Prison Doctor to 8-Figure Business in 16 Months: Dr Alex Spinoso’s Journey

I would say be the dumbest person in the room. When you usually start a franchise, they give you all the booklets that you can read and you can read those up and down and left and right and maybe it doesn't have all the answers. Start to study other franchises. Why do other franchises work? How do they work? Go and sit inside franchises that you know are good.

Welcome everybody. I am Jeff Duden and we are on the home front. And as always, this podcast is brought to you by Homefront Brands. Simply building the world's most responsible franchise platform. Encouraging entrepreneurs to take action and transform their lives, impact communities and enhance the lives of those they care the most about. All the while delivering enterprise level solutions to local business owners out there on the home front. So if this sounds like you, check us out@homefrontbrands.com today and start your next chapter of greatness, building your dynasty on the Homefront. I will be looking out for you here and today I am upbeat, excited and really looking forward to our time with Dr. Alex Spinoso. Welcome doctor.

Thank you for having me, Jeff. Appreciate it.

Yeah, absolutely. So Dr. Spinoso is an entrepreneur and health fanatic running seven thriving companies. Won an eight figure titan in just 16 months. Beyond business, he has a passion for comics and cars. In High School, Dr. Spinosos led his soccer and rugby teams to national championships and ACL tear. In the midst of his athletic career forged his resilience and a passion for health and medicine. He continued his athletic career at Dartmouth College, joining the soccer team and studying biology. He is the CEO of Genesis Lifestyle Medicine. He lives in Las Vegas. He is a father and proud father and husband and welcome Alex. How you doing today?

Thank you Jeff. I'm doing wonderful. Thank you.

Awesome. Well, super excited to have you on. I've been consuming a lot of your content and quite frankly I found it very upbeat and very inspiring. Would you care to share with the audience a little bit about your background, how you grew up?

Absolutely. So I was born and bred on MA Air force base in Northern California. My dad is Italian and my mom is Puerto Rican. So you can tell it was a really calm family, east coast New Jersey, Italian and a Puerto Rican from Miami. You could, it was a very fiery growing up. Food, great, great food and everything like that. So. But they always instilled great worth ethic in me growing up. My job was to get good grades. My job was to be the best that I could possibly be. I think the only time they were ever upset with me was when they knew I was half assing. It, if you will, and not living up to my full potential. But I grew up in an amazing family. Both my parents still together. They have been together almost 40 years now. Absolutely amazing. My dad ran his own contracting business, still runs his own contracting business. His first employee ever, the last few years. I think I inspired him to do that, which is wonderful. My mom stayed home and raised my sister and I growing up. And after I left, I went to Dartmouth College and traveled the country playing soccer for Dartmouth, which is phenomenal. And like you said, in. In high school, I had actually torn my acl. And when I saw my first orthopedic surgeon at the time, he said, you know what? You're never going to play at a high level again. And that was my whole identity. That was really just me. And so getting my identity stripped away from me and having to work to get it back. The second orthopedic surgeon I saw was phenomenal. He worked on the US Ski team at the time, was able to operate on me, and I was back on the field within six months. And that's what really drove my passion for medicine at the time, was him, Dr. Sweeney. And he inspired me to go on to work in the medical field and give kind of that same feeling back to other people. And so when I went to med school, I actually went to med school in England so I could play soccer. And that was the whole purpose. I was trying to play soccer at the same time as going to med school. After getting Cs in every single medical school class my first couple semesters, because I was traveling all over the country playing soccer in Europe, decided, you know what? I gotta fall back on something. Might as well fall back on being a doctor. And went full in on that. Finished up my residency in Southern California. That's where I met my wife. And I started working after residency for the prison systems. So I was a prison physician on a general population yard. The baddest of the bad, if anybody's seen Locked up. Caliphate Atria State Prison was one of the places that that was filmed at. That's where I worked. So. And it really taught me a great deal. I thrived in that situation because it was all about respect. You give respect, you get respect, and that's how the prison system runs. And it was actually some of the greatest treatments of my life and some of the greatest patients of my life, because they all respected you. After about two and a half years, I had a great girlfriend. She was my fiance at the time. Stephanie had a little dog. It was wonderful. We lived in a house in Palm Springs and a little pool and I had a, you know, mid level car. And I wanted to just blow my brains out because I was so bored. There was nothing pushing me to the next level. I was not growing. I was working a government job, which was out of a 40 hour workweek, 16 hours of real work, and then the rest of the time putzing around and I wasn't pushing myself and reaching that next level. So I decided to at that point go all in. And I started to look at ways to grow. I started reading self help books and self improvement books and business and entrepreneur books. And that's when I found a podcast which is, was run and now by a good friend of mine, Andy Frisella, the MF CEO project All About Business. And I just started diving into that, listening to every episode he had. And I actually convinced my wife at the time to move out of our house and rent it so we could save up money for our business. And I convinced her somehow to also at the same time move into a hundred square foot foyer of a house that we rented. And it wasn't a bedroom. It was literally, you walk in and it's one of those houses where right in the front end there's that front playroom that nobody really knows what to do. And there's like a dining room right off the front. And we lived in that dining room. We bought nine by 10 sheets of plywood, which were not expensive at that time. And we used that for walls and doors and we slid those back and forth going to and from work with six other people because it was five bedrooms and the other five bedrooms were full. And we slowly moved up. I said, you know what, babe, we'll see here six months, I'll save the money. Well, a year and a half later we had, we had moved from that foyer to the Jack and Jill bedroom, which we were like, man, we got, we got to share a bathroom now, this is nice. And then to the master bedroom that had a bathroom in the bedroom. We were like, we're living like kings at this point. And I was able to save up enough money to go all in on a mastermind group. And that's where I met my now business partner in Genesis. And we opened the first Genesis Lifestyle Medicine in August of 2019. And since then we've been acquiring and building. We have now 17 locations. 18 is being built and will open in 30 days. And we've acquired about a dozen other companies in the same field. Medical field, allergy labs, biologics, labs and things like that in the B2B space in our medical field and have been growing since then.

