually two businesses: CVC Consulting, where she coaches professionals on communication skills, and SmartCharts, a goal-tracking tool built for therapists and educators. Her path is one of the most unconventional we've featured on Clinic Chats, and it's packed with lessons about knowing where your skills actually belong.
Business Communication Is Speech Pathology in Disguise
Corinne's consulting practice doesn't look like traditional speech therapy. Her clients aren't a disordered population. They're insurance executives, general counsel, professionals across industries who want to communicate better in meetings, presentations, and interviews.
But the clinical skills underneath? Pure SLP.
"I use all the speech-language pathology skill sets that we've learned throughout and apply them for business purposes," Corinne explains. Reading a room is pragmatics. Adjusting your word choices for different audiences is a language skill. Even accent modification work, which she discovered during a stint in India working on cultural integration for Deloitte, maps directly to what she studied in grad school.
Before COVID, she was doing 20 to 30 hours of consulting per week, juggling two to three large corporate clients and five to twelve independent professionals at any given time. The work is deeply personal for clients who often can't articulate what's holding them back.
"It's this piece that you really can't put any words to, which is kind of ironic. They know they're really good at their job, but they're getting held back because their presentations aren't hitting home."
Getting Rejected From Nine Grad Schools (On Purpose)
Corinne's road to the SLP license wasn't smooth. She applied to 11 grad schools with essays that were bluntly honest about her intentions: she wasn't going into clinical work. She wanted to apply speech pathology to the business world.
Nine schools said no.
"I think that was a reason for a lot of my rejection. But luckily, I was accepted to Northwestern here in Illinois, and they took a chance on me."
Northwestern didn't just admit her. They let her shape her clinical experiences around her goals, giving her room to translate what she was learning into the direction she actually wanted to go. It's a reminder that the SLP degree opens more doors than the traditional clinical path suggests, if you're willing to make your case and handle some rejection along the way.
Why She Built SmartCharts
The idea for SmartCharts came from two places: her consulting clients and her mother.
On the consulting side, clients kept struggling with the same problem. Communication progress is hard to visualize. Corinne would tell someone they were improving, but a verbal report and a boring spreadsheet weren't convincing anyone. People need to see their data.
The deeper motivation came from family. Corinne's mother had a stroke when Corinne was two years old and had to relearn how to walk, talk, read, and write. Her mother eventually recovered, but she reflected later on how frustrating it was to only focus on what wasn't working, like being stuck on the word "chicken," while making real gains in physical therapy and occupational therapy that nobody showed her visually.
"There was no visualization of how she was doing across the board to celebrate those wins. It centered her focus on the things that weren't going well, which is frustrating."
SmartCharts solves that. It helps practitioners write measurable goals, automatically tracks progress notes over time, graphs the data, and gives patients and students a portal to see how they're actually doing. It works across disciplines: speech pathology, physical therapy, OT, social work, education.
The tool launched at the 2019 ASHA convention, and the feedback Corinne got there still makes her smile: "Oh my gosh, I didn't know Apple came out with a product." She took that as a compliment about usability, and the team has kept that standard as they've upgraded.
Building a Tech Product Without Being a Developer
Corinne is the first to say she's not a developer. Building SmartCharts meant learning an entirely new language, hiring the right development team through a careful interview process, and eventually bringing on a CTO to lead the product roadmap.
"I had to learn a whole new language in terms of tech. It put me in a perspective of feeling like a client, because I have to learn so much. I would say things in other words that don't make sense."
That experience, feeling out of her depth in someone else's domain, actually made her more empathetic with her own consulting clients. It's a useful feedback loop: the discomfort of being a beginner reminds you what your clients feel like when they're working on something hard.
She's also clear about what SmartCharts isn't. It's not an EMR. It doesn't handle billing. It's designed to be supplemental, like a plug-in that handles the clerical side of documentation and goal tracking so clinicians can focus on actual care.
The Loneliness Problem Nobody Warns You About
When asked about her biggest struggle, Corinne didn't mention money or marketing. She talked about isolation.
"It tends to be a little bit lonely, but really surrounding yourself with the right talents and the right community of individuals to support you has been life-changing for me."
Running two businesses means constant decision-making: which features to build, which clients to take on, which developers to trust. Having a strong community on both the entrepreneur side and the therapy side makes those decisions less heavy. It's a theme that comes up again and again on Clinic Chats, and it never stops being relevant.
For anyone curious about CVC Consulting or SmartCharts, Corinne can be reached at cvargas@cvcconsult.com, and the SmartCharts platform is available at mysmartcharts.com.
