Healthcare founders in Northwest Arkansas

Healthcare in Northwest Arkansas is a hiring story. The businesses on this page grew around one problem: demand for care outran the supply of qualified people.

Kym Hannah and Cindy Watson opened their first Children's Therapy Team clinic together in Fayetteville in 2005 and grew it into an outpatient pediatric therapy provider with five locations. Their episode covers a kind of business most founders never think about: a clinical business where the customers are children with developmental needs, the staff are licensed therapists who are hard to recruit, and the payers are insurers. They talk about building it a few therapists at a time, and what it takes to hold clinical standards while adding locations.

Taylor Faught has led TRS Healthcare in Rogers since 2012 and runs it as a national nurse staffing company from a Northwest Arkansas headquarters. TRS reported $315.4 million in revenue and was ranked the sixteenth fastest-growing staffing firm in the United States by Staffing Industry Analysts in 2023. His conversation is about growing through a market that wouldn't sit still. Travel nurse demand spiked and then fell hard within a few years, and he's candid about holding a team and a strategy together through both.

Health is the show's joint second-smallest industry group, which undersells how much healthcare matters to the region's economy. Northwest Arkansas has large hospital systems, a long list of physician-owned practices, and health technology companies that haven't been on the show yet. Children's Therapy Team and TRS Healthcare are worth hearing for opposite reasons: one is a local clinical business built slowly over about twenty-five years, and the other is a national staffing operation run from Rogers. If you're working through the hiring and retention problems both describe, try Charley Boyce of Paschal on the professional services page too. The two conversations below run newest first.