So there are so many fascinating things I want to ask you about. You grew up in a home where there was an entrepreneur. You're self employed. And how did that early entrepreneurial exposure inform your thinking when you were working at the prison system and now you're bored and observationally, to me. So my dad had a engineering business.

Okay.

Was not a big. It was him and one other person. So when, when they had big clients come in, they actually had me put on a sport coat and go sit in a cube and me and my brothers and anybody else, you know, because it's like, we gotta. We gotta look like we have some people in the business. That's amazing. And, and yeah, but, you know, like, I would see him on a Saturday, he'd come to my baseball game, and then he'd go into work, and then he'd work, and then he'd be bringing work home with him. So for me, I was like, hey, you know, there was. So when I would go to a job and, and I would. It would be downtime or dead time, even though I was getting paid, I couldn't stand it. I absolutely couldn't stand it. And it sounds like it was that way for you. Do you think that that early entrepreneurial exposure informed ultimately your thinking and going to be an entrepreneur?

Absolutely. Partially because I didn't want to get yelled at by a boss for holding the flashlight wrong.

But no, like a, like a, Like a Christmas story.

Yeah, it was pretty much like that working for my dad. But at the same time, I really wanted to grow my own thing. See, I saw what he did. And speaking, Jeff, exactly to that where your dad was there. My dad was there for every sporting event. He was there in military boots for my sister's ballet recital, you know, doing plies in his military boots. My mom and my dad drove for every single event. And I wanted that for my future when my kids were born. But I also wanted the ability to have that freedom. I saw him work his butt off. And everybody knows who builds a business. It is more work than going to a 9 to 5 by far. But he had the freedom to be able to do those things for us growing up as well. And that's what I wanted. I wanted that freedom. And that's definitely what it was, Jeff. Whereas I still work 40 hours a week, but I was stuck at the prison in a little box on the yard with 2,000 inmates every day, working for two hours real working for two hours and then six hours a day just reading books or looking at the Internet trying to find the next thing to learn. It got old just sitting there doing nothing. I was stir crazy.

Some people are figuratively in prison with their job, but you were literally in prison with your job. Yeah, so. And the freedom is the important part of it. I always said as I was building our, our franchise business that I would be one of the only dads that was at the play at 9 o' clock in the morning. But maybe I had to get up at 3 o' clock in the morning and make sure the estimates were out or the training was put together or whatever it was. But I had options and it I freedom. When you're building a business early. Yes, but I would say it's more optionality and choice. So you're choosing to be there now once you grow your business and you learn how to scale a business and you have cash flow and you're making money while you're sleeping, or you're making money when you're on vacation, then freedom really comes into it. Now you can drive yourself deeper into your purpose and you can make decisions that are more purpose driven for you. Whatever it is, whatever you want to pour into, you know, when you start a business it's, it's pretty much it's heads down to get the thing going but absolutely is.

I remember I missed the first month of my triplets life because I had to run four clinics at the time. We had a provider that leave and I went and was the provider from 9am in the morning to 7pm at night. And my kids, I really didn't see them that first month and a half of life because I was back in it during that time. And you're absolutely right.

Here's something I find very interesting about your story. I've said before and I'll say it again, most entrepreneurs are oftentimes screwed into existence. Meaning they need money and they need to come up with a way to meet their bills. They did something in their past. They're like, well I can start doing this and I can start making money and I can feed my family. You intentionally left comfort. You chose discomfort. You took your fan, your wife must be incredible. And your child was too young to know but didn't have a, didn't have a vote but. And you put them in this very uncomfortable situation for a year and a half and you took the money that you were saving and you didn't invest in a business, you invested it in Yourself, like, tell me about that.

So my kids are actually only 20 months old, so they came after this, and they're triplets. Oh, okay.

So they.

