Latina-Owned Business Thriving in the Permian Basin

The West Texas District Office, along with our resource partner UTPB Small Business Development Center (SBDC), recently recognized Tanya Manriquez Lujan as the 2022 Small Business Person of the Year for the Odessa Area. Tanya owns West Texas Speech, which specializes in language, orofacial, and articulation disorders. Tanya holds a certificate of Clinical Competence from the American Speech, Language, and Hearing Association (ASHA).

Tanya started the pediatric outpatient speech therapy clinic at Odessa Regional Medical Center in Odessa, TX, in June of 2014. She soon opened her private practice in 2016 after seeing the shortage of therapy services in the Permian Basin and West Texas area. She is the only dually certified "Speech-language pathologist and Certified Orofacial Myologist" in West Texas currently.

Since beginning the private practice in February 2016, the practice has grown progressively with the vast need and demand for their services in the Permian Basin and surrounding 17 counties. In 2018 the practice overflowed into a neighboring suite in the same building to accommodate new providers, patients, and staff, increasing square footage from 1500 to 2500 sq. feet and adding three additional therapy rooms. Since 2016, the practice has risen annually in staff by 10%. By now, the practice is well established through web trafficking and word of mouth outside of their counties into bigger cities. The company consistently gets new client referrals from cities as far away as Lubbock, El Paso, and Dallas for their knowledge, training, and positive reputation in helping to remediate and improve communication, feeding, and swallowing.

More recently, in January of this year, 2021, they were approved for a 1.2-million-dollar SBA 504 loan to begin constructing four new state-of-the-art 5,000 sq. foot clinics.  

To qualify for the loan, Tanya connected with her local SBDC and received assistance creating a business plan to receive funding to move locations. Her request for commercial funding was approved! She is now located in a beautiful building on Medical Park Dr. in Odessa. The new clinic was just recently completed.