Some entrepreneurs create successful companies. Others fundamentally change the way an entire industry serves people.
For more than three decades, Nanette Zumwalt has done exactly that.
As Founder and President of Hired Power, Zumwalt has dedicated her career to helping individuals and families navigate some of life’s most difficult moments. Early in her career, she recognized a heartbreaking reality. While treatment often saved lives, families were frequently left to face the journey that followed on their own. They were expected to rebuild relationships, manage crises, restore trust, and support lasting healing without the guidance they desperately needed.
Rather than accepting that reality, she built a different path.
In 2002, Zumwalt founded Hired Power on a simple but powerful belief: no one should have to navigate recovery alone. She envisioned a model of care that extended beyond hospitals and treatment centers, surrounding individuals and families with experienced professionals who could provide guidance, structure, accountability, and hope as they rebuilt their lives in the real world.
Today, Hired Power is recognized as one of the nation’s leading concierge community-based behavioral healthcare organizations, serving individuals, families, treatment providers, healthcare systems, attorneys, family offices, and professional organizations across the United States and internationally. The company’s services span interventions, safe passage, clinical case management, recovery support, monitoring, executive services, and long-term community reintegration, all designed around one central philosophy:
Treatment is where healing begins. Life is where recovery grows. With guidance, support, mentorship, and the right people walking beside you, recovery becomes more than staying well. It becomes building a meaningful life.
Long before continuity of care became a recognized priority, Zumwalt was helping families bridge the gap between professional care and everyday life. She understood that true healing happens around the dinner table, in the workplace, at school, during family conversations, and through the countless ordinary moments where people learn to live differently. That philosophy helped establish Hired Power as a trusted partner to treatment professionals while contributing to the evolution of community-based behavioral healthcare.
But building a company was never the ultimate goal.
Building a better way to care for people and families was.
Recognizing that recovery professionals needed greater education, accountability, and ethical standards, Zumwalt co-founded the International Recovery Institute alongside internationally respected family systems pioneer Dr. Judith Landau. Together, they developed professional training and certification programs that have educated recovery professionals around the world while helping elevate standards across the profession. Their work has received recognition from organizations including NAADAC and continues to influence behavioral healthcare education internationally.
Throughout her career, Zumwalt has remained committed to lifelong learning and professional excellence. She holds credentials as an International Certified Alcohol and Drug Counselor Level II Clinical Supervisor, Certified Intervention Professional, Certified ARISE Interventionist, and International Certified Criminal Justice Professional. She has also served in leadership roles with respected organizations, including CCAPP, AIS, and the National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers, contributing to conversations that continue shaping the future of behavioral healthcare.
Yet those who know her best rarely begin by talking about her credentials.
They speak about her compassion.
Families often meet Zumwalt during the worst days of their lives, when fear, uncertainty, and exhaustion have replaced hope. Her gift has never been simply solving clinical problems. It has been helping families believe that healing is still possible, restoring dignity during moments of crisis, and reminding people that they are more than the circumstances they face.
Her influence extends well beyond the clients she serves. Through national speaking engagements, media appearances, professional consultation, and decades of leadership, she has become a trusted voice for ethical, family-centered behavioral healthcare. She has been recognized nationally for her contributions to intervention and recovery support, but her greatest measure of success has never been awards. It has always been the lives restored, the families reunited, and the communities strengthened through compassionate care.
That same commitment to walking alongside people during life’s greatest challenges has guided another deeply personal chapter of her journey.
Following her own experience with kidney disease and a life-saving transplant, Zumwalt co-founded the Circle of CORE Kidney Foundation with fellow transplant recipients, patients awaiting transplantation, living donors, family advocates, and leading nephrologists. The foundation reflects the same philosophy that has defined her life’s work: while medicine can save a life, healing continues through education, advocacy, community, and the unwavering support that empowers people to move forward with hope.
Away from her professional responsibilities, Zumwalt’s greatest joy is found with her family. She and her husband, Dr. Richard Zumwalt, have built both a life and a mission together, raising their family while helping thousands of others rebuild theirs. As a wife, mother, grandmother, mentor, entrepreneur, and advocate, she believes leadership is measured not simply by professional success, but by the lives we influence and the legacy we leave behind.
Looking back across more than three decades, it becomes clear that Nanette Zumwalt’s greatest accomplishment is not the company she founded.
It is the countless people who found hope because someone chose to walk beside them when they needed it most.
She helped demonstrate that recovery does not end when a program does. It grows through relationships. It grows through community. It grows when people are given the guidance, encouragement, and opportunity to build meaningful lives beyond crisis.
Some entrepreneurs build successful companies.
Others build movements that continue changing lives for generations.
Nanette Zumwalt has spent her career doing both.
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