Turning clinical skills into something new takes guts and the right tools behind you. ClinicNote is a HIPAA-compliant EMR built specifically for private practices and university clinics, handling documentation, scheduling, and billing in one place so you can spend your time on the work that matters. See how ClinicNote works.
Transcript
Kadie: You are listening to Clinic Chats, the speech therapist's private practice podcast, a podcast full of personal journeys where we not only talk about success stories, but also real life struggles of small business startups. Clinic Chats is sponsored by ClinicNote, a HIPAA-compliant, cloud-based EMR platform used specifically by private practice owners and university clinics. I'm your host, Kadie Jackstadt, and thank you for joining me today.
Kadie: Good morning to all of our listeners, and I wanted to go ahead and introduce our podcast for today, Corinne Vargas. So I wanted to introduce Corinne and a couple of the businesses that she has that are pretty unique to the podcast. First, she's going to give us a rundown of CVC Consulting, and she's also going to explain her site, SmartCharts. So Corinne, I know you have a lot to explain. Do you mind going ahead and telling us a little bit about your businesses?
Corinne: Absolutely. So I started as a speech-language pathologist about six years ago, and I specialize in CVC Consulting and servicing professionals that are within the business world in all different industries, insurance, general counsel, all across medical fields, all across the spectrum. And basically what I do under CVC is I use all the speech-language pathology skill sets that we've learned throughout and apply them for business purposes. I help professionals learn interpersonal communication skills, as well as presentation, interview, all different aspects to enable them to get to either that next level in their career or perform their positions and responsibilities a little bit better.
Corinne: It's super exciting because it's not necessarily a disordered population. It's a population that's just looking to add to their professional portfolio. So I kind of think of it as communications as almost like an application, like learning Word or Excel. You can whip out those tools as you need them.
Corinne: And then through CVC Consulting, I actually came up with an idea about three years ago, because a lot of my clients were struggling with the idea that communication is super hard to visualize. So I would be telling them, hey, you're doing a really great job within this session. And the simple fact that they couldn't see it or they didn't feel that the data and the information that I was providing them both verbally and then visually in some, for lack of better terms, boring spreadsheets, was just not adequate enough.
Corinne: So I created a program that is a quantitative program for speech pathologists, as well as physical therapists, occupational therapists, social workers, in both healthcare as well as educational settings. It's called SmartCharts. You can find it at mysmartcharts.com. It helps all professionals write really great goals that are tailored to their patients and or students, and then allows you to automatically track that information. What I mean by that is it will write your documentation and then it'll graph that information over time. And it allows you to give a portal to share that with your patients and students. So that's just a quick overview.
Kadie: So of course, these are pretty unique. Normally I have a business owner of a small private practice on the podcast and I've also had large private practice owners on, but I think you are the first who has, like you said, your business is not necessarily geared towards a disordered population. So I'm curious about your previous experience as an SLP and how that all transformed and led you to this kind of business.
Corinne: I was actually in the business world working for Deloitte Consulting. I thought I was really excited about being in the financial world. And I did a lot of number crunching for all types of businesses. So my numbers and stats was super exciting. But around year four, five, six, I realized that there was a little bit more to what I like to do for work than just the numbers. It became a little redundant. And I realized that was mentoring and that soft skill component.
Corinne: Well, I moved up pretty quickly within the organization and really wanted to understand what differentiated a great manager or a great leader versus one that was just able to perform the job. And I realized that it was those soft skills, being able to read the room. So when we, from a therapy perspective, pragmatics or social interactions, right? And then in addition to being able to take information and change it in ways and convert that content or those word choices to really hit home with different aspects of the business world.
Corinne: Outside of that, I got a really cool opportunity to go to India for a couple months and work on some of the cultural integration components. And that accent piece was a huge piece in terms of communicating both with our offices in India, but across the world. I was fascinated by that and then decided to jump back and go into grad school, got my license in speech-language pathology. And like I said, applied a lot of that clinical knowledge and information as well as some of the colloquial stuff that I learned every single day in the business world, brought it together and kind of bring those services to clients.
Kadie: Wow. So you always knew that you weren't going to take this SLP degree into a typical clinical setting.
Corinne: It's actually a little bit of a silly story, but as I was applying to go back to school, I applied to 11 different schools, not knowing what I was doing because I was coming from the business world. Didn't really have a lot of background or really understanding for the profession itself in terms of what I needed to know or what I needed to have in my background. And throughout the course, I ended up getting my second bachelor's while working as an actuary. And I got rejected from nine of those 11 schools.
