Lewis Finch, Company Founder, President, CEO  

Welwynn Outpatient Center was born from my own experience with addiction. Like many professionals with successful careers, I managed to build a thriving business in spite of being a full-fledged alcoholic. The day finally came for me to face the music and it was a turning point in my life for which I am profoundly grateful.

In March of 1991, I founded an advertising agency that grew from a single-employee start-up over my garage, to a multi-million dollar marketing firm that was voted the fastest growing business in Raleigh-Durham, NC in 1999. The business was purchased by a holding company in 2006 and I was made president over the holding company’s entire marketing division. Not long after this, I was charged with my second DWI and fear took over; the fear of losing everything if I could not stop drinking.  Shortly after, in June 2007, my wife drove me to a treatment center. I started receiving treatment and have remained sober ever since.

In the years following treatment,  I bought the agency back; lost my father, my wife and my mother; closed the agency; remarried and then divorced. But through all this chaos and trauma and personal tragedy, after getting treatment, I never drank. Never!

While in treatment and eventually while working with an addiction facility, I began to reflect on the path professionals have to take with their addictions and the special circumstances they encounter.  Welwynn Outpatient Center, slated to open in early 2016, will cater only to professionals with alcohol and drug addictions, allowing them to get help in a setting with people to whom they closely align. My belief is that by coupling the professional peer component with the outpatient element will make a difficult circumstance just a little more palatable and accessible; in the end, leading to a better path for recovery.