#177: Reinventing A Business Model With Transformational Service With Dr. Travis Zigler

Welcome to The Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, bestselling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markel. The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life. You'll gain powerful insights into how you can fully embrace new opportunities, increase your performance, and master the art and science of innovation and resilience. So please join Adam as he guides you on your conscious pivot.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Conscious Pivot Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markel, and happy new day. I go, hmm, is it Monday? Is it Tuesday? Is it Thursday? What day is it? Well, it doesn't matter what day it is when I'm recording at this moment. I shouldn't say it doesn't matter. Of course it matters. It's actually a Monday here, but what's funny about podcasts obviously is that when you're listening, All of you out there that are listening right now. It could be Monday, that could be one of those little remarkable serendipitous things. I don't believe in coincidences, or it could be some other day, morning, evening, evening, night, whenever. But I just thought to myself, you know, we're always celebrating the New Year and saying Happy New Year for the better part of a month until people stop saying that. But some years ago, friends of ours were hanging around at our house as they're wont to do from time to time, and we were having one of these parties that starts on a loose Supposed to start on a Friday and people are still leaving on a Monday or Tuesday. And we came up with this thing, Happy New Day. And so I am repeating it now, that it is brand new, beautiful day, or it's the end of a brand new, beautiful day. Wherever you are, wherever this is meeting you, it is perfect. And I'm so happy to be here with all of you and so happy to have a new day, actually. What a blessing that is. And so sitting in gratitude, being present in this moment, anticipating a wonderful conversation with a great guest. I can't actually wait to bring him on and introduce him all to you. I'll probably say a little bit about him from just a bio standpoint, read a little bit of his bio actually, and then we'll dig into that and see where our conversation leads us. But I'm really, I'm super excited for everything. And Dr. Travis Zigler is his name, graduated in 2010 from Ohio State University College of Optometry. With honors, magna cum laude, something I also had as a distinction after college. And I haven't thought about that in a while, but it takes a lot to just get through school. To get through school with any distinction is a pretty cool thing. I remember when I actually got out of University of Massachusetts at Amherst with that same distinction, I wasn't— I don't know, I felt kind of funny about it at the time. Didn't really— when my dad, I remember, would say, oh, that was incredible what you did, and I'm so proud of you. And I just I wasn't a great receiver of that compliment back then. To me, whether it's with honors or not, I think just getting through 4 years of college or any formal education is not necessarily easy. There's so many places where you can just kind of come off the track or find that it's just not worth it, maybe even not something that you can see the value in. I know that today, I think statistically, only 1/3 of the people that actually go into college are actually graduating, which is pretty shocking. I mean, the cost is so It's a really intense situation. When I went to school, it's a little while ago, I had student loans and all that kind of thing, but it wasn't nearly as expensive. And it certainly didn't mean that I was going to carry this debt, this burden, or this load of debt afterward that so many young people are facing right now. And that's not going to be the subject of our talk today, but who knows? Because the work that Dr. Ziglu does in many ways is meeting people in a different arena, meeting their needs. And I'm going to get into that in just a second. He's the founder of iLearn. E-Y-E love, which is really cool. In fact, his website, which I don't typically talk about websites on the show, but it's an incredible foundation, so I want to shout out to it right out of the gate, ilovethesun.com. And I am absolutely an eye lover of the sun. Their mission is to heal 1 million dry eye sufferers naturally. Dr. Travis and his wife, Dr. Jenna Ziegler, use the profits from Eye Love to fund free and low-cost clinics in Jamaica and in the US. They also started a charity called Eye Love Cares Foundation, which provides exams, glasses, sunglasses for those in need, free education scholarships for students that align with their mission. So interestingly enough, that sort of long and winding road to the introduction, I think, may make some sense. But first and foremost, Travis, great to have you on the show. Thanks for being with us.

Adam, I'm privileged to be on here, and I loved your whole introduction on gratitude. So something we practice quite a bit. So thanks for having me on.

You have an accomplished bio and a lot of, you know, a lot of people I think can relate to some of those things. Maybe some people can't. What's something that's not in your bio that you would love for people to know about you?

So I love to play the ukulele. That is something that I love to do and it's something that relaxes me. And so I play for my son and try to learn songs like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and he sings and I play and he's only 2 years old. So it's a lot of fun.

Yeah, that's way cool. And I know you've done a lot of charity work on the island of Jamaica. I'm just curious how you ended up What sparked that? Because I think I said to you before we started the show, that was a place my wife and I, when we first got married, we went there to celebrate that marriage and it was our honeymoon spot for a couple of weeks and been back ever since and love that island. It's a beautiful place, beautiful people.

