LifeSpeak (TSX: LSPK), the mental health and wellbeing platform for employee and customer-focused organizations, today announced the creation of its Growth Markets team, which will focus on expanding the Company’s global customer base to more organizations outside its traditional footprint of enterprise employers, insurers and health plans. The company also announced two new strategic hires leading the new division – Paul Estey, VP of Growth Markets, and Erin Dixon, Director of Growth Markets. Together, Estey and Dixon will build and lead a team focused on developing new relationships, models, and partnerships for reaching people and groups around the globe in need of wellbeing support.
The Growth Markets team will enable LifeSpeak to address the growing demand for education-based wellness solutions among many organizations that have not had access to this type of preventive health resource. As mental health support becomes more accepted, and in many cases, even expected, many organizations have turned to LifeSpeak for new levels of assistance. Clients who have experienced the benefit of sharing access to the LifeSpeak platform with their family members have expressed a strong desire for specific offerings to address the unique challenges of their loved ones. This is especially true for university students, and in response, has made partnerships with higher education institutions an important focus for the Growth Markets team.
The pandemic has brought increased attention to the mental health challenges students face and has intensified an already alarming issue. A 2019 National College Health Assessment survey of 55,000 students across Canada found that more than two-thirds of those surveyed reported being lonely and feeling overwhelming anxiety. Over 50% felt so depressed it was difficult to function, and more than 16% seriously considered suicide.
Through direct relationships, partnerships with organizations focused on social impact, and other arrangements, the new division will make LifeSpeak more available and accessible to people who can benefit from its micro-learning content created with world-renowned experts in their fields. The Growth Markets team will focus on ways to expand LifeSpeak’s footprint with people and organizations such as:
- Students and schools, especially university and college campuses,
- Small business owners and their employees,
- Industries with high self-employment, including artistic and creative sectors, agriculture, professional services, and real estate,
- Community health providers and practitioners,
- Seniors and professional caregivers, and
- Marginalized communities and populations that often struggle with unemployment or under-employment, such as minorities, recent immigrants, and refugees.
“Most traditional workplaces offer resources like extended health benefits and employee assistance programs, but the many people outside of these environments do not have access to the same level of support,” said Michael Held, founder, and CEO of LifeSpeak. “As a global leader in the wellbeing space, we have a responsibility to find economic models and partnerships that enable us to reach and support the people who need it most –it’s an obligation we take very seriously and are happy to fulfill. With Paul and Erin, we have the right team in place to make a positive impact for even more people.”
Paul Estey is an experienced strategy and marketing executive, entrepreneur, and social impact expert. Before joining LifeSpeak, Estey was Chief Innovation Officer at Public Inc., which he co-founded in 2008 to help leading companies leverage more strategic and business-oriented investments in social and community impact to drive profit with purpose. He also spent four years as VP of Strategy and Business Development at global SaaS fundraising software leader FrontStream (formerly Artez Interactive). He started his career as a business consultant at Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte).
“The pandemic has only heightened the need to provide better health and wellbeing support to people outside more traditional workplace environments and close the growing divide between the haves and have nots,” said Estey. “Having lived through my own challenges with mental health, I am especially proud to be working with the fantastic LifeSpeak team to support the organizations and people that are the backbone of our communities and have been marginalized by lack of opportunity and access to the same privileges that so many of us enjoy.”
Estey will lead the new Growth Markets team with support from Erin Dixon. Prior to LifeSpeak, Dixon spent more than a decade at Morneau Shepell (now LifeWorks) in senior roles across a number of program and product lines, including Employee and Family Assistance, Student Support, and Internet Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (iCBT). For several years in this role, Erin partnered with LifeSpeak, to enhance the wellness offering of many of her clients by integrating the LifeSpeak platform into solutions for her client base.
“In our early work getting this new division of LifeSpeak off the ground, we’ve had a tremendous response from the schools and organizations we have spoken with,” said Dixon. “We’re working on exciting new partnerships to serve these audiences and look forward to working with them to help provide the mental health and wellbeing support that everyone deserves.”
About LifeSpeak Inc.
LifeSpeak is a leading software-as-a-service provider of a platform for mental health and total wellbeing education for organizations committed to taking care of their employees and customers. With 17+ years of experience creating and curating thousands of expert-led micro-learning videos and other digital content, LifeSpeak’s proprietary library’s depth and breadth of easily consumable content helps companies around the world support their people anytime and anywhere. LifeSpeak serves a diverse global client base across many industries and sectors, including Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, insurance providers, and other health technology firms. To learn more, follow LifeSpeak on LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/company/lifespeak-inc), or visit www.LifeSpeak.com.
Forward-Looking Information
This press release may include “forward-looking information” within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Such forward-looking information may include, but is not limited to, information with respect to our objectives and the strategies to achieve these objectives, as well as information with respect to our beliefs, plans, expectations, anticipations, estimates and intentions.
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Forward-looking information is necessarily based on a number of opinions, estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable by LifeSpeak as of the date of this release, is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information.
Important factors that could cause actual results to differ, possibly materially, from those indicated by the forwardlooking information include, but are not limited to, the risk factors identified under “Risk Factors” in the Company’s prospectus dated June 28, 2021 (the “IPO Prospectus”), and in other periodic filings that the Company has made and may make in the future with the securities commissions or similar regulatory authorities in Canada, all of which are available under the Company’s SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com. These factors are not intended to represent a complete list of the factors that could affect LifeSpeak. However, such risk factors should be considered carefully. There can be no assurance that such estimates and assumptions will prove to be correct. You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information, which speak only as of the date of this release. LifeSpeak undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking information, except as required by applicable securities laws.
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