Getting Raw Ep #17 with Sean Hall

Welcome, it's Richard Mark Toutounji and it's getting raw today. And today I've got a very special guest, Sean Hall. Hi. Thank you. CEO of BioCeuticals. which I'm sure you've used, tried, seen around. I mean, I've used them, I've seen them, and they're prescribed everywhere. So I wanted to have more of a conversation about the success of your company and the next stage of your company, which is—

Bioengineered.

Bioengineered, right. So tell me, I guess, how this company came about and why is it everywhere when it's prescribed in pharmacies and health food stores. How did you engineer such a thing?

It's a fairly young company when you look at histories of companies. So, BiCeuticals itself was a family business and it was started roughly 12 years ago by myself, my late brother, and my father, who is an economist by trade. The thing is, is my father has been around these life science ranges all his life, and for those of you who are a bit older and a bit more savvy in this area, You may remember a company called Bioglan, still around now, still advertised. That was him,

right?

Right before he sold it. Bioglan, right. So there's this bio, bio, bio, bio thing that's, that's, uh, yeah, right. It's sort of staying with us. Um, 12 years ago, Alex and myself and the old man got together and we were in a position where we were bringing US products that my father was involved in to Australia, right, and putting into the Australian market to deliver a range being biocuticals, that could take this middle ground, that could take the best out of the nutritional world and make it just as efficacious as drug medicine, as we would call it. Sure. If I skip now forward 10 years, you know, my brother has passed on, but the legacy of the company has been shared with the family and still remains the same. You know, we now have an outstanding primary tier research portfolio that spans pediatric work at Westmead. We're in early talks on depression work with Black Dog. We are doing stuff with UQ, and we've done stuff with overseas military on human performance. We were very particular on the channels we picked. We were very strong in the medical community moving forward with the product.

Yep.

And it also represented a different type of range for naturopaths because there was science coming in and there was research papers coming out of it. You know, we had professors of medicine talking about the product, so it became safe. And that's where we've concentrated on. So it's not a big range, you know, compare it to—

But it's a trusting range though.

That's exactly right, and that's more where we concentrate. So key formula, right, it's niched, and it has had a lot of attention.

What I don't see with your product is it's not, you know, in magazines on full pages with guys with 6-packs. It's given directly, pretty much, to small communities like pharmaceuticals, doctors, etc., and then provided around there. And that's where you're building up a lot of trust,

right?

A lot of credibility straight away.

So our ads are very different, and if we were to give them to a normal marketer, they'd sit down and go, this is boring.

Yeah,

right. It doesn't excite me.

Sure. Yeah,

but you know, the audience we're speaking to have Very— I don't want to use the expression they have blinkers on, but they're looking for key things about it. Now, you know, if I'm a practitioner and I'm going to use any product in practice, right, if I'm going to give you any ingestive therapy, I need to know it's safe.

Yeah.

You need to convince me of that, and I need to know that I'm not wasting your time, your money, and my time. So if I give you that, as this company has told me to do it, then it must work.

Yeah.

Right, so these are the more key things that we've concentrated on.

And now that this range is— and it's been out there for over 10 years now. You've got a new range now, which I sort of want to get understanding why.

Yeah, right.

Since this stuff is really good anyway, and then so you've changed labels a little bit. And this is, well, I guess why we meant to have a conversation in regards, because this is all focused around marketing to trainers, gyms, to get to their community-based people. So the same sort of model you've done marketing-wise, but to a different industry, if my understanding is right, and that's the bioengineered range as well. So tell me a bit about, I guess, why this was born.

Okay, so very new, and we're just dribbling out to the marketplace now. We're known in the medical, naturopathic, chiropractic world. What we underestimated is how many personal trainers—

Are actually taking this.

Know this brand.

Yeah, a lot of people don't.