Yeah. So when we were students, my wife and I went to Ecuador and did a mission trip down there. Saw about 2,000 patients down in Ecuador and there was a moment in those clinics that my life changed forever where we helped somebody that had really extreme glaucoma. Glaucoma is where your eye pressure is so high that it causes blindness. And he was already blind from this eye, but he was in a lot of pain. And we pretty much took his pain down because we brought his pressure of his eye down. And this was like an 80-year-old farmer, just hard-nosed, hardcore kind of guy. And he just fell in tears, grabbed me, gave me a hug and said, God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. And at that moment, I knew I was addicted to the mission work and that's what I wanted my end goal to be in life. And it was something that I thought I would get to around 55 to 65 years old after practicing, you know, 30 years and doing the typical grind.

Making enough money, putting enough money away. Exactly. Yeah.

And, you know, we decided that we wanted to shift to that earlier. And so now we get to go down to third world countries 3 times a year. Now we don't practice actively anymore. We do everything online and the online presence has allowed us to Focus more on the mission work and focus on a bigger mission of helping people, helping a million people heal their dry eyes naturally. But to answer your question, to go back to Jamaica, you know, a random ad. So I was reading my optometry magazine one day.

Yeah.

In the optometry magazine, there is an advertorial in there and it talked about mission trips in Jamaica. And so we're like, hey, we haven't been on a mission trip in like 3 years because ironically enough, when we graduated and got into practicing, we stopped doing the mission trips because we didn't have time. And so we went 4 years without a mission trip, and that one popped up and I was like, we need to go to this. And so we went down and we've been back 7 times since. And so it's something that, you know, our mission in life was the mission trips. And then we got away from them because life got in the way and we wanted to get back to them. So now we try to go on 2 to 3 a year now. And like I said, we don't practice anymore. So that's allowed us to do that.

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So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. Yeah, it's interesting. In many ways, this show is about reinvention stories, about pivot stories. It sounds as though you reinvented the business model. model for yourself just a bit? Because I mean, a lot of people that come out of school with a professional degree in part have to work just to pay for the loans. I mean, just seeing why it was that that kind of showed up earlier in my thoughts was just this idea of, wow, man, it's so expensive today. I mean, obviously, there's a lot of political conversation around making college free or doing something to alleviate this debt load that a lot of people have. Yeah, you come out of school whether it's a lawyer or a doctor or some other thing or accountant or whatever and you've got to pay for those student loans and malpractice insurance is expensive. All these kinds of things weigh into it. So maybe take us down that road a piece that you were working a more traditional model which we all know what that's like, 70, 80, 90, I don't know, 100 hours a week to get something going in a startup business or even maybe working in someone else's practice and it's a traditional thing. You're going to see your patients, you're going to see your clients, As many as you've got, you know, in a given week. And clearly that does not leave a lot of room for a lot of other things. Maybe family, time for yourself, time for mission work, the kind of work that you said was so important to you and your wife early on. So what did you do about it? Take us into the belly of the beast a little bit there, because I'm sure it didn't reinvent itself. I'm sure it didn't happen overnight. I'm sure it didn't happen without a certain amount of pain or a certain amount of prayer or both. So if you could give us a little of the gory details there.

And if you want to stop me in any of this story, then just, just stop me, ask any questions that you have. But started back in 2010 when I graduated from optometry school, which was oddly 10 years ago, which is crazy. And then my wife graduated in 2011. We thought our whole career was based in Columbus, Ohio. My uncle had a practice there and I was working for him when I was in school. And right when I got out of school, I started practicing with him and then my wife came in as well. And then my cousin came in as well. So we had Dr. Ziegler, Ziegler, Ziegler, and Ziegler at this practice.

That sounds like an old comedy. I don't know. Yeah, Mel Brooks movie or something. Yeah, good.

So, you know, I love seeing patients and I still love seeing patients, but there was just something missing and I couldn't figure out what it was. And, you know, I did the 3 things you're not supposed to do. We quit our jobs. We quit the stable job of working for our uncles, my uncle. We moved across the country, moved to South Carolina. And we bought 2 practices and so we started 2 practices across the country all alone and we loved it. We loved every second of it. We were the business owners now and that was kind of our first pivot was going from employee to business owner.

Right.

But it came with, with the new practices and the practices we took over, the doctor was actually going downhill really fast. He was an alcoholic that got a negative rep in the community. Right. So we kind of had to revitalize the practice a lot. And so with that comes a slower time. And so I went from seeing 4 to 5 patients an hour to seeing maybe 1 an hour. And I had a lot of time on my hands to think and a lot of times to do other things. And I came across a course called Amazing Selling Machine and I took it and bought it and it taught us how to sell on Amazon.

Hmm.

And so we started selling sunglasses of all things, hence the name Eye Love the Sun, Eye Love. And we became a sunglass company and the sunglass company started doing pretty well. We doubled our practices year over year and after 2 and a half years of being in South Carolina, we were at this point that we were just like, okay, we have 2 successful practices, we have 1 successful online business, we need to figure out, we need to get rid of one of them because we don't have time and we wanted to have kids too. So we kind of did a cost analysis of where's most of the revenue coming in with most of the stress and figure out which one we'd like to do more.