Corinne: So luckily, because I was very honest about what I was going to do with my degree. But the simple fact that I knew that there was an opportunity in the business world that we could really make a big change, I wanted to break down barriers and people to be seen for their actual skill sets and abilities, but not necessarily based on the way that they sound or communicate.
Corinne: So in my essays, I was very clear about that, and I think that was a reason for a lot of my rejection. But luckily, I was accepted to Northwestern here in Illinois, and they took a chance on me and really allowed me to grow my practices there, which was really cool. I didn't work in just straight clinical type of environments. I got to use a lot of the information and translate it to where I wanted to go. So I'm continuously thankful for them taking that chance on me.
Kadie: That is so nice. They helped you gear the direction that you really wanted to go. And how long have you been in business now since graduating?
Corinne: Yeah, six years with CVC Consulting. And then that business that I started to really support therapists and be basically the administrative assistant for therapists, doing all the clerical, boring work that we don't really love to do. I created SmartCharts in 2019, and we just launched.
Kadie: Oh, awesome. And thinking about coming out of grad school, starting CVC Consulting, how did you approach even beginning that business? Can you recall?
Corinne: That's a great question. I actually leveraged a lot of my historical contacts in terms of when I was in the business world. I took two or three years where, obviously, I was going through grad school, but maintaining relationships as well as trying to really understand the needs of the business world. In doing that, I was developing these models that really help us understand how people are making changes on soft skills. So that's a little bit of a buzzword, EQ, emotional intelligence, as well as the soft skill acquisition piece.
Corinne: And as I was doing that, I was kind of creating different models and information, sharing it with my old contacts, and they just got more and more excited. So as I was ready to launch, I shared that information and a lot of different types of documentation to show what I was doing since it was relatively new, and just kind of went from there. So it was a lot of word of mouth to start, and since then, it's continued to be a lot of word of mouth. But I'm working on that online presence, I think all practices are.
Kadie: Right, right. Wow. So cool. On average, let's say before quarantine, on average, how many hours of consulting were you providing? And how many different businesses?
Corinne: Great question. Before COVID, I was doing anywhere on a weekly basis from 20 to 30 hours. There's also prep time associated just like with any other therapy session. It's just really tailored to their information or to their daily needs of their jobs. And then in terms of clientele, that's a little fluid because one company, so large companies that you could probably name, insurance companies, as well as business consulting companies, that sort of thing, they can provide anywhere from five to 10 clients at any given time. And then we kind of do pricing and billing based on the needs of those groups and individuals.
Corinne: So in terms of large clients, I would say these ones that everyone would know, I have two to three on board at any given time prior to quarantine, and then a lot of independent clients. So I could have anywhere from five to 12 of those going. And then post quarantine, actually, we've seen a little bit of a slowdown, but I think it continues to be important, particularly when we talk about consulting and moving into those next phases of your career.
Corinne: We know that COVID's really affected us all. So as speech-language pathologists, we are able to provide kind of a differentiated service in terms of helping people organize their brand and content for who they are going forward, interviews and next steps.
Kadie: Absolutely. And it's a whole new skill set to learn how to communicate remotely, whether you're used to doing in-person meetings, presenting yourself via phone or Zoom meeting, whatever it may be, a whole new skill set.
Corinne: Absolutely. Personally, my husband and I, who now both work together from our home, I've gotten the honor of hearing him in his meetings, and I'm like, oh, I need to refer him to you.
Kadie: Amazing. Hey, I will definitely take you up on that.
Corinne: I really, my rationale for getting into this line of work was to help as many individuals achieve their goals as possible. And oftentimes it's this piece that you really can't put any words to, which is kind of ironic, right? It's like, I know I'm really good at my job, but I'm really getting held back because either my presentations aren't hitting home or my ability to communicate what I do to different audience types and in different situations really varies.
Corinne: So yeah, it's a definitely needed skill, and it definitely changes over time, and I'm happy to help as many people. I get really excited when my clients come back to me and they're like, oh, I had a great meeting or a great interview, and this is what came out of it. And I was cognizant of X, Y, Z. So it's really funny that you bring that up because it's a hard thing for people to realize that they might need, but once they go through it, it ends up being a lot of fun and eye-opening as well, but also empowering. I think that's the biggest thing a lot of my clients take away.
Kadie: Wow. Well, maybe if I can approach this subject lightly, you might have a new client.
