The first contract was already approved. The founders hadn't even opened a bank account.
Veronica Simpkins and Ashley Green had walked into a meeting with a San Antonio organization hoping to explain why new mothers needed better access to breastfeeding support. Instead, they discovered that the director was ready to pay them to provide the services they had been offering for free.
They accepted the contract, walked into the parking lot, and realized they needed a bank account to receive the money.
It was a turning point that revealed something fundamental about the business they were building. For three years, the two nurses had been providing a service that families desperately needed but often couldn't afford. They knew the demand existed because they had been meeting it themselves, visiting homes after completing their nursing shifts and donating their professional time.
What they hadn't yet established was a sustainable way to fund that care.
The contract introduced a possibility that extends far beyond nonprofit organizations: The people who need your service aren't necessarily the people who should be paying for it.
Nearly a decade after deciding to work together, Veronica and Ashley have built Latched Support into a maternal and infant health nonprofit with five programs, approximately 20 employees, and what Veronica described as a $1.6 million operation.
Their story offers a compelling case study in identifying an overlooked market, finding the right economic buyer, and building an organization around a problem that conventional service delivery had failed to solve.
But it also raises a less comfortable question for founders: How many worthwhile businesses never become sustainable because their founders mistake an inability to pay for an absence of opportunity?
Two Strangers, One Nursing Shift, and a Problem Neither Could Ignore
Veronica and Ashley knew each other for approximately 12 hours when they decided to become business partners.
They were working as registered nurses and lactation consultants when a conversation about their patients began to take on a different significance. Again and again, mothers leaving the hospital told them they wished they could take their lactation consultants home.
The request reflected an obvious gap in care. A new mother could receive professional breastfeeding support while hospitalized, but the moment she returned home, the availability of that hands-on guidance changed dramatically. For women struggling to feed their babies, discharge didn't mean the problem had been resolved. It often meant they were about to face it alone.
Veronica and Ashley understood that an in-home lactation consultation could cost approximately $250 an hour. They also understood that many of the families who needed that service couldn't afford it.
They had two choices: accept that limitation as part of the healthcare system or find another way to deliver the care.
By the end of their shift, they had chosen the second.
Their first outreach was a Facebook post offering to visit mothers in their homes. They showed up with the equipment they needed, provided professional lactation support, and charged the families nothing.
For the next three years, they continued working as nurses while volunteering their time.
Some colleagues viewed their efforts as a nice hobby. The founders were still learning how to create a nonprofit, how to operate safely outside the hospital, and how to turn a shared commitment into an organization capable of supporting itself.
The partnership itself was developing alongside the business.
They hadn't spent years discussing their personalities, comparing leadership philosophies, or negotiating every possible disagreement before becoming cofounders. They had recognized a shared problem and decided to work on it together.
Nearly a decade later, both women speak about the advantages of having a partner whose strengths complement their own. They also acknowledge the tears, difficult staff conversations, disagreements, and growing pains that came with building an organization.
That is an important distinction for anyone considering a business partnership. Shared values may be enough to begin working together, but they don't eliminate the need to develop trust, navigate conflict, or make consequential decisions under pressure.
In this case, trust was something the founders built while doing the work.
And the work would eventually become far more personal than either expected.
They Knew How to Care for Mothers. Then They Became the Mothers Who Weren't Heard.
Ashley was already a postpartum nurse and lactation consultant when she experienced serious complications after the birth of her youngest child.
She knew the warning signs that should concern a healthcare provider. Yet when she experienced severe headaches, abdominal pain, difficulty breathing, and dangerously elevated blood pressure, she struggled to get her concerns taken seriously.
She went to the emergency room three times in one week.
According to Ashley, she was repeatedly told she was probably experiencing postpartum anxiety and should go home.
She continued advocating for herself and eventually sought care from a cardiologist. She remembers the doctor telling her:
“Ashley, one more day, you wouldn't be here. You're already in heart failure.”
The implications of that experience stayed with her.
She had the professional training to recognize that her symptoms were concerning. Her mother was also a nurse. She understood enough about healthcare to continue asking questions, challenge the explanations she received, and seek another medical opinion.
But what happens to a mother without that knowledge? What happens when she has no medical professional in her family, no one to accompany her to an appointment, or no reason to question what she's being told?
Years later, Veronica encountered her own frightening experience.
By then, she had spent years helping build an organization focused on maternal health and patient advocacy. Yet during her pregnancy, she repeatedly felt that her concerns weren't being adequately addressed. She described having to remind her healthcare provider about her medical history and questioning a blood pressure reading that didn't reflect what she had been experiencing.
Her son was ultimately born at 30 weeks, weighing two pounds and 14 ounces, and spent 50 days in the neonatal intensive care unit.
For both women, the experiences exposed a painful contradiction. They had spent their professional lives caring for mothers, yet their own medical knowledge hadn't protected them from serious difficulties navigating the healthcare system.
Their experiences aren't proof that every healthcare professional or institution fails patients. They do, however, illuminate the consequences when patients' concerns aren't adequately heard or investigated.