They came after all this. But it was. It was my wife and I, the podcast that I was listening to at the time, they had released a mastermind that was revolving around the podcast, and it was $50,000. And. Wow. I applied to it and they said, you know, you had to be a business owner. So I didn't think I would actually get in. Somehow I was able to get in and I sat down and we had saved my wife and I a little over a hundred thousand dollars at the time for building a business. And I told her, I don't know what it is, but I feel like something is telling me that I have to do this. And if you tell me not to, I get it. This is half of our savings. And she said, well, you don't spend your money on anything else, which is true. And she said, yes. And that decision changed my entire life. Our entire lives. And you're absolutely right where I went from comfort to having to put myself back into discomfort, because I had, for all intents and purposes, won the game of life. I had a great family, I went to an Ivy League school. I'm now a doctor. So I'm making minimum 250k a year. The three jobs that I had with all the overtime I was doing, I was making close to 500k a year before taxes. And so I won. I won the game of life. And it just wasn't enough for me to not contribute to something, not grow something, not help others. And that was a big thing, was I work in the medical field and medical providers in general, whether they are nurses or doctors or nurse practitioners or even a clerical work, they're really just shit on by the hospital system over and over. They're churn and burn. They're not taken care of as a. There really isn't that culture of, hey, I want you to grow as a human being with us as much as possible. And so I saw that and that's what I really wanted to do, is grow that. And you're absolutely right. I was comfort. I left three jobs at once, and with the money I saved up, I sold my house to say, hey, I'm going all in. If I had enough money to survive a year with my wife, and if we didn't make it, I just was going to walk back into a hospital and ask for a job again.

Attention, dilution is a real thing. And lack of Focus needs leads to a lack of greatness. And the reason many people never do the things that they truly aspire to do is because they've got all of these other things that they think they have to continue in their life. It might be a job, maybe it's a sport, maybe it's drinking with buddies and all of these other things. And you really can't do something material if you're given 20% of your attention to it. You got to give 100% attention to something. And that's one of the challenges we have today with social media, me included. As a 55 year old guy, man, I will get sucked into Instagram Reels or TikTok and I'm sitting here, I just burned 20 minutes and I have things to do. So it happens. But what you did basically is you said, I am getting rid of my financial obligations, I'm getting rid of my work obligations, I'm getting rid of anything else that was distracting you. And you took half of what you had and you put it into this mastermind group. I can only imagine that your focus was very intense inside of that. What are a couple of the things that you learned in that time that still inform your thinking as a business builder today?

One of the biggest things is you have to keep putting yourself into that no options mentality. And it is a mistake that I constantly get when I grow because as you know Jeff, you get more money and when you get more money, you think, okay, I'll just save it and we could just hang out and I could put it in my 401k and I'll survive my way to multi million dollar platform. And then you realize what am I thinking? I did this because I didn't want to survive my way. I know that 9% on my money is not going to be there possibly when I'm 65 years old. So I might as well put it in tangible assets and businesses and things like that. So that was one of the biggest things, is consistently put your mindset back into that no options mentality. The second thing was exactly that growth. Every single dollar I reinvested into my business. And even when I could take pay, it was just enough for my wife and I to survive, to eat, to pay our rent and gas and bills. That's about it. Other than that, we didn't take any dividends. Everything went back into the growth of the business. We took dividends, we bought another clinic, we took dividends, we bought paid for more marketing, we took dividends, we went and looked to figure out what was the next B2B option that we could plug into our systems to lower our cost of goods? And doing that over and over and over, there was a point where the money was coming in and we couldn't spend it fast enough on things, on acquisitions and things like that. So that was really the second thing that I learned. Doing that is I absolutely every single dollar that you have putting it back into the business because people forget that you get comfortable, you start to live at that, you know, your thermostat rises to your income and, and pretty soon you're going out to dinner three times a week and the business has stalled, it's not growing, it's not, you're not hiring the person to get you the next level. And then the third one was you don't know everything. Really. I don't know everything. And people look to me because I'm the physician and I have an MD and an MD and an MBA and a bunch of other degrees. And I always like to tell people, try and be the dumbest person in the room, ask why? And I think as kids you get that beaten out of you because I said so. But as adults, if you just ask why, ask why, ask why. You know, some of my friends are the most annoying when it comes to this, are the richest because they are consistently looking for the next edge or the next opportunity or how did you do this? So I could apply it to this business. So continually asking why? And then speaking to your staff and explaining to them, this is why we do this, this is why I need you to do this. So they have that buy in and that concept of oh, hey, what I'm doing isn't just this menial job. If I didn't do this job, this whole assembly line would crumble. So what I do is important on a day to day basis.

More successful a person is, the more thoughtful research I see them doing. They want to know everything. It's kind of Art of War really. If you read Art of War, it's like no more than the opposition is a big part of that. And being curious is a lifetime hallmark of people that are up to something and going somewhere. So let's talk a little bit about Genesis. And so you, you, you come out of this mastermind, you have many choices of businesses that you can do. How did you settle on this one?

