Lance Wright didn’t stumble into the problem. He grew up inside it.
“I grew up hearing the gripes, the issues, and stuff like that,” Wright says, referring to his father’s work running a vocational services organization. “I grew up with people around disabilities, my dad’s business… it’s also something I always cared about.”
That business, Wright Choices, works in vocational services, a largely invisible field focused on helping people with physical, mental, or emotional disabilities prepare for, secure, and maintain employment. The work involves job coaching, employer coordination, ongoing support, and heavy documentation tied to state and federal requirements. It’s critical work, and it’s complex.
From the inside, Wright saw how broken the systems supporting that work really were.
“They have a million different tools, nothing actually works,” he says. “They’re spending crazy money constantly paying offshore companies to build them custom software. Everybody has custom software. It’s always broken.”
When those systems failed, the impact wasn’t just administrative. It affected real people trying to find jobs, independence, and a place in the world.
“I’ve always known, even if things fell through, my goal was to actually resolve the issue.”
Years later, after building the technical expertise to do so, Wright decided to act. He founded Sayou, a software company created specifically to solve the problems he had grown up watching vocational services providers struggle with for decades.
“Sayou is a multi-tenant, full-scale platform that does everything for them,” Wright explains. Scheduling, referrals, billing, reporting, all customizable by organization, city, and state. “I had to create something that could allow a business owner who doesn’t know coding or anything like that to actually do this themselves.”
The challenge wasn’t purely technical.
“It’s a mixture of medical and semantic information,” he says. “It can be driven by emotions or goals. That’s what makes it so crazy hard.”
But the motivation behind Sayou was never just about software.
“A lot of people don’t know this,” Wright says. “The person with the disability is really lonely. They want to be out. They want to work.”
Vocational services, when done right, restore more than employment. They create connection, purpose, and belonging.
What started as a problem close to home, rooted in his family and lived experience through Wright Choices, has grown into something much bigger through Sayou. In time, the work could help thousands of people not just find employment, but reconnect with the world and the people around them.
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