For Latched Support, those experiences reinforced the importance of giving women information, resources, and the confidence to ask questions about their own care.
They also help explain why the founders refused to define their organization exclusively around breastfeeding.
A feeding problem might be the reason someone called. It wasn't necessarily the most serious problem the family was facing.
And sometimes, discovering the difference could change a life.
The Visit That Changed Their Understanding of the Business
During one early home visit, Veronica and Ashley met an 18-year-old mother who had been referred for help breastfeeding her baby.
They expected a relatively straightforward lactation consultation. Instead, they became concerned when the young mother's milk production didn't match what they anticipated.
As they asked more questions, they learned she had experienced a difficult delivery and had been running a fever. She had been taking medication and understood that a postpartum fever was normal.
The nurses urged her to contact her obstetrician.
According to the founders, the physician subsequently discovered retained placental fragments, and the young mother was developing sepsis.
What began as a breastfeeding appointment had revealed a potentially life-threatening medical problem.
Ashley also recalled that the young mother's own mother spoke Spanish and hadn't received adequate translation support to understand the hospital's discharge instructions. A family member who could have helped identify warning signs had not been fully equipped to do so.
The experience challenged the founders' understanding of what their organization needed to provide.
Breastfeeding support was important, but so were food, housing, education, medical follow-up, basic supplies, and the ability to navigate a complicated healthcare system.
If those needs weren't addressed, a lactation consultation alone might accomplish very little.
This is where their story becomes especially relevant to business owners outside healthcare.
Customers often approach a business with the problem they can identify, not necessarily the problem that most needs to be solved.
A business advisor may be hired to improve sales only to discover that the company cannot fulfill additional orders profitably. A leadership consultant may be brought in to address employee turnover and find that the real issue is the founder's reluctance to delegate authority. A financial professional may be asked to reduce expenses when the larger problem is a pricing model that cannot support the business.
The initial request creates the relationship. Understanding what is happening beneath it creates the opportunity to deliver meaningful value.
Veronica and Ashley could have continued providing breastfeeding consultations and considered their work successful whenever a feeding issue improved.
Instead, they allowed what they learned inside their clients' homes to change how they defined the problem.
That decision helped shape Latched Support's evolution into a broader maternal and infant health organization.
But recognizing a bigger problem also created a bigger financial challenge. Delivering more services would require more people, more training, and more dependable funding.
They couldn't build all of that on volunteer hours.
Three Years of Free Work Proved the Need. Their First Contract Proved the Model.
There's a tendency to romanticize founders who sacrifice their time, work without compensation, and keep going despite uncertainty.
Veronica and Ashley certainly demonstrated that level of commitment. But three years of unpaid work wasn't the business model they ultimately needed.
It was a period of testing, learning, and collecting evidence.
They kept a basic register documenting the mothers they served, appointment dates, and the problems they encountered. Their initial recordkeeping was simple, but it became important when they needed to demonstrate that families were using the service.
As Veronica explained:
“And that register book was our first documentation that we were making an impact.”
That detail deserves attention.
The founders hadn't waited until they could afford sophisticated systems or hire a research team to start documenting their work. They captured information from the beginning and gradually developed evidence that other organizations could understand.
Their first institutional contract came when the Children's Shelter Nurse Family Partnership wanted to improve breastfeeding support for its clients.
The organization had a need that aligned with the service Veronica and Ashley were already delivering.
The families would receive care. The institution would pay for it.
For the first time, the founders could see a practical way to grow without requiring every mother to pay for her own appointment.
This changed the economics of the organization.
Rather than trying to convince families with limited financial resources to purchase a service they already needed, the founders could work with institutions that had a reason to make that service available.
The distinction is more consequential than it first appears.
Many founders define their customers primarily as the people who consume their products or services. But in some markets, the economic buyer and the beneficiary are different.
An employer may fund a service that benefits employees. A school may purchase support that benefits students. A healthcare organization may contract with a community provider to extend the services available to its patients.
The existence of an institutional buyer doesn't automatically make a business viable. The founder still must demonstrate value, negotiate workable agreements, manage delivery costs, and avoid becoming dependent on funding that could disappear.
But identifying the right payer changes which business model becomes possible.
For Latched Support, institutional contracts became an important part of building revenue while preserving free access for families.
The organization could now pursue growth through partnerships rather than relying exclusively on the founders' willingness to donate their time.
That was the real significance of the meeting that ended with two nurses scrambling to open a bank account.
They hadn't simply found someone willing to support a good cause.
They had begun identifying a market for the outcomes their organization could help deliver.
Growth Created a New Responsibility: Making Sure the Care Didn't Depend on Them
Building an organization around a personal mission presents another challenge once demand begins to grow.
The qualities that make founders effective early on aren't automatically transferable to a team.
Veronica and Ashley brought years of nursing experience, clinical judgment, and personal conviction to every family they served. They could recognize warning signs, ask additional questions, and understand the circumstances surrounding a mother's care.
But an organization cannot sustainably serve thousands of families if that judgment and commitment exist only in its founders.