So the business partner that I had met, Brent Messer, he is just a businessman, he's not a medical person, but he had owned and operated three medical clinics at the time. And they were weight loss and hormone therapy clinics. He had a very old medical director who wasn't into any of the newer treatments, pushing new PRPs and things like that that are really healing you from the inside out and making sure that we live longer and age better. And that was really what I was interested in. So we decided, hey, we want to build this clinic together. The first clinic that we actually built was actually a different brand called Cell Spark. It was a stem cell clinic. I have my fellowship in stem cells and peptidology. So I did treatments on joints and hips and shoulders and everything like that. After about six months, we decided, hey, we can't just put all our eggs in this one basket, we need to grow it out. We knew that there were things like the FDA that didn't like us actually making patients better and improving. So we decided to pivot and start to add all these things that have been around for a very long time that really help people live better. Hormone therapy, weight loss, hair transplantation, things like that. So that's when it kind of transformed into what is now Genesis is that we started to build all those brands where it's like building an entire lifestyle of medicine where people are feeling better, looking better on the inside and the outside. And then that was a model that we knew we could scale. As you know, in the franchise model, there are some things where if you're just doing one thing and all of a sudden that one thing goes away, you're in big trouble. And so we wanted to make sure that, hey, our business didn't rely on just one service. If one service went down, we had five other services that helped spread our risk out, was allowing us to grow and all fed into each other. Where one person that did one thing, hormone therapy, could also do weight loss, could also do coolsculpting, could also do vitamin therapies, etc, to really take care of their body. So that's why we settled on Genesis and scaling that model out.

So how many services do you have? What I heard was you have IVs.

Yes, in one location. We overall, in all of the locations, we have a real core of three services now. And we got into the, I would say the mistake early on as being a jack of all trades, master of none. There were a time, there was a time when we had 30 services training staff to do 30 services, me training the provider to deliver 30 services. The sales aspect of 30 services, the SOPs of 30 services, the follow up, the CRM of 30 services, it's an absolute nightmare.

As simplicity scales, complexity fails 100%.

That's a great phrase. So we actually have cut it down. We do between 10 to 12 services in each clinic and really a heavy focus on three services. Weight loss, hormone therapy and men's health and women's health, which is either sexual health or erectile dysfunction.

So you've, you've got, you start the one clinic and you're iterating on the services. How long till that was profitable and, or did you wait till it was profitable until you started your second location?

We were profitable within the first 90 days. We were very low overhead. It was just myself and a medical assistant. So I said, hey, if we're going to fail, we're going to fail just on the two of our backs. So it's just myself and the medical assistant. About six months in, we hired our first employee who was a student that came and rotated through ours. So there was three of us. A year later, we built the second location. So about 12 months later we built the second location. And then it was just after that, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. We, we had built out two or three more locations during the first six months of the next year. And then my business partner and I took a class on M&As in the medical field. And for those who don't know mergers and acquisitions, and we're like, whoa, we could buy somebody else's stuff and then just put our sign on it. No way. And so you got to realize, like, I came from no business out of med school. They are the smartest dumb people ever. I'm sorry. Because we know just about the body. We don't even know how to read a P and L. I took my, I have an MBA in healthcare management. I could barely read a P and L after that and I could definitely not have an employee. So we went from that to mergers and acquisitions. We took a small course on it. It was like a four day online course with the gentleman named Roland Frazier. We're like, whoa, let's start applying this. And that's one of the biggest things, is that everything that my business partner and I learned, we try, we see if it fails. And if we fail fast and fail hard, and if it works great, let's do more of that. Whatever fails, we're not going to do that again. So we acquired over the next six months four companies and we just continued on rolling with that, where we continued to acquire a company, build another one out, acquire a company, build another one out. And on the ones that we built out, we decided, hey, you know what? The best way to do this is, and nobody's really doing it in the medical field is the Chick Fil A model where we take people from within our systems that have gone through our system, trained in our system, deserve to be owners in our system. And we give them equity and say, hey, we're going to build a new clinic. Would you like to be the clinic director or the main provider? And we're going to give you 10% or 20% or 5%. Every contract is different. And you're going to run this, this is your baby. And, and that has really allowed us to scale because it has allowed my business partner and I to step back without a board. We have no board or anybody like that, no CEO or anybody running each of these clinics and really provide each of those clinics with their own little owner. And each of them, who drives the culture, who drives our monthly and weekly meetings, who passes on everything that Brent and I pass to them and you know, disperses it around the team. So there is a tight knit culture. And still as a group we're growing and growing significantly faster because once we know they're taken care of, they're going to take care of everybody beneath them.