Hmm.

So we sold one of our practices in June of 2017. And then we sold the second practice in January of 2018 and went all in on our online business. Around August of 2016, we started to have a shift in our online business too. We liked the sunglass side, but it's still— there's no meaning behind it. There's no— you're selling eyewear to people to protect them from the sun, yes, but we knew we were destined to do something more. And that's when our dry eye company kind of started. This was around August of 2016. We just started a group on Facebook called the Dry Eye Syndrome Support community. And with this group, it just started growing and the impact we were making on people was huge. And we didn't have any products for dry eye, but we came out with our first product in July of 2017. And this was a result of product that we sold on our shelf in our practice. And it was a $30 product per month and you spray it on your eyelids and they decided to up their prices from $30 a month to $300 a month.

Wow.

Big increase.

Meaning your supplier?

Our supplier. So the patient cost was even more.

Yeah.

And so a patient came to me and was just like, can you make this product? And I said, let me look into it. So we made the product and we released it June 2017. It's our bestseller now and it has made an impact on thousands and thousands and thousands of lives. And so we shifted our whole business into being more of a dry eye company to help people heal their irritated dry eyes naturally. We don't use chemicals in our products as much as we can. We try to minimize preservatives. And, you know, we've had so many pivots in the last 10 years, but we feel like we finally found what we're put on this earth to do, and that's to heal people of their dry eye naturally. And to go into that story a little bit more, the reason we went down that route is because when we were trying to have kids, we were battling infertility. And we did everything in the Western medicine world. We were— we did, you know—

For how long, by the way? How long?

3 years.

3 years. All right, so I just want people to take that in because we've already covered a lot of territory.

That's why I said stop me whenever.

No, no, no, it's perfect because frankly, I want to dig into the dry eye thing a little bit more and because there are probably a lot of people that are maybe even unaware that that is such an issue or what to do about it if they are themselves struggling with it. And then there are too many cases, too many people. I've met a number of people that have had trouble conceiving. I'm sure there's— we all know somebody that's I've had that and in many ways there's a— there are a lot of emotions involved in something like that. And so to be wanting to have a family, start a family, and to not be able to see that happen for a period of time, 3 years or sometimes longer even, that can be a really— I mean, especially in a new marriage. You guys weren't married that long to begin with and you were in business together, you know, right out of college. I mean, that's a lot of pressure.

Yeah. You know, it's— the infertility journey does tie back into the dry eye journey as well because we were in it for 3 years and this was while we were starting our 3 businesses as well. So they all kind of coincided together.

Hmm.

And we went through all the Western medicine things that you're supposed to do for infertility except for IVF. The day of our IVF appointment, something just told me that we weren't made to do this. And so we canceled our appointment and we explored Eastern medicine and we went down like the acupuncture, diet, herbals, and we went down that route and we were pregnant in 3 months. So It made us kind of question everything we were taught about dry eye management, about how you have dry eye, you give them eye drops. You have dry eye, you give them this. And we thought, well, why can't we just heal everybody's body? And why don't we— our book is called Rethinking Dry Eye Treatment. The reason we did that is because what if we rethought dry eye treatment to be more of a symptom of an overall systemic inflammation, inflammation in our overall body?

Hmm.

And if we treat it that way, then maybe we don't need the eye drops, maybe we don't need any of those products. And so that's kind of where that pivot occurred is we started teaching people how to heal their dry eye naturally through diet, through hydration, through decreasing stress and affirmations and gratitudes and sleeping better and just all these other things. And the results have been far superior to any eye drop that's prescription out there. And so it's all tied together, but that's kind of— we've had many pivot points in our business journey, but we feel like we finally found like our niche is healing dry eye naturally. And it's all a result of things that happened in our lives. There's, there's a reason everything happens to you and you hear that all the time.

Sure.

But you got to sit down and listen sometime too. We always think like, oh, it happens for a reason, but we never listen. Like you never just sit down and listen to see What that reason could be. And I think that's what we did a great job of and we've shifted as a result of that.

Does

that make sense?

And you know what? 3 years of infertility that's resolved in 3 months of changing an approach. And again, I don't believe or think there are too many coincidences. It's always possible to connect the dots when you look back at it. And it seems like in your looking back now at what was going on then, as soon as you began to shift mindset As well as things that you were ingesting, the kind of foods you were eating. And I don't remember if there was this in your timeline that when you decided to more focus on the one business, the online business, and look to sell those other practices, did that coincide as well with that 3-month period where eventually you were able to conceive? Is that— I just want to find out where the stress, the idea that you were creating a release valve, so to speak, for the stress. Yeah. And I can only imagine when you're running 3 startup organizations. Well, I shouldn't say I can only imagine. I know what that's like, actually. Yeah, it doesn't leave you a lot of room for— and I don't know what the fill-in-the-blank is— but this for conception. Yeah. I mean, think about conception. In this context, we're talking about, you know, they're becoming the procreation of a child, but conception is in so many ways about everything. You're conceiving ideas, you're conceiving solutions to challenges, you're conceiving Things that produce resolution in your life and heal the areas where there are challenges. Conception, I think, is a metaphor. That's the way I'm interpreting it at this moment. So what was it that you were doing to increase the— or in hindsight, to look back and say, this is what produced that conception actually?

