Jennifer Steiner, MBA ’10: Answering the Call for Compassionate Mental Health Care

Building experience and passion for mental health care

Steiner’s career has primarily centered on the healthcare industry, where she’s held leadership roles in marketing, operations, and branding. These roles gave her a broad view of the healthcare landscape, particularly mental health, and brought to light key gaps in the care patients were receiving. That realization helped ignite a passion for making a positive difference in the mental health of others that would guide her career.

“There has been an explosion of awareness for mental health, especially during the pandemic,” Steiner said. “Incident rates have increased dramatically, and the severity level of mental health conditions has also been on the rise. I felt like there was a lack of providers and options for people who needed a higher level of care.”

To respond to this heightened need for better care options, Steiner is building on her experience leading recovery-centered companies like Alsana and InnerChange to start her own business, which aims to improve the lives of those who may be struggling with their mental health. 

Creating Lightfully

Steiner says stepping into the role of a start-up founder was a new and unique challenge, but one she was excited to tackle. Her dream for Lightfully was to create an organization that could handle residential partial hospitalization and intensive outpatient care, and offer flexible options for varying levels of patient needs that traditional health systems are not equipped to handle long-term.

“When people are at the point that they get hospitalized, they are often medication-managed to stabilization. And then they get sent home, and it's like this revolving door,” Steiner explained. “I wanted to create a better solution, so we designed our program to be able to take pretty high levels of acuity, and be more of a therapeutic intervention.”

On her quest to create this new program, Steiner secured an investment of $50 million, backed by middle-market private equity.

“We started this company from nothing. It’s usually more of a venture capital thing to invest in a brand-new start-up, so getting a middle-market private equity fund to invest was pretty rare and exciting. I was very lucky to have that,” Steiner said. “Since that initial investment, we've opened 10 locations around California over the last three years.”

Important lessons from Ross

Lightfully is now a successful mental healthcare organization that provides process-based therapy to patients primarily in the Los Angeles, Thousand Oaks, and San Diego, California areas. Steiner attributes her success to mentorship throughout her career, valuable on-the-job experiences, and her learnings from the Ross School of Business.

“I did the Ross Executive MBA Program when I was sort of mid-career. We had two kids at the time and were adopting our third, all while working full-time, so it was very intense,” Steiner laughed. “I felt like it was a great chance to attend a top-tier school, and I really liked the flexibility of the program and how it was designed for people who were already well into their careers and had real leadership experience already under their belt.”

“Amidst all of the other things I was juggling, I’m so glad I was able to do it, and it's been an incredible investment. I don't think I would be here today as a three-time CEO if I hadn’t done the program,” she said.

Steiner says it was a great opportunity to build upon her existing experience as an executive and further her skills alongside a cohort of talented career professionals. While the curriculum she learned in class was important, Steiner says the most valuable thing she took away from her time at Michigan Ross was more personal.

"You leave with a lot of hard skills, of course," Steiner said. "But the most valuable thing I learned was to believe in myself."

I gained the confidence to know I had the skills to sit in a boardroom and not be intimidated. That's the piece that really propelled me to where I am now.

Working together for a brighter future

As Lightfully continues to expand, Steiner dreams of using its potential to help as many people as possible.

“I think we have tremendous potential to be a nationwide solution for this type of care that's consistent, scalable, and accessible,” Steiner said. “So I'm really excited about that journey that the company will take as we expand outside of California.”

Steiner has encouraged Ross students and alums interested in working in the mental health space to consider how they could make their own impacts on the growing mental health challenges around the world.

“It's a significant societal challenge that will require big brains and passionate hearts from many different specialty sectors to solve. We should all be doing our part, considering where we are in the matrix of solutions, and feeling a shared sense of commitment to being part of a solution because I think it will only get more challenging from here,” Steiner said. “With so many bright minds in the University of Michigan ecosystem, I can imagine that there's a greater impact that will be made.”