Franchising is so powerful because it puts ownership mentality at the point of attack. You've accomplished that same thing by giving somebody a vested upside in the opportunity that you're in. And also I imagine participating in the profits by whatever percentage they, you, they, they own in the business with you. So, so you've done a, you, you've done the Chick Fil A model. Chick Fil A is a franchise, but you know, it's, it's an interesting different type of franchise and you've mimicked that. So that's very smart. Now the other thing I want to talk about is culture. So you've grown a total of 29 locations since 2019. I'm not going to ask you how many employees you have, but I mean, it's got to be over a hundred. And it's, it's up into the hundred somewhere. There was this great book I read. Now I'm going to tell you, I get facts wrong, but concepts I get. Okay, that's kind of the way I think got it. Probably the c. Probably I was a fullback in college, so there's probably CTE in there somewhere. But so the, but so the concept was, I think it was from Burton. It was an example of a book and it was Burton Snowboards. And they saw a study that said people can know 155 people and can connect with 155 people. But after that you start to lose that connectivity with that, with that group and the culture changes. So this particular company, I think it was Burton, every time they only put 155 parking spots in a building and when they filled them up, they built another building and they would build another division just to make sure that they had these cultures that were relatively intact and. And that kind of thing. Really interesting. Anyway, put in the notes in YouTube if you want to, how wrong that is and how many ways. But the point is, I've seen some of your social media and you take a very upfront, honest in your face approach to what it means to be on your team culturally. So what are the things that you do intentionally? Because when you grow fast like this, you get an app, not everybody works out. It's not a good fit for everybody. You have to be ultra intentional about building your culture because people have to know what they're even in the interview process. This is what you're signing up for because that's going to increase the chance of success.

Yep.

So what are the things that you do in recruiting and communicating and leading so that you know as you're building 29 locations over three plus years that you're able to hold this together and attract the kind of people and retain the kind of people that are giving you this success?

One of the biggest things we do is talk about our core values. And our mnemonic for our core values is dig deep and act with integrity. Now our business runs off what's called the EOS model, the entrepreneur organizational system model. And so our core values were actually created by our executive team and our executive team made up about at that time, we created these core values or redid the core values about 22 people. And so we deliberated for a day on what it meant to be an employee at Genesis, what it meant to be an executive at Genesis, and drove it down to our core values. Now every single employee gets one of these. This is a metal business card, says Genesis on one side and it has our core values on the back side. Every employee gets bookmarks, and these are unlimited. We give them out like candy and we have our employees carry them out, carry them around with us. And so when we talk in terms of praising, when we talk in terms of reprimanding or writeups, there is always at least one core value tied to it. I learned this actually from hotels. My wife worked for five star hotels and I haven't had a single five Star Hotel. Who doesn't do this. They don't have a car that walks around with them. They don't speak through their core values on a consistent basis. So every single person knows, dig deep. We have determination, integrity, growth. Deep is just a word, an act, a C T. Accountability, customer service and teamwork with integrity. And integrity is one of our core values. So they are able to recite our core values. They know our core values. And we speak in terms of core values not in. Only in terms of who we are serving, but also ourselves and that we're living with that. Accountability means that we as owners don't care who messed up. All we care about is that you are working on fixing the problem. You bring me a problem, make sure you bring me some sort of solutions. If you don't know, make up a solution that you think would work so that you are learning in the process of how to solve things. When it comes to growth, we don't just focus on growth in the business. How can you make more money in the company? How can you make more money at home? What do you need to do to save? What is a 401k mean? How should you be spending money on mortgage? How much? How to finance a car? These are some things that we help our employees with because we want them to live better at home and not paycheck to paycheck like 82% of Americans or something ridiculously high like that. But we want them to live our core values and we are very upfront about it. So even our reprimands, they always include a core value and breaking a core value. But at the same time, I expect so much of them as family members, as my kids, I protect them as family members, as my and my kids. I do not have a problem. And we don't have a problem with releasing a patient if they're rude, if they are cussing out staff members, if they're in any way inappropriate with our staff members. We're not going to be the type of family and the type of team that says, well, you know what, that's just the team or that's just the patient. You got to deal with it. The patient's always right. No, the patient's not always right. In our system, we will respect each other. Prison mentality. You give respect, you get respect. You don't respect the staff. You really don't belong in our business. And the staff knows that. So they know that we push them because we want them to be better. Because as you know, Jeff, that uncomfortableness is where Growth happens. So we consistently find ways to make them uncomfortable so that they're growing.

Personal and professional development. So many companies overlook the personal piece of it. We're all looking for belonging. We're all looking for respect. We're looking to be heard. We're looking for connection. We spend most of our waking hours serving in a business or an organization. And the organizations have an obligation to give back and I think to complete that. And there's people that want that and there's people that, you know and they might say to you, this has probably been one of the hardest places I've ever worked, but it's the most. I got the most out of it, and it's the most fulfilling. I mean, they would stay, say that about Steve Jobs. I mean, they'd burn out in 17 months. And then they would look back and say, that was the greatest time of my career. Working 111 hours a week.

Yeah.