Corinne: You know what? You're getting a good idea there. I've actually gotten that question quite a few times in terms of how do I broach the subject of, hey, you might want to think about working on different communication components. I should maybe throw that up on my website. But it's just asking those open-ended questions to individuals in your life.
Corinne: It's a different situation than the husband-wife relationship, but at work, in terms of those development and performance meetings, a lot of times you can kind of go down this open-ended question route. How do you feel like this is going? How do you feel like that's going? Do you feel like you excel in one aspect, maybe giving presentations to large groups versus a smaller group type of atmosphere thing? And as you said, the virtual mediums have become so much more important these days, which is funny. I know you have a story or two about a virtual oops.
Kadie: Oh, absolutely. Yes. I'm just super intrigued. And of course, I'm going to check out your website as well, SmartCharts. What's the actual URL there?
Corinne: Yeah, it's mysmartcharts.com. I invite everyone to just go check it out. We are going through a revamp, so hopefully there will be a lot of cool, interactive information up there very soon, if not already. And the goal here, again, is to help practitioners and teachers serve their clientele. So I even use SmartCharts with my executive clients.
Corinne: And that was really the idea, is how do we break down goals and make it super fast to write a great goal for that individual, and then continue to show that information over time, whatever that individual education plan or plan of care might dictate from any level, and be able to share that visually.
Corinne: If I can tell you, too, the reason I came up with that one, actually, was that my mother had a stroke when I was two years old. So she had to learn how to walk, talk, read, write again. And as we reflect as a family on the toll of what she went through, and she now can talk, write, drive, all the good things, right? She reflected on the simple fact that she was so frustrated about the fact that she could only say the word chicken, yet she was making huge goals in the ability to walk and physical therapy, huge goals in her reading and writing goals for occupational therapy and everyday activities of daily living.
Corinne: But the fact that there was no visualization of how she was doing across the board to celebrate those wins and things that she was doing better was extremely frustrating and really centered her focus on the things that weren't going well, which is frustrating, right?
Corinne: As I went through not only the actuarial side and trying to make sense of data for my consulting years, I got into speech pathology and said, there's a real opportunity here to break these goals down and then make them accessible to people of all ages at different stages. So whether you've just undergone a stroke or whether you have a child with autism or anything in between, for me, a knee surgery in high school, being able to see those little goals that maybe my physical therapist was working on, strength and mobility. And I was really just focused on the fact that I couldn't run.
Corinne: But if I could see that I was making incremental movements in the right direction, I think mentally that would have helped me so much more, but also really rallied me for motivation and then also to ask better questions to your care team and be more involved. And also accountability, right? If I'm not doing my exercises at home, it's probably going to show up in lack of goal progression as well.
Kadie: Absolutely. So it sounds like it's something geared towards all disciplines of therapy. And I'm curious how you've been able to make that aspect of the business profitable. If you market, if it's a cost to utilize.
Corinne: Absolutely. And so it's interesting as we think about this in the context of ClinicNote, it's really a supplement. It's not meant to be an EMR or EHR. It's actually meant to be supplemental in terms of almost like a plug-in to help clinicians. Like I said, do the clerical stuff, but not the billing stuff. So let me be clear, as of now, we're not doing any billing and we're really looking to make sure that data is accessible, usable and really interesting.
Corinne: So the schema behind the marketing now is we're actually offering the program for free through at least the end of June to help all therapists and teachers that are migrating to virtual mediums. And you can get that at mysmartcharts.com and just say, throw in the code "clinicnote" in the message field and we'll make sure that we get you set up for free.
Corinne: But in the long term, we're just doing it on a license basis for each clinician and or teacher that's used. And we do group pricing as well as individual pricing. And it just kind of depends on the needs of those clients.
Kadie: Awesome. And what do you think the training aspect is? If I were as a therapist to get on today and I want to use it tomorrow, is there a learning curve or is it a pretty user-friendly website?
Corinne: Great question. As I said, we just launched in 2019 at the American Speech and Hearing Association convention, which seems so long ago, right? The idea that we were able to all get together. And the biggest piece of feedback that we had there was, "Oh my gosh, I didn't know Apple came out with a product." And the way that I took that was as a huge compliment or pat on the back. Because individuals were able to just jump in and use that tool immediately.
Corinne: And we've even made upgrades since then. And that's the number one aspect that we continue to get feedback on, that we continue to take to heart, is virtually no training, as easy as possible to get on and just start doing your work. So there's a lot of information in terms of support and support questions. But honestly, those forums are not being visited that much. So I'm going to say that it's pretty user-friendly and super easy to use. I might be a little biased, but I, again, invite everyone to try it out for free, at least through the middle of this year.