To give you an idea, this is Ultra Muscle Ease. This product's been with us 10 years. Yeah. It's one of our best sellers still today. And this is probably the product that we underestimated how many PTs got involved in. This product, if I can cover those 2, is actually Ultra Muscle Ease but with all these other key ingredients that we were playing with over the past couple of years to make it a different type of magnesium formulation. It's because we see magnesium as being a linchpin to so much that we do, right? So you pick up most ranges and it's protein, protein, protein, protein. That's great, right? We see magnesium being key, right? So the proposition behind BioSurf BioEngineered is enabling you to pull up quicker and easier after a harder session. Right now, I'm not your average gym guy. I don't profess to being that.

Right.

For those of you who don't know me, I am an avid diver. You know, I train for my diving. So my training is specific. I have a personal trainer that likes to kick the living hell out of me. I gav, right? And outside that, you know, I try to get some personal time in fitness first, you know, just for cardio. But I'm getting older. Now there'll be guys that say, oh, that's crap. You know, just get out there and train hard. And there's some truth to that. But somewhere along the lines, you'll have problems with a muscle. You'll have problems with a joint. Alright? You'll have problems with your headspace, your focus. We see magnesium as being a big player here because by creating a cellular system that is nimble and is hydrated, you can pull up quicker. I actually use this before I dive. Before I jump off that boat with steel twin tanks on my back, boys screaming, you know, who are only half my age, right? I got this.

Let's talk a bit about that because, I mean, you're big on diving in the office here. Diving, diving in. You've built a company up now, and this is getting raw. So, we do like to talk about the business side of it, and this is where— we'll come back to this in a second in regards to— there is a business side of this, and this is why we don't just talk about nutrition here, we talk about how it can help your business. But you've built a company up, and tell me about, I guess, the way building the company up and how you've done it now. We're in Alexandria, just right up from my office. Yep. And you've got a whole team here. Tell me about, I guess, the struggles, if there were some struggles along the way, and the wins along the way as well to getting these and being where they are at the moment, you know what I mean?

If I can concentrate on this when I answer that question. One of the hardest things to maintain is your core culture.

Right.

We hire people based on cultural fit to the company. You don't always get that right.

So you hire people based on the culture?

That's right. So that way we get a stronger alignment, a stronger affinity to what we believe in and what we do. The commonality at the end of the day is they fundamentally believe in what we do and why we're doing it, which makes it easy to get buy-in from the staff. It makes it easier to move the company along. And sometimes it's the hardest thing to maintain because as the company matures and you add more people and you're going through compounded growth on growth, It's easy to sit there and lose your way.

Yes.

It's easy for the finance guys to go, wow, did you see that last year? That was amazing. Let's do it again. And it's easy to get carried away in that. On one hand, you have to make money because you have shareholders and you have boards and you have banks. But on the other hand, what the bankers want to know is that there is something— there's sizzle in what you

do.

So your choice very quickly is you become heartless and run for the dollar. Or you turn around and you invest really in the brand and in your people. And that's the angle we chose to do. So what most people would not know about us is on one hand we have this that sits in that semi-ethical space. We have a biotech division that actually R&Ds drugs and drug applications. The best example of that is this is Loli Vitamin D.

Vitamin D.

Right, which is actually a hormone, right? We just all call it vitamin D. No, sorry, vitamin D. We have— and that's the upper limit, that 1,000, that 1 drop, that 1,000 IU is the max limit set by Canberra.

Sure.

We've taken that.

Yep.

We have turned that into a dosage 50 times that allowable limit, and we have concentrated it down to a 1 mL source, and it's in an oral syringe. And here and now, it's in trial in pediatric studies because of the need of D deficiency in children. So like, let's put it this way, if you go to Dr. Google, Dr. Google's great, he answers most of your questions pretty quick, and type in D, D deficiency, D symptoms, right, you will come out with a plethora of uses for D, right. What we're going through here now is an epidemic where most of us are D deficient. But this is probably the best example I can give you of a nutritional And you can buy D in any type of flavour or size from front-of-store pharmacy through to prescriptive that we've turned into a novel drug that is patented and will be on the market shortly, we

hope.

That's the tenets of Biocuticals. Now holding that cultural and that vision true to the staff, true to the shareholders, right, and true to the board is hard work because different people have different interests.

Of course.

