Listen to your clients, your team and the people who understand things you don't. Keep the purpose of the business clear, but don't become so attached to the original plan that you stop noticing when there is a better way to get there.
This week on Dynamic Business's Founder Friday, we're chatting with Dr. Queenie Wu, the founder of Mindspace Consulting. We caught up with Queenie to hear about her journey, from being an international student to becoming a renowned clinical psychologist who's making a real difference in Australia with her culturally responsive approach.
Mindspace is a bicultural, bilingual psychology and allied health practice offering clinical psychology, counselling and developmental assessments. The team works across clinics in Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane, plus telehealth, and includes clinicians fluent in languages such as Mandarin alongside English.
Dr Wu arrived in Australia at 19 as an international student, working out a new language and a new culture largely on her own. Before founding Mindspace, she spent years as a forensic clinician within the Victorian Department of Justice, in onshore and offshore immigration detention with asylum seekers, and at headspace. Today she's a clinical psychologist and AHPRA board approved supervisor, and Mindspace has grown from a single room she opened in 2019 into a women-led, multidisciplinary practice.
A psychologist's eye for what gets missed
Dr Wu says Mindspace didn't start as a business idea so much as a slow realisation built from years on the clinical floor. Across forensic psychology, youth mental health and community settings, she kept noticing the same pattern: people's distress was easy to misread when clinicians only looked at the behaviour or the diagnosis sitting in front of them.
"My clinical work taught me to ask not only, 'What's wrong with this person?' but also, 'What has happened to them, and what might be preventing them from being understood?'" she says.
That question became more pointed once she started working closely with culturally and linguistically diverse communities, where language, stigma and unfamiliarity with the Australian mental health system were keeping people away, or delaying them from getting help until much later than they needed it.
"I wanted to create a service where evidence-based psychological care and cultural understanding could sit together, where culture wasn't something considered afterwards, but part of how we understood the whole person from the beginning," she says.
Growing without losing the plot
Scaling a healthcare business comes with a constraint most industries don't have to think about as closely, Dr Wu says: growth has to happen alongside clinical governance and quality of care, not ahead of it. Mindspace built out a multilingual, culturally diverse clinical team, expanded into allied health, and invested in supervision and clinician development before chasing size for its own sake.
"Sometimes the right business decision has actually been to slow down, strengthen our systems and then grow again," she says.
For Dr Wu, the real test of growth isn't how many clinics or clinicians a practice adds, but whether the service can reach more people without losing what made it worth building. The question she keeps coming back to isn't "how do we provide more services," but "who are we still not reaching, and why."
Learning to run a business she was never trained for
Clinical training teaches you to assess, treat and supervise ethically. It says nothing about cash flow, recruitment, operations or opening new locations. Becoming a founder, Dr Wu says, meant becoming a beginner again, and watching systems that worked fine for a small team start to buckle as Mindspace grew.
She's learned not to treat a change in direction as proof the original decision was wrong, since businesses shift and what worked at one stage can stop fitting the next.
Her advice to anyone starting out is to build on something they understand at a personal level, not just a commercial opportunity. For her, that was knowing what it felt like to land in Australia young, learn an unfamiliar system, and live between languages and cultures.
"Keep the purpose of the business clear, but don't become so attached to the original plan that you stop noticing when there is a better way to get there," she says.