Kadie: That's awesome. And I hope that our listeners are just as intrigued as I am. Because now that I work for ClinicNote, I've seen the behind the scenes of website development. And it's so much more complicated when it comes to the developers. And I'm curious if you have been able to do that, or if you were hiring out to develop this site.
Corinne: Good question. I had, obviously, I am not a developer. I had to learn a whole new language in terms of tech. So I went through a stringent interview process to find the right developers to actually get the product off the ground. And then I recently just hired a CTO who's really in charge of all aspects, development and product migration or evolution over time.
Corinne: So I'm working with him and it's taken a huge load off my shoulders, but kind of makes me feel like a client a little bit too, right? Because I have to learn so much tech. It put me in a perspective of, like you said, I don't know how to say this. So I would say it in other words that don't make sense.
Corinne: But yeah. So at this point we have an internal tech team, which is great. Super exciting. And also makes us super dynamic. So I invite any users to give us as much feedback as possible, because we're continuously upgrading the product and making it even better every day.
Kadie: Wow. I'm amazed at everything that you're doing. Clearly the CVC Consulting seems like a full-time gig, but yet in the meantime, you've developed a whole other business on the side. So just kudos to you. And I'm trying to think if there's anything else. Would you like to add any other parts of the business or struggles that you've experienced along the way in business ownership?
Corinne: That's an interesting question. Struggles along the way. I think there's a lot of probably private practice owners and maybe some of the other interviewees that you've spoken with. It tends to be a little bit lonely, but really surrounding yourself with the right talents and the right community of individuals to support you in terms of those endeavors has been life-changing for me.
Corinne: I think, like you said, the difficulties of trying to decide what developers to go with and what features to integrate and when to integrate those, as well as what clients to take on. It's always a difficult part of business, but it's also a good problem to have, right. The fact that we're continuing to evolve. So I think my biggest struggle over this period of time has been really maintaining a good community of both on the entrepreneur side, but also the therapy side. And then also socially, I think we're all struggling with that right now.
Kadie: Oh yeah, for sure. So before COVID did you have an office and people came to see you in person?
Corinne: Yeah. So before COVID I do have an office, but I actually tended to go more often to client sites. So different offices here in Chicago, a couple of clients in New York. Actually they're kind of spread out through the United States. So I did a lot of traveling. So that's been a little bit of an adjustment.
Corinne: But outside of that we did do a lot of tele-video transmission of sessions. I hesitated there with teletherapy because again, accent modification consulting and that sort of side for CVC is not therapy, not disorder, but yeah, it's not been too bad of a transition for us. It's just there's a lot of big changes I think for a lot of clients. So it's being patient with them.
Kadie: Right. Yeah. And you don't need to go into the details of the cost. I'm just curious on the basic structure, whether it's an individual or a whole company, I'm sure there's different sorts of paperwork. How does that look? Are they signing off to a certain number of sessions or does it kind of go per need?
Corinne: The pricing model is actually really dependent upon the relationship with the client. And if there's any questions with any listeners out there regarding private practice and corporate support in terms of being a coach or being a speech-language pathologist that works in this space, definitely reach out and email me at cvargas@cvcconsult.com and ask those questions.
Corinne: But I price those based on, yeah, exactly like you're talking about, number of sessions, degree of severity in terms of that communication difficulty or difference. And then if we're working on just a couple of straight skills here or there, it'll be a flat fee per session depending on what skill set we're working on. And oftentimes, just for the listenership, corporate contracts tend to be a little bit more lucrative and expensive because we're working within a lot of different systems and having to integrate a lot of information.
Corinne: And then for individuals, I try to streamline that process. So it's a little bit less expensive because it's out of pocket and we're all working to do better with what we've got.
Kadie: Well, I am amazed at what you have created. I love how unique it is and now I can't wait to run off and go check these sites out myself. Awesome. Well, thank you for your time and for sharing your story and good luck with all of your future endeavors. It's going to go far, obviously.
Corinne: Thanks.
Kadie: Thank you for joining me and listening to Clinic Chats, the speech therapist's private practice podcast. If you have a moment, please leave a five-star review for Clinic Chats to help other SLPs find our podcast. If you'd like to share your own personal journey through private practice, please email me at kadie@clinicnote.com. That's K-A-I-D-E at clinicnote.com.