Help in finding work-life balance
SCHAGHTICOKE — As a local school-based physical therapist, paperwork was often the last thing on Margaret Rice’s mind.
Her focus was on engaging and educating the children who filled her classroom — a juggling act that she said often left other tasks unchecked on her to-do list.
Now, Rice owns and operates Your Therapy Source, an online resource that provides essential forms, activity ideas and worksheets in special education and pediatric occupational and physical therapy for educators and parents. It also makes all necessary state documentation for school-based therapists easy to find.
The Schaghticoke native launched the business in 2007 while home from work raising four of her six children. During the time away from the classroom, Rice thought often about the amount of work service providers have to bring home and complete after hours. Motivated by her passion to help students succeed at school, she sought out a method to devise a one-stop shop for information and resources to aid therapists in helping children improve motor skills and emotional regulation.
“When you’re one-on-one or in groups all day long managing children, you don’t have the time during the day to develop progress forms or printable activity ideas to do with them so on our website, you are able to get different ideas made for you and it really helps in terms of time management for schoolbased service providers and teachers,” Rice said.
In the beginning, the licensed therapist was creating the printable activities and authoring educational blog posts while growing her presence slowly in the now-outdated realm of 2007 internet.
“I just really stuck at it,” Rice said. She would get up early to work on the digital products before the children woke up and stay up on her computer after she tucked them into bed.
After having her fifth child, Rice began providing physical therapy again and was struggling to manage both the business and working directly with clients. She decided to step away from her day job and focus solely on Your Therapy Source, building her passion project into a crucial resource for schoolbased therapists and service providers, who are predominantly women. “For many of us, it can be very hard to have that work-life balance,” she said.
Rice has since built the website, www.yourtherapysource.com, into a lucrative platform for other vendors and artists to sell their creations, from screening forms and fine motor baselines to multisensory intervention and exercise games. She also designs classrooom posters that remind students on how to engage various coping mechanisms.
“I think post-pandemic, students are struggling with social skills and emotional regulation, so our posters are ready to hang in the classroom to give students ideas on how to reflect on and identify their emotions and learn about different strategies they can use to get their mind and body ready to get back to learning,” the entrepreneur said.
While the pandemic carried tremendous loss for many businesses, the switch to remote learning and telehealth services prompted recordbreaking profits for the digital resource platform, which has grown from earning $10,000 in its first year to multiple six figures annually. A major contributor was the stream of income coming from the business’s newfound partnership with Amazon, which allowed Rice to reach a much wider customer base than her regional group of physical and occupational therapists.
“Living in Schaghticoke, I’m not exactly a hop, skip and a jump away from everything, so it’s incredible through Amazon to operate a business in a more rural area but reach hundreds of thousands of customers,” she said. The partnership, in which Amazon handles shipping, has saved Rice countless hours previously spent printing labels and visiting her local post office and has cut printing costs exponentially, especially for colored products in larger formats, like the business’ array of posters.
Even post-pandemic, as employees strive for greater work-life balance, Rice continues to see more customers take advantage of the resources she herself was desperate for years ago.
“I’m a mother of six and I’ve done so much of this myself, it’s a nice accomplishment to know that I’ve had millions of dollars’ worth of sales and I’ve been able to build this business off a computer.”
And while the business’ financial growth has been more than gratifying, Rice is most proud of the network of worldwide educators that have leveraged her resources to engage students in a meaningful way. The venture is a way to continue her passion of helping children make gains toward their goals in educational environments. She offers myriad free resources for parents who come to the website for ideas on how to keep their kids active or practice visual perceptual skills.
“It’s very important that children developmentally need real-world play time and activity time away from the screen,” Rice said.
“I’m always hopeful that a lot of these activities will help keep kids busy and unplugged.”