Fashion Student Redesigns Her Future with Phlebotomy Business

Veni Touch Labs of Hillsborough County

Michaelle Doricent was living in Boston, Massachusetts when her mother called her up one day and told her she had to get a ‘real job.’ In school for fashion at the time, her mother told her about phlebotomy and encouraged her to look into it. In fact, her mother even found a seven-week course for her and paid her way through phlebotomy training, and Doricent in turn, found herself a new passion. That was 18 years ago.

“I love it,” she said. “I’ve done pediatric patients as young as one day old all the way through geriatric patients and I just grew a passion for it.”

Fast-forward to two years ago, now with a 10-year-old son and working on a travel assignment in Connecticut, she started thinking about her next career step. “It just made me think outside of the box and at the time we were coming out of the pandemic,” she said. “I just thought about doing a mobile phlebotomy business. That way I can employ myself and create my own schedule and be able to make the money that I was making on the travel assignment, and more.”

Now, she’s the owner of Veni Touch Labs, a mobile phlebotomy business serving the Tampa Bay area.

While she was able to get her initial business licensing and create the basic foundation for the business on her own, she eventually found the Florida Small Business Development Center (SBDC) at Hillsborough County, while looking for ways to ‘get outside the box’ in terms of growing her business.

She was introduced to Janette Blanco, business consultant at the Florida SBDC at Hillsborough County, who told her about an upcoming business pitch competition. “I never ever entered a competition in that type of atmosphere ever and so, I didn’t even think I was going to win,” Doricent said.

She ended up finishing in second place, which earned her a $1,500 prize from two different financial institutions. As luck would have it, that pitch competition would lead her to a connection that would land her first contract.

“My prize for the competition was $1500,” she said. “A thousand dollars of it came from one bank, $500 came from another bank. I had to go into the banks and set up accounts in order to receive that money. When I went in to receive my prize money, in communicating with the agent at the bank we were just having general conversation and she mentioned a doctor in the area that was looking for a phlebotomist. From that day forward, she referred me to this doctor and I got in contact with the doctor.”

That conversation led to her first contract with Dr. Traci’s House, of Tampa. “It was just like a domino effect,” she added. “Me and Janette have been attached by the hip ever since.”

Blanco has helped Doricent with market research to better understand the market within her profession. She says she intends to continue to work with the Florida SBDC at Hillsborough as she attempts to expand her business into St. Petersburg and beyond. She also highly recommends the services to other business owners.

“Take advantage of it one thousand percent,” she said. “There is so much information and resources out here to help you, to help us to be able to start businesses, to build them up, to grow them and SBDC does a really great job in working with you and providing those resources and really just helping you get that foot in the door and getting that foundation solid so that you can grow and continue to just elevate.”