The funny thing is you bring that up and I'm thinking to myself, I haven't thought of it in that context, but When we conceived and it was in 2017, February, that was the same month we decided— it was the month after actually that we decided to sell our first practice.

Interesting.

And that was the one that was causing the most stress in us. And so like in January of 2017, we decided we are going to sell that practice and we put it up for sale. And then in February, we conceived and then we had him in November. And then We got rid of the second practice shortly after that, after we had him. What we also feel is that if you believe in God, we believe in God. So

God was— I'm a God guy.

Yeah. So good. So we can talk about God.

It's okay here.

So God was telling us that it's not your time for children yet. And that 3 years, if we would have conceived right when we wanted to, we would still be practicing in South Carolina. I can guarantee it. But the fact that it was delayed 3 years, it allowed us to build our online business to the point that we could sell our practices and stop practicing to focus on this online business. And now we're all in on it and it is our business. It's our only thing that we do now. And the great thing about it is I worked maybe 60 hours a week back then and I work 30 hours a week, maybe 60 hours a week. I don't even know how long I work now because I just love what I do. And it doesn't feel like work. I love communicating with someone like yourself, a like-minded entrepreneur that thinks like me, that does things like me, but you're still different and we still have fun conversations around it. And so this is what I love to do now and it doesn't feel like work to me every day when I wake up. I wake up jazzed about going to my computer and working, going to my office and working.

Space is a creative thing and creating space is how you get Creative. It's funny, but we have so much clutter in our lives, and that can be mental clutter, it can be the physical clutter that's around us, it could be emotional clutter, even spiritual clutter. I mean, when we're talking about God or spirit, universe, there's a lot of clutter in that space as well. I know people that just are sort of— their daily lists of the to-dos are so great, and even things that involve our spiritual practice, if they feel like they're a duty, if they feel like they're an obligation, They lose their creative juice. There's something of the juice that makes those practices powerful that kind of gets sucked out in the process of it being an obligation or being a part of a list that you tick things off. Again, there's no hard and fast rules to any of this stuff. I just think it's really fascinating that when you guys relaxed a bit, when you were able to focus on and see that there was an area for you to focus and consolidate your energy, And let go of some things that might have been just clutter and extra burden and baggage and to-dos. It changed. Things changed for you.

Yeah. And we worked for 2 years, 2018 and 2019, on just the online business. And as anybody, this happens to everybody, as we get settled into a routine, we tend to start going after shiny objects or something new or something else that's different. 2019 was a big scattered year for us. We tried to get more sales and we focused on the sales side of our business and that scattered us, scattered our attention, it scattered our finances, it scattered everything. And we didn't grow. We stayed stagnant. And so we decided that in 2020, we're going back to how we were before, which was service. We actually had to let go of a lot of our team members. We went away from sales. So if you watch any of our videos from last year, there's a lot of call to actions and a lot of Go to dryeyebook.com and get your free dry eye book or try our product. And this year we have one call to action at the end and it's just share this video if you want to join us in our mission to help 1 million dry eye sufferers and that's it. And so we're focusing on service more and it feels good.

I have chills. I don't know what that means exactly other than at the moment on the most obvious level what you're saying is really resonating with me. We talk about sometimes that there's a difference between closing sales and opening relationships. There's always a difference between those 2 things. The idea of what does it take to close sales, which becomes its own, can dominate and become a driver that dominates philosophy. I think when it dominates philosophy, when it impacts culture of an organization, whether it's small or medium-sized, huge organization, it changes the trajectory in ways that also show up in the bottom line. And I think you had a firsthand experience of what that looked like and you pretty quickly pivoted, I'd say. I mean, it's hard to really have— there's a lot of lagging data and you've got to analyze things and that takes time. And you can go down, you can kind of get off track pretty far without really knowing it, without enough data to analyze, to determine that the trend is not the trend you're looking for. So to be able to correct course in a year in a business, just 4 quarters to be able to look at what you've What you had created, built, obviously you must have scaled up and then scaled down, I guess, but we call it non-scale on our side. We love how our business grows in a way that is more around doing exactly how we want to do it. It sounds selfish actually, and it is primarily, I suppose. We want to feel good about our work and we want to feel good about the interactions we have with people. And that means To some extent, being able to spend the kind of time and know the people or at least have the experience where you really have a sense that you— for us, that we do know them and that we have some finger on the pulse of what's helping them or not helping them, et cetera. And it's really difficult to do that at scale in a service business. I think products are maybe a little bit different, but not so much, I suppose, because The whole idea of how you service, serve the customers and where it is that you meet them with a client experience. I assume that's in part, but I'd love to know more. Give us a sense of, on a more micro level even in the business, what are some of the things that you saw that were driving, let's say driving the boat when it came to more sales focus that didn't feel good or look good or show good results versus what you're doing now? And what you were doing before that you've now gone back to doing?