And this is why maintaining our platform So, the platform in clinic with doctors, chiros, naturopaths, and in professional pharmacy was key because it all builds up to our endgame.

And has there been situations where you've gone down that easy path and you've had to sort of come back or been slapped on the wrist?

Certainly, yeah, yeah, look, you know, we all stuff up every now and again and it's part and parcel of being human. And, you know, we have to sit back and we have to take stock and say, what's the right thing for the company?

Yeah.

You know, there'll be some people out there that will say the move of biocuticals into ethical pharmacy was wrong. And, you know, our answer to that is, well, in ethical pharmacy, the practitioners themselves are the pharmacists, but we also have a wonderful amount of doctors that prescribe through pharmacy. So, we have to be But the challenges we get into when we do things like this is trying to monitor and be fair about how the products are dispensed, you know, to the public, right? We actually have what's called a retail policy, which is a policy that a retailer needs to sign into on the storage, the handling, and the dispensing of the nutritional, right? Right. You know, sometimes we get into some, some hickledy-pickledies with the retailer or the proprietor at the time. Sometimes we might get into some trouble with the associations because, you know, company law is not law, right? Company guideline is all it is.

Yep.

And, you know, associations have charter and stuff like that. So there is a balancing act on expectations from Canberra, expectations from staff, especially sales staff that are trying to earn a commission, right? Expectations from these associations that help these practitioners upskill Help them start practices, right? And then what's happening in the real world? I think you know in the last two three years as well, the biggest challenge we've had is the internet. Yes, right. Multiple times, we now see an increased amount of patients that are self-diagnosing.

Dr. Google.

Dr. Google. That's hard work. We all do it. Yeah. I have this itch.

Oh, we all do it. Yes. We're about to die.

We do get people to do some funky stuff with pricing on the website.

Okay.

It does get people. back up. And you have to walk a very fine line because obviously you can't talk to people about fixing pricing, but we want to know why they feel a need to mark down. Yeah. And they're very open about it. And they usually have some real-world situations that these have all come about because one of the things we're going to look at doing in the future is building a distressed patient fund, right? So instead of practitioners feeling the need that they need to heavily discount price because they've got a patient that has hit some financial hardship, we're going to build a fund and a committee that allows a subset of patients going forward to be sponsored through the company. Cultural thinking that you're not gonna see from, you know, the magazines you're referring to or the front of store guys, you know, because at the end of the day, to get into a product like this, and we're copying this to this, we're just changing who the advice is coming from. We feel that you don't self-serve. You need to sit down with someone qualified and say, this is what I have, this is what I don't have.

This is what you need.

What do I need?

What do you need?

So, he goes, you need to do that twice a day. And you go, that's really cool. How do I know when I've had too much? And he goes, well, you're going to come see me next week.

Yeah.

Right? And when you get in trouble, that same guy is there for you.

And they're going to go through the steps. And, you know, as trainers and personal trainers, they're seeing their clients at least once a week, at least. And they can continue to share their journey and their nutritional journey and their energy levels and They can really, I guess, be a very good indicator of what they need to be taking.

The thing I can share with any personal trainer out there is if you look at your client as a patient, you're going to change your mindset a little

bit.

And as patients, we all have a tendency to tell the truth as we see it, which is not necessarily the truth as the person consulting for you needs to know. So engage, ask probing questions, ask 3 or 4 times in different ways, right? Number one is we all have a tendency to share resources, right? When we work with our practitioners, and we do this every 18 months, we engage small amounts of research just to see how many practitioners that one patient is engaging. And it is common for the one person to be getting very different advice from 2 people.

Really?

Which creates a problem. That's a big problem. When something doesn't work, My question to you is, what didn't work? And if you don't know that other person exists, nor that advice— now I'm not saying put your boxing gloves on and go swing it with the guy next door, right? Work out ways to work cooperatively. Because if the patient doesn't volunteer it and something does go wrong, who's going to be blamed for what reason? Any pool of people meeting to do any type of business engagement always has that possibility and that opportunity to add secondary effect. Personal trainers

have

it. I kind of figure, I know how much I pay for a personal training session and I reckon I get great value. I'm very open for Gav to sit there and go, Sean, that sucks, that's great, do this, do that. Have you tried? I can say no. But the point is, he's there to give me advice. That's what I'm saying. If you start thinking about it as a patient, then they're not coming there to work out with you. They're coming there for a consultation.