Doing whatever he forced them to do. You know, that's very admirable. There's huge lesson inside of that for people building teams and not just making it transactional. There's a great book called Predictably Irrational, and it talks about how you take a relationship and you ruin it by making it transactional. So you say, you know, the example they give in the book is, hey, Alex, you know, you're a friend, you've got a truck. Will you help me come move my couch on Saturday morning? And you, you're like, sure, Jeff, no problem. Or if I said, alex, I'll give you $3 to help me move my couch. Now you're offended. And once you monetize personal relationships and you lose the personal set of, it's very difficult to get them back. Now, this is an employment situation. You're paying them, you're trading time for dollars. But that doesn't mean that you also can't pour into them and make it a much a more fulfilling place. Become an employer of choice and really look back on it. And so when I sold my main business, I had for 24 years, we had nine people that had been with us over 20 years at the, you know, one of the little celebration post deal dinners that we had and the stories that they. People remember the first conversations we had 20 plus years ago. I remember when I came in and then we would go back and talk about some of the early customers and the jobs. I mean, we sat there for five hours. Our spouses were, you know, sitting off somewhere else and. But I mean, like that, to me, that meant as much to you know, to, to what we accomplished because all of those people grew up in the business and they were all better off and they all shared in the outcome and, you know, fed their families and grew up along the way. So I really applaud you for that. Any, any other tips that you would have for people maybe that are starting their first business? If you wanted to say fundamentally, okay, I just, I just entered into a franchise. I've been in corporate America. I'm starting my first business. What words of wisdom would you have for these people so that they can start well and go well?

I would say be the dumbest person in the room. When you usually start a franchise, they give you all the booklets that you can read, and you can read those up and down and left and right and maybe it doesn't have all the answers. Start to study other franchises. Why do other franchises work? How do they work? Go and sit inside franchises that you know are good. Everybody knows there's franchises that provide great service, great training. Go and sit inside them, learn. Pick the staff's brains. Hey, how did, who taught you how to do that? How did you do this? That doesn't mean you have to steal their books, but you could pick up a lot of good stuff from these franchises in terms of purpose and what other franchises are doing really, really well and just try things. I know with franchises there are certain things you have to have, maybe certain sorts of marketing or certain types of services that you have to provide. You can't be outside that. But that doesn't mean you cannot change the customer service. And customer service people don't realize is one of the most important part of their business. If you don't have customers, you don't have a business. And there is no franchise that is going to limit you on your customer service.

Yeah, franchisees that do the people piece well, it goes easy for them. And people that don't do the people piece well, you know, they have to figure that out. Best of class franchisors create exactly what you're talking about within the system because there is always a top 20 or top 25% that do everything exceptionally well. And then you enable the high engagement, radical transparency inside of the organization, sharing numbers, you know, creating tools and dashboards where people can have comparative analytics, benchmarking, and you can look and see who is the best at conversion, who's the best at this. Like you said, go to those people. And by the way, those people generally, which is crazy, they are the people that want to share the most. I love to Teach, because I'm constantly rechecking myself about what I'm going to say. And then, you know, you get better by teaching. You really do. You get better by sharing. You get better by training. You get better by teaching because you're making sure that you're delivering a message that's on point. And it's, you know, especially in our, in our franchise systems, you know, you never know that you might be helping somebody that's new, but they're brilliant and they're going to come up with. With things and, you know, be one of your, you know, peer groups, running mates, whatever you want to call it. So I think that's great advice. I'd like to talk a little bit about personal branding. So your story is so amazing, mainly because it started in 2019. I mean, really with the clinics and stuff. This is just a. This is a rocket ship. And yet somehow, in building or acquiring 29 businesses, operating businesses, you've also managed to build a pretty solid personal brand and you've taken time to do it. Why did you choose to invest your valuable time, energy and money in doing that?

I think it was because the three biggest mentors that I had had built phenomenal personal brands. Not just around their businesses. They had built a podcast where they gave away information for free, or the training system where they gave away information for free and it wasn't attached to their company. They just love to provide value. They were at a place in time where they didn't need the money. So, like you were saying, you love to teach, they love to teach other people. And I saw that the more they taught, the more value that provided, the more it fulfilled them and then the more money their businesses made. Because people want to do business with people they like. So when they see you and they like what you're saying and they like your personal brand, you're not always the guy who can do one type of franchise. Like, oh, that guy Jeff, he can only do construction franchises. That's it. He doesn't do anything else? Well, no, Jeff is the franchise guy. He is the guy like, you want to franchise anything, you go to Jeff. The guy knows what he's talking about in across the Skies when it comes to franchising. And that's kind of what I wanted to be, is that I didn't want to just be the medical doctor. And I think a lot of doctors do this where they elevate themselves as the smart person and only in one field, and they are the doctor to celebrities, which is great. But I also understood that that's not a sellable business. I can't sell Dr. Spinozo when I'm gone. And nobody's going to buy that because when I'm gone and Everybody's attached to Dr. Spinozo, that's not nobody, no VC, no corporate brand, nobody's going to want to buy that. It's worth $0 if I get hit by a bus outside. So I realized that, hey, I had to build a brand to where I can coach and be a part of these other companies and grow out all these other things. So it wasn't just one thing that I was focused on and I didn't want to get pigeonholed into that one thing.

