Howard Baumgarten is a Licensed Professional Counselor, author, consultant, speaker, wellness and small business-training expert, and owner of a successful mental health private practice in Lakewood, Colorado. He is the founder of Smart Practice Central, a healthcare business-building platform that values intelligent, ethical, and clinically minded practice development, and provides clinical practice business consultation and trainings to private practices and healthcare agencies. Howard has lectured throughout the country on the integration of mental health and business, focusing on practice development, working within managed care systems and the impacts of the Affordable Care Act on mental health care. He is the author of Private Practice Essentials: Business Tools for Mental Health Professionals, a guide to starting and successfully managing mental health practice.

In 2003, he developed and implemented the first practice building business curriculum in a graduate level-counseling program in the country at the University of Colorado, where he taught this curriculum for twelve years. He is the former Director of Network Relations for Westside Behavioral Care, Inc., a clinical group practice he helped build into one of Colorado's largest outpatient behavioral health practices. Howard routinely consults and trains businesses and organizations across a variety of industries in areas including managing stress, building resilience, creating work/life balance, burnout prevention, and other wellness related topics.