Yeah. So in our business, we— the reason we grew the dry eye side is because we started that dry eye syndrome support community on Facebook, and that was before we had any products. And so it was all service-based, so we weren't trying to sell anything, and it grew really fast. We actually just crossed 10,000 members in that as of March of 2020, so it's kind of fun. But that grew because all we did was serve. We just went live in the community, they asked us questions, we answered the questions. It was just full service. We didn't have any products. If we did have products, we'd mention other people's products. It wasn't even our own. And so that's how that community grew and that's how our dry eye following grew from 2016 into 2017 and 2018. We had maybe 2 products in 2018 and now we have close to like 10. But in 2019, you know, it all depends on who you hang out with. I was hanging out with a crowd that was very into direct response marketing, meaning Advertisement to a page that says, buy my stuff, and then buy my stuff. And so—

The funnels.

You got it. Yeah, funnels. So we're like, well, we need a funnel. And we went away from everything that we had learned, everything that felt good to us, everything that was our values and our integrity. We want to focus on people over profits and we want to service others over ourselves first. So we want to make sure that the customer is taken care of no matter what. And you talked about it in a service relationship, but it's the exact same in a product relationship. People want to do business with businesses that they have that relationship with. So most of our competitors are pharmaceutical companies and they have a lot of money to put towards just advertising.

Yeah.

And so we're a smaller, scrappier organization, so we like to focus on the relationship and you can't get that in a pharmaceutical company no matter how hard you try. And so, whenever somebody asks us, why should we buy your Hydrate over your competitor Abenova? We say, you know, they're a pharmaceutical company and I'm the CEO and co-founder of this company and you're talking to me. And so, you can choose who you want to, but the products are similar. It's just the relationship. Do you want it with us or do you want it with them? And so, transactional versus more of an actual relationship, human-to-human interaction, connection. And that's what we're all here for. We're all here to connect and everybody craves it, whether it's online, whether it's in person, but we all crave connection. And so if you create that connection in your business with your customer, then you'll win every time. And it's not all about the winning, it's all about the serving. And then if you serve more, you'll connect more too. And so that shift going from that funnels, direct response marketing of last year Where our revenue was the exact same as the year before, but our profits went down.

Right. Because your expenses ratcheted up.

You got it. And so now this year, we're 2 months into this year already, our sales are up 10%, our profits almost tripled. And so we've just done a complete 180 turnaround from last year. And the best part about it is it feels good again. Like I'm not stressing. I'm not like, oh, I don't like that funnel because it's too salesy. I just get to go on video, talk to people like you. I get to go on video. We just did a live video before this, before we jumped on the call here, and all we did was talk about what we want to talk about. We were talking about ocular rosacea today, and we didn't try to sell them anything. We just talked about it, and it was fun.

Wow. The pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid, and if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do is take it. All you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. Yes. And it's, as you said before, it's the difference between something that feels And is transactional in nature or primarily transactional versus something that is transformational. Connection is transformational. People, we are all renewed by our connections to others, the places where we are seen, where we're heard, where we don't feel alone, where we feel we belong. I mean, that's just the nature of nature, of not just human existence, but existence in general. Things thrive In an environment that is collaborative. None of us can survive on our own. So yeah, I mean, it might even sound like it's more on the side of what is more personal development in nature, and yet it can be the foundation for a business that more than anything, we want to be able to connect and serve a community of people without there being this constant pressure or hammer or There's always something coming. Yeah. Meaning there's always going to be a pitch. There's always going to be an offer and always a call to action that requires a response of some kind. And what ends up happening is people start to look at other people in those transactional relationships like, well, we got a 2 out of 10 response rate. We got a 3 out of 10 response rate. So you got a great, like a 30% closing rate. And yet, what happened to the other 70%? What happened to the other 7 people? You didn't open relationships with them. Exactly. So I think you're doing something really brave. It's counterintuitive, or maybe it's entirely intuitive. It's just counter to what's in the marketplace today and what people are feeling like if they want to grow a business or scale a business, that they've got to succumb to that mousetrap mentality. Because I think a lot of those marketing initiatives are really They are in many ways quite manipulative. And again, they're putting profits before people for sure. So you don't need me to say this, Travis, but good on you. To you and to your wife. Really wonderful. And obviously you can see the difference in the bottom line in your own business, which is proof in the pudding, right?