Finding the mechanism to share what you've learned, it will grow your network and your reputation far beyond anywhere you ever knew that, that it was. And I believe, and I've said it, and I don't know what the math is. I used to say that people will give you $10 for every dollar you can screw them out of if you can provide value to lives because you've, you know, give first. What I look for really is like, do they, do they understand what they're trying to do? Do they have a purpose? Are they passionate about it? Do they have the right intent? You know, are they going to be successful in their business? And then are they going to in turn, you know, do something that's going to build our society out? Because we got this widening wealth gap in this country and small business and entrepreneurship. What you're doing, we, what I'm doing, man, it is like the antidote to chaos. Because if you can, it's, I mean, you look at what home prices are. I've got three children, 25, 22 and 19. And you know, I bought my first house when I was in College for $62,500. It was owner financed. I worked off the down payment and I held that. I rented that house for 20, 30 years. 25, 30 years. I forget how long I held it because I just sold it a few years ago and I selled, I sold it. I made so much money on that house over the lifetime of it, probably five times or six times, whatever I paid for it. And by the way, renters paid the mortgage, so I didn't pay really anything on it. But now you look at starter homes at $400,000. I mean, that's a real material problem in this country. It's something that we've got to solve. I mean, homeownership is the fundamental core asset to People that want to build and there's. People are going to say, well, you know, homeownership's not great. Well, you know what, it's something every year, it's growing in value. You're paying down a mortgage, you know, and you couple that maybe with a 401k or building some other businesses or side hustles, Whatever you're doing, it's an important part of a portfolio. Teaches you about real estate and all that. So we've got this wealth gap in this country and we can fill it with entrepreneurial entrepreneurship and people that can create generational wealth, create that freedom, create jobs for other people. And, you know, that's what really my purpose in coming out of retirement. I mean, I sold my business at 50 and didn't have to do anything ever again to generate cash. But I was like, I, I, it took me about two or three years to really find a purpose that would get me going. What I learned when I sold my business, which is probably not a good thing, is that the money is unsatisfying to me if it's not attached to something else. Either people that I care about, conquering a new industry, doing something that you've aspired to do, or you know, really impact making some sort of an impact. I've got to have that piece to it because that's kind of what gets me going. And I want to make money doing it because when I play, I want to win. And the money's the scorecard. And, and it's important because if you don't make money, you can't help anybody. So it does feel good. It does. You can do no good by, by building a, an unprofitable, you know, fat, unhealthy business. So you have to do it well. But, but I really appreciate your perspective on that. So how did you get started with your personal brand? Was it just, you know, on your iPhone doing whatever or did you, did you. Were you as surgical and planning it as you did when you went to the Mastermind group and then you ultimately did your business?

No, honestly, everybody that I have been taught and I've been taught personal branding from guys that have multimillion followers and nine figure businesses, guys like Andy Frisella and Ed Mylett and Dean Graziosi, and every single person just told me, hold up your phone and speak your truth. Whatever you're thinking about, whatever you're learning. There's a great line that said, good artists copy, but great artists steal. So if you have, if somebody has a thought and you Have a thought about that thought. Cool. Pick it up. Say, hey, I read this, this is what I think about it, etc. Post it. That allows people to be attracted to you and realize that no matter what you do, 50% of the world will hate you for no reason whatsoever. So don't speak to that 50% of the world. The 50% of the world that will love you, just speak to them. The other half will hate you and you didn't do anything to them. So quite honestly, just. Just be yourself. And the recordings that you do of yourself, just post. And now all my stuff is a little bit more, is a little bit better because I actually have a crew and I have a marketing company now that I own that comes and does my filming and stuff. But up until that point, it was iPhone. I set it up to 4K and portrait mode and recorded questions and just posted them over and over and over. And for a while it just sat there and allowed me to remind myself of things that I had learned. Because I could always go back and say, oh, okay, I remember I read that, or I remember I have to do that to myself. And most of my posts are just things that I've experienced. Hey, I experienced this. This is what I. This is what I think about it. Hey, experience this. This is what you should do. You know, and just all the lessons that I've had, so repeating those lessons, other people say, well, I feel like you're speaking to me well, because I lived it. And if you're living it now, there aren't a lot of lives to live in the entrepreneurial world. At the beginning, it really sucks. You work a lot of hours and you don't get paid shit, and it's rough and you got to live through it. And then when you make a little bit of money, you make the same mistakes that everybody else does, and nobody knows what they're doing. And so that's why we listen to podcasts and other people and read books and things like that, because I 100% agree with you. You know, the greatest form of rebellion is personal excellence.

Well, very well said, Alex. You've lived a life of adventure. And one of the things I tell my children and I tell anybody who cares to listen is that everybody needs an adventure in life, and you don't need to afraid to take it. If there's no reason to say no, you need to say yes. So you started out and you, you went all the way over to England and you played soccer and you traveled all over Europe, which was very exciting. Then you come all the way back to California and you're working inside of a prison, which I think is very cool, informative. That's an experience that, that's going to stick with you and it's going to create some real hard understanding about what's right and what's wrong and what consequences are.

Yep.

And then, and then you go, you go through this season of, you know, you live, I got on my wall, you know, live the life of a monk and you know, just live the life of a monk, you know, and defer like you don't need anything and I won't ask you what kind of car you drive, but you don't need a great car.