By the time of their podcast conversation, Latched Support had grown to approximately 20 employees, with program managers, community health workers, doulas, lactation professionals, and educators contributing to its work.
The founders described developing training opportunities that allow women with lived experience, including former clients, to enter the maternal health workforce.
A woman who once needed additional support during pregnancy or postpartum may eventually train as a doula and provide that support to another family.
The model creates workforce opportunities while connecting families with people who may understand their circumstances from personal experience.
Yet growth has also required Veronica and Ashley to become more deliberate leaders.
They discussed difficult employee conversations, the importance of complementary leadership strengths, and the expectations they establish for workplace behavior.
They want a compassionate organization, but they don't confuse compassion with avoiding accountability. They are direct about refusing to tolerate gossip, hostility, or behavior that undermines colleagues.
Their standards extend to the families receiving services.
“The same level of respect, quality and dignity is extremely important to us.”
That statement is a useful reminder that free services don't eliminate the obligation to deliver excellent customer experiences.
In fact, dignity becomes especially important when recipients have limited alternatives or may already feel vulnerable asking for help.
The founders attribute much of their growth to word-of-mouth referrals, which suggests that the way people experience the organization has been an important part of how it reaches additional families.
They also described integrating services into three San Antonio hospitals and developing plans to expand virtual support across Texas.
Through a separate education and consulting venture, A&V Innovations, they are working to make their professional training and program development knowledge available to other organizations.
These efforts reflect a business that is moving beyond the founders' personal capacity to provide services.
But scale introduces tradeoffs. New programs require funding and specialized skills. Institutional relationships can create dependencies. Training other providers increases reach while introducing questions about consistency and quality.
For any founder whose reputation has been built on personal expertise, the challenge is familiar.
How do you grow without allowing the very standards that made the business valuable to become diluted?
Latched Support's approach has been to invest in people, training, partnerships, and a culture that reinforces what the organization expects from its staff.
The underlying business principle is not that every founder should build a large team. It is that growth eventually requires transferring judgment and responsibility, not merely assigning more work.
What This Story Should Make Founders Reconsider
Veronica and Ashley's journey challenges several assumptions that can quietly limit a business.
The first is that demand and purchasing power must exist in the same customer. They saw a genuine need among families who couldn't afford conventional lactation services, then found organizations willing to fund that care.
The second is that founders must fully understand their market before they begin. Their knowledge deepened because they entered their clients' homes, listened, observed, and allowed those encounters to challenge their original assumptions. The organization they eventually built addressed a much wider problem than the one they initially set out to solve.
The third is that mission and financial discipline are competing priorities.
A service can be deeply meaningful and still require careful decisions about contracts, staffing, training, operating capacity, and sustainable funding. In fact, the greater the consequences of failing the people you serve, the more important financial discipline becomes.
For an established business owner, these ideas create a useful set of questions.
Are you trying to convince the wrong customer to pay for something valuable? Are you defining your offering too narrowly because that's how your industry has always described the service? Have you built a company whose reputation depends on your own judgment, without developing the people and systems needed to maintain that standard as it grows?
These questions apply well beyond nonprofit organizations.
A founder's most important competitive advantage is often the ability to see a problem that others have accepted as an unavoidable feature of the market. But seeing the problem is only the beginning. Building an organization capable of solving it repeatedly, affordably, and without depending entirely on the founder is where the business work begins.
Veronica and Ashley didn't start with a $1.6 million operation or a detailed roadmap for building one. They started with two nurses who believed new mothers needed more help than the existing system provided.
They tested that belief through direct service. They documented what they learned. They recognized a payer outside the families receiving care. And as their understanding of the problem expanded, they changed the organization to meet it.
Their story is not an argument that every worthwhile idea will become a sustainable business, or that every founder should spend years working without pay. Their early model depended on a level of personal sacrifice that would not be possible or appropriate for everyone.
It is an argument for questioning the economic assumptions that shape how a service is delivered.
Sometimes the obstacle isn't that people don't want what you're offering. It's that the conventional model asks the wrong person to pay for it.
And sometimes the business opportunity becomes visible only after you stop asking how to sell the existing service and start asking what it would take to solve the customer's actual problem.
For Veronica and Ashley, that shift helped transform a volunteer effort into an organization serving thousands of families.
For another founder, it could change how she thinks about pricing, partnerships, market selection, or the next stage of growth.
The most valuable question their experience leaves us with is this:
What problem have you accepted as difficult to monetize when you might simply be looking for the buyer in the wrong place?
Continue the Conversation
In their full conversation with Cristy O'Connor and Aggie Chydzinski on the Badass Women in Business Podcast, Veronica and Ashley share more about the unusual beginning of their partnership, their deeply personal experiences navigating maternal healthcare, the resistance they encountered, and the decisions that helped them build Latched Support into a growing organization.
Their experience opens a larger discussion about who gets access to services, how founders recognize opportunities that established institutions overlook, and what it takes to build a business that can sustain its purpose.
Explore more founder stories and business analysis in the proveHER Blogcast, where we examine the decisions, challenges, and realities behind building and leading businesses.