And honestly, I just want to feel good when I wake up. I want to feel like I'm doing something that's worthwhile and I want to feel like It's something that I want to do. I want to go on video. I don't want to try to sell. It just feels good. Like I said, we just like to focus on the people over the profits. What's going to happen is going to happen no matter what, so do what you love and the rest will take care of itself because people can really feel, even on video, even on a podcast, they can feel that passion. If you don't have that passion because you're doing something that you don't like to do, sell, then they'll feel that and they won't connect with you. And like you talked about a sales call, if you close 3 out of 10, what happened to the other 7? You're not trying to connect. If you're a good salesman and you connect with your prospect, you can close 90% of your calls no matter what because usually you just got to find their pain point and if you can help solve it, that's the key thing to sales. I mean, you just got to be able to open up that conversation to solve, to make them realize How big of a problem they have and how big of a pain it is and then make them have the aha. The thing I see, and I get sales pitches all the time, is that they just tell me what they're offering and they're not trying to learn about my pain at all. And so that's what we try to really do with our customers. We try to learn their pain and then we try to solve their pain either with a product or with a video or with a blog post or whatever it is. And even if it has nothing to do with our products, it creates that relationship with that customer. And that's not the reason we're doing it, we're just doing it to help out, but then they trust us with everything.

I'm so glad we got into this. I didn't expect that this conversation would take this track, but— and I want to plus what you're saying because even in the scenario of, you know, 90%, it's like for us, we call it 100% enrollment. And we say in connection with it in a little different context, we say that it's 100% enrollment 100% of the time. So with public speaking, we train speakers to get on stage and deliver keynotes or deliver TED Talks and things like that. And it's this concept of 100% enrollment. You enroll 100% of the room 100% of the time. And it's the same thing in sales, that if you're not focused on closing a sale, but instead— and this is a small but meaningful distinction— what your focus, your attention is to open a relationship. That's ultimately the point that you want to get to. You can open 100% Meaning that if you're with 10 people, you can open relationships with 10 people. Doesn't mean that 10 people necessarily will feel compelled to buy a product or service from you in that moment. But we get people that come back to us years later, months later, weeks later, years later, that because we were careful to curate and nurture the relationship, that they didn't feel as though they were part of that whole commercial fishing expedition of, you know, what gets caught in the nets enough to keep the company going and all the rest of it and everything else, you know, it's like we could care less.

So because they don't get caught up in that, they go, great, you know, it wasn't what you were talking about or where my focus was then or what was of pain or of significance to me at that time. No, didn't lead me to think I was— you were about was something I needed to get involved with or whatever. But later on they go, you know, I am interested in that, or I am still curious. And that happens all the time. And I think it is legitimately a business model to focus your sales team and your sales efforts on how can I open relationships today. And the sales— and you're, you're a testament to this— that the sales will absolutely take care of themselves. It doesn't mean you don't have a really beautiful and effectively constructed online presence. Those are all meaningful things to have. People don't want to be confused. You've got a product or service, make it easy for them to understand what you do, the problems you solve, and if they're looking to get it done, just make it a one-click, as simple a process as you can create. I mean, that's what, in part, what Amazon does so well. Epically well, regardless of what you might think about their own business practices or their employment practices. There's some controversy for me there as well. But as a pure model for helping a person see what they're looking for and make a quick and meaningful decision, they facilitated that brilliantly. So I want to come back to one thing as we wrap up here, Travis, which is in talking with you about the years that you've been in business and the different iterations of that business, pivots both personally and professionally. You've had to be quite resilient.

I'm curious, I know a lot of the folks in our community are resilient themselves, and yet the evolving definition of resilience is very, very important because I think it's a skill set that anybody can learn. I know the research is clear, people can learn that skill set and develop those tools at any age. So you've been resilient. How do you define resilience? What can you share with us about your own approach? understanding of what that word even means.

So I'm gonna take you down kind of 2 things with resilience that I believe, and the first one is persistence. So persistence to me means that you're doing something every single day that's gonna move you forward in some way or another, and doing it consistently is key. To give you a very like superficial example, we have to do 2 videos that are live every single week. And so we have to write 2 blog posts and come out with 2 videos every single week. We know if we're persistent and consistent with that every single week, our business will grow. It's just as easy as that. And so find whatever it is that you need to do for your business and be persistent on it. It could be 10 calls a week. It could be exchanging cards or 10 connections a week. It could be whatever. But just making sure you're doing that every week, that's the problem that most of us have is we don't do it every single week and that's when things start to fall apart. So persistence is kind of the first part of resilience. And then the second part is having a bigger why. Our why is to help 1 million dry eye sufferers naturally. That's a big number. But there are 30 million dry eye sufferers in the US alone, let alone worldwide. I don't know what the number is worldwide. So all we have to do is hit 3%. of the dry eye sufferers in the US to reach our 1 million goal, it is still a very big number and we're, you know, we're only 4% of the way there. And so we still have a long way to go, which is the fun part. So having that bigger why is going to get you through the hard times. So we've been sued by a pharmaceutical company.