Thanks.

But you don't need it. But you got it now. But you know, so then, then you live the life of a monk and then you go on, on this entrepreneurial journey which is four years of just rapid fire business building and you're building a social media. So, so what is next for you as you, as you think about going forward? Because you've learned how to do business, you've learned how to do M and A, you've learned how to build a personal brand and done so successfully. So now you have optionality. How, what kind of rudder do you have on your future and how do you think about choosing what you do next?

So our goal really is by 2025 to start some form of an exit. And an exit wouldn't be a total sale because most of the time in our field there isn't a total sale. An exit would look something like a franchise system that we set up with Genesis or a partial purchase from a VC company or something like that where we can reward all the people that have gone with us like we already have, they do have like profit sharing and things like that. But being able to provide them with that and being able to provide them with the next level because my business partner is starting to understand that we only know what we know and there's people that are better than us that can scale this to the next level. So how can we work with those people to scale the business to the next level, to give the people underneath us the opportunities that we couldn't give because we don't know what to do next. We're doing this. This is the first business I've built and when I started adding and building the other business, these are still. I'm young in business, I've only been around in business for five years. That is like infinitesimally small for people like yourself. That have built and sold 20 year plus businesses. So I'm very young in that and I want to be able to help these people that have grown with us, provide them with, hey, there's some money that you really don't have to worry if you're intelligent with it from now on. But we still want to get to the next level. We want to grow the biggest medical group in the country. We want to acquire all of the B2B companies, and we want to grow it that way. We want to create this behemoth of really taking care of people before they get sick. And you're absolutely right, Jeff. Yes. I drive a McLaren and when I bought it, it was great. And after a few, it still makes me smile because I love cars. But when I was able to see my employees buy a car that they love or like move into a house and when they've been renting, I mean, that stuff, my business partner and I were talking about it, that makes you a life changer. You're changing somebody's family stripes forever. And that is way cooler than the stuff that I own. That is just really what drives me. And that's why we haven't, quite frankly, sold and walked away at this time. Because it's like, I want to take them all with us. I want to grow. And I see that this can be way bigger. So what are the next steps of doing that? And that's what my business partner and I, that's where we're at.

We've got some things that are symbolic in my life. A car or two or a watch or two. And I, I find those things to be absolutely appropriate. They're, you know, it's, it's a, it's a testament to the hard work and the sacrifice that you made. It makes me feel good. I've got a, I bought a Tesla. Top of the top of the line. Everything you could possibly get in a Tesla. And dude, I love it. I just, I love driving it. And it's fast, it's sharp, it's, you know, it's cool.

Being a monk doesn't mean you have to live like one, that's for sure.

Well, you have to get to, you got to get to monk work. I mean. Yeah, yep. They're not going to walk everywhere, so. Yeah, absolutely. And then also too, like you said, really pouring into other people and letting them have success. And some of the people, so many of the people that we've had in our business came right out of college and we've got some people that came Right out of college and they went through three or four different departments and now they're leading big companies or very successful inside of the industry. So, yeah, that's. That. That to me is a reward. Alex, I've really enjoyed it. You've, you've spoken a lot of truth here and, and I wrote down a bunch of notes just for me personally to go back and clean up a little bit and, and think about. So I really appreciate the way you think. I really am impressed with how quickly you've built these businesses and I'm excited to see what you're going to do from here. If you had one sentence that you could give to somebody to make an impact in their life, do you have a go to?

Because I came from the medical field and we have in the professional world such a high rate of suicide and there's such a high rate now of anxiety and depression and things like that, which I think you could debate is largely driven by looking at perfect lives of Instagram and social media and things like that. I would say to anybody, it is never too late and anything when it comes to business and when it comes to growing, what you want to do is possible. You just got to be willing to put in the hours outside of what everybody else is. Just keep learning. There are books, there is the amazing Google machine, there is YouTube where you can learn to do anything and do anything really, really well with everything that's at our fingertips. So there's, it's never too late. Push yourself, go out, learn and just don't stop learning. Be the absolute best at what you do.

Oh, well said, man. Be, be open, stay open and focus on it. It's fantastic. I really appreciate that. Alex, how can people reach you and where would you direct them to continue to follow you?

Yeah, they can follow me on Instagram. It's just. Dr. Alex Spinoso. D R A L E X S P I N O S O my website is doctoralexpinoso.com and then I'm on Facebook as the same thing. Dr. Alex Bonozo. Very simple and easy.

Awesome. Alex, thank you again for investing the time with us today. I've thoroughly enjoyed it.

Jeff, thank you so much for having me on. I'm really honored.

Oh, absolutely. And as always, this podcast has been brought to you by Homefront Brands. Simply building the world's most responsible franchise platform, all the while delivering enterprise level solutions to local business owners out there on the homefront where it counts. So if this sounds like you, check us out@homefrontbrands.com today. And start your next chapter of greatness, building your dynasty on the home front. I am Jeff Duden, and I will be here looking for you.