Hmm.

And we were in a lawsuit with them. We lost $140,000 in one day as a result of a coupon code gone wrong on Amazon. We've gone through different team members here and there doing things behind our back. We've had people attack us. We've had other lawsuits come after us. And if you don't have that bigger why, you'll fold at the first thing. Like, oh, this isn't worth it. They were right. I should have just never started. And you're going to start listening to those naysayers that come at you because whenever you come out with a new business idea or something else, there's somebody that's going to say, why would you do that? Or, you can't do that. You just can't do that. And so, when I told people that we were going to stop practicing after 7 years of practicing, people thought I was crazy. And it actually started in 2010 when I graduated. I told people that I wanted to stop practicing at the age of 40 and we did it at the age of 33. But everybody laughed at me. Everybody laughed at me. My financial advisor laughed at me, which is why I found a new one and then a new one and then a new one until I found the one that didn't laugh at me. And when he didn't laugh at me, that's when I knew I found somebody. So having that bigger why and then having the persistence to focus on that bigger why is my definition of resilience.

That's beautiful, Travis. I love the way you put that together. Persistence and consistency. That consistency, right? Because as you said, if you're persistent but only in fits and spurts, you're persistent for a week, And then not for 2 weeks, but then persistent for a week, you lose something that Einstein called a miracle, and that was the compounding effect.

And the compounding effect requires both of those things, the persistence as well as the daily consistency. And with money, you see that all the time, just a little bit, but consistently, consistently investing in something that produces an interest rate over time, you get to see the hockey stick effect of it. And thank you very much. I don't know that we would have found our way into those spaces had you not volunteered that, which is that in many ways we've all faced lawsuits or the threats of lawsuits or the bullies have shown up. I think Bill Maher calls it cancel culture these days. It's where people just use their own platforms, be it large or small ones, to bash people when they don't agree and threaten them and speak really unkindly in many ways to folks that are just doing their thing, doing their thing. There's a tremendous amount of judgment. out there in this space. And so to wake up in the morning and feel the energy that's required to really deliver your best performance, your highest possible performance for the day, it's tough to do that when you're carrying the weight or unnecessary weight. It would be like, oh, I'm going to run a marathon. You go, great. I've been training and I'm ready and my body is equipped, my mind is equipped. And they say, well, great, but today you're going to run the marathon. We're going to put a backpack on you. I'm going to put 50 pounds of bricks in the back. Now you're going to run your marathon. You go, well, I didn't prepare for that. That's insane. There's no way I'm going to be able to do that. And that's what it can feel like when you get a letter or an email or a threat of something or an actual lawsuit or any number of other things, even just getting sort of bullied on social platforms. So thank you, Travis, for sharing that with our folks. And that is in many ways what resilience is. So many different things today to so many people. And that was— so my last question for you is really just piggyback what you said about resilience. What's one thing you do on a regular basis, even a daily basis, that would help you to develop those resilience qualities?

Yeah, and you know, I heard you talking about this on one of your previous podcasts, and it's funny because it's something I do every single day. I have a 7-minute— just, it's a meditation, and it's just a golden OM meditation, meaning like that type thing.

Yes.

And I put my headphones in, I listen to that for 7 minutes, And all I do is repeat back to myself, I love myself. And I think everything starts with loving ourselves. And once you love yourself, then you can love someone else and you can love everybody else. And so we have to constantly remind ourselves. And it may sound crazy to sit there for 7 minutes by myself just saying I love myself to myself, but it gets my mind space right to tackle the day and to love other people and to serve other people. And so I wake up every morning after I do my 50 push-ups, crunches, and squats. I then sit there, quiet my mind, put my headphones in, because if you don't have your headphones in, it makes a big difference with meditation. And I just listen to that, and I listen to the same one every morning just because then I know what's coming and it's consistent. Then I just say, I love myself, over and over again, and that sets me up for the rest of the day.

That's beautiful, Travis. You know, the I'm a spiritual person, not a religious one, but in the pursuit of my interest in spirituality, I've read a lot of things in that arena, including places, passages from the Bible. So this is one that anybody, regardless of your interest in spirit or not, will know, and that is the Golden Rule. Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. And that whole do unto others thing has a lot of meaning There's a lot of wisdom to me in what you just said, which is that to love yourself, which many people find selfish. Even the response to my TED Talk was quite interesting. It was overwhelmingly positive. People got it and they loved it and shared it, and that was terrific. But there was a good percentage of folks, 10%, 15% even, maybe 20% of people that pushed back on that, that said, listen, if you knew what my life was like, you wouldn't love your life if you lived my life, kind of thing. And so who the hell are you? Was that direct feedback, let's call it. And so what you said about loving yourself is we get it, and yet it's so surprising how that is, is one of those things that people will think is either not something they can wrap their arms around because it just doesn't feel true to them, or on some level people say it's being self-absorbed or selfish. And I go back to those words, those profound words of the Golden Rule, you know, how can you do unto others? As you would have them do unto you. If you, if you're not willing to love yourself, how can you love others? How can you invite love for yourself?

Yeah,

if you don't practice it yourself, it's difficult. On a good day, it would—

It goes back to that whole victim mentality of, you know, you can say everything's happening to me, but this Tony Robbins says this all the time, is instead of thinking that things are happening to me, start thinking about what if they're happening for me? And I think I alluded to this at the beginning of the show is, you know, we don't take time to really think about what happens in our lives to us or for us because we don't listen. And when you start to listen, that's when things start to show up. And, you know, we've had some tragic events happen in our lives over the last 6 months, and a lot of people would fold up everything and just go away. And, you know, every step— because one happened in November, then December, than January and then we moved in the middle of January on top of all this stuff happening to us or for us. And if we didn't just sit there and listen to why this is happening for us, then it would probably have broken us down completely. But it made us shift our business model. It made us shift just a couple of things in our life again. And if you start thinking about how everything's happening for you instead of to you, then you get rid of that victim mentality and then you start listening. And then you'll move your life forward and create the pivot that you need to create in order to move your life forward, your business forward, your marriage forward, your relationship with your children forward. And so happening for us instead of to us.

Yes. It's the get-tos. You know how often we look at things and go, I got to do this. I got to do that.

I mean, and I still catch myself all the time with that. And it's a good 10 years since I first heard that. And they come from places like Emmet Fox. I remember reading Awaken the Giant Within and looking at some of the footnotes in that big tome of a book and it led me and I'm still grateful to that book and to the reference to a little pamphlet called The 7-Day Mental Diet by Emmett Fox. And so there's no question that these are principles that have been around for a long time, spoken about again and again and again. And yet until we breathe life into them ourselves, they are just sort of conceptual. And so I guess the last thing I would say about that is language is important. Watch your own language. Me, do it all the time and things slip through. They slip through the filter even being aware and the got-tos. I gotta, I gotta, I gotta, gotta. And to be able to turn that around and simply say, do I get to? Is this a get-to? Is this truly a got-to?

If I can't feel like I get to do it, maybe there's question as to whether or not you ought to be doing that. Obligation is not the energy, at least in this phase and stage in my life. I don't want to feel obligated because the love isn't there. There's just not a lot of love in that activity when it feels obligatory versus something that's a blessing. I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof podcast.

If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices and rituals and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today. So with that, Travis, thank you so much. What a blessing it's been to have you on the show. I love this conversation and I appreciate you for it.

Yeah, I appreciate you having me on. It's been a blast and I love your show. I've been listening to it for the last 2 weeks and you've got a listener now.

Oh, that's awesome. Way cool. We'll hopefully keep up the good work, the good conversations. Quick reminder to myself, to all of us that But we have a choice when we wake up tomorrow. And I say when we wake up collectively, that is itself an unknown, and yet I'm going to take it right now as a fact, not for granted, but as a fact that we will all get to wake up again tomorrow and have this choice to make at the beginning of the day how we want to begin that day, what it is that we will set into motion by the first few seeds of our thoughts that we plant. And for me, that's going to be gratitude. It's where we began this conversation, Travis and I, and where I find constant resolution. There's just never any doubt. There's nothing that isn't rectified and reconciled when I can shift whatever my focus is in the moment to the acknowledgement and the realization of gratitude for that moment. So tomorrow morning we wake up, potentially you can feel grateful for something as you're taking that first breath of the day. And then those 4 4 simple words that take 10 seconds. For me, I say these words every morning when I wake up. I love my life. And that's what you said, Travis. You get quiet, you listen to your meditation, you think about how you love yourself. And it's powerful. So 4 simple words. And they don't have to be those words, of course. They can be any words you want. But my prayer is that more and more our world collectively are setting these powerful intentions at the start of the day that involve us being More loving and kind to ourselves so that we can ultimately give that gift. That's the way we can do unto others. Just can't give something to someone else that we don't accept for ourselves. Travis, thanks again. Appreciate the time today.

Thanks for having me on.

Okay. Everybody check out the show notes as well. You can find out more about the foundation that Dr. Travis and Dr. Jenna have created. You can go to ilovecares.org and find out more about that. As well as ilovethesun.com. The show notes will be there. We'd love to get your comments, get your feedback, get your questions for myself or Dr.

Travis as well. And of course, you can leave us your feedback, which is so valuable. It's like oxygen to us. We love to get it. adamarkel.com/podcast to do that. And we'll see you and hopefully hear from you very, very soon. Ciao for now.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have the tools and greater insights to navigate your own pivot. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over at adammarkel.com/podcasts. For more tips, strategies, and support as you consciously pivot into a new business and lifestyle you love, join our Pivot Community on Facebook at pivotfb.com.