Yep.

And in that consultation, you are going to do, let's call it bodywork loosely. Chiropractors will probably knock me for a 6 for using that.

Yep.

But you're gonna do some bodywork, right? And in that bodywork, you're gonna take them through a routine. And a routine is, it's kind of like their medicine at the time, if I can use that term loosely, right? Why should a personal trainer feel that they can't turn around and have the conversation and says, look, We're getting your bodywork right. Let's talk nutritionally what you need, right? And start having that conversation.

And they obviously, I think the big problem is having the confidence as well. One, in the product, right? So they understand that the product's backed and then having enough advice and information about that product as well, which I'm sure—

That's a problem everywhere.

Is just training, more training up, you know, education.

And then, so, you know, what will happen is you're gonna start getting those Personal trainers go, I get this, and the light bulb switches on. And turn around and go, I need to invest time in me.

Yeah.

Right? So, you know, most professions have some level of continuing professional education that requires points. I don't know if they have it in PT.

Yeah, it's exactly the same.

So, you know, you find stuff in there that really enables what you do and adds value to what you give to your patients.

Sure.

Right? So you go beyond the, we're gonna work out for 45 minutes, we're gonna work out for an That's great. But if you can start having those secondary conversations that pile up benefits—

And that makes you a great fitness professional. Once you can do that. It's not just this, I can offer this, this, this, or I can advise. Then it's up to the client if they'd like to take the advice up or not.

That's exactly right. Yeah. And it also builds a secondary income stream for you. Right? After that, you might turn around and go, you know, I want to pair with a dietetic to get, you know, a diet plan more molded rather than a simple flowchart stuff. And it then opens your minds to other types of creative joint ventures you can go into where you can pull knowledge off other industry players that can benefit your people. Yeah. You know, I kind of figure from a patient's point of view, if I can use that term again, walking up to a personal trainer and going, I need you to do this, is one of the hardest things in the world to do. Especially if you're a male, because males hate saying that they're wrong. So if that guy is walking up to you going, I want to do this, right? Then you want to be able to make sure that you've got a few things in your bag that's going to provide—

Yeah, because the fitness might not just work, or they may be busy, so you've got to find other options based on each individual, based on each client. So that's very important. Let's just quickly talk about culture before we go, because I've spoken to you before and you're talking about the staff culture. I think it's important in any business as personal trainers grow their business, or fitness owners grow their business, about culture.

Right.

You've got a pretty cool culture in regards to this Sunday, what's going on. Tell me a bit about that.

Next Sunday? Next Sunday. Next Sunday being the 25th is my late brother's birthday. And to commemorate my brother, my mum, I actually, when I think about this, I give a lot of credit to my mum. My mum devised the trophy, the Alex Cup trophy.

Alex Cup trophy, yeah.

Right, and she's part of the Balmoral Swim Club, they're part of Ocean Swim. So, every year now, Ocean Swim at Balmoral Beach features the Alex Hall Trophy. It's compulsory attendance for my staff.

How many staff do you have here at Go Go Go?

There'll be about 60 of us that will come. We have 124, but a lot are interstate or overseas.

So, if they're in Alexandria, they're coming. There's no way about that.

It's the only time they get to turn up for work in thongs.

And they have their bio swimmers, do they?

Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The girls have one-piece biosurgical swimmers. Our feature girls that walk around and hand out products have skimpy bikini bioengineered— come on boys, you'll love that. 25th coming up. And staff will be in BioCeutical t-shirts or bioengineered t-shirts. Free samples. We don't sell a thing. No staff is allowed to try and sell anyone on anything. So this goes like hotcakes. This will be there for the first time. We also bring IceAway, which is our weight loss supplement as well. There's about, I think, 1,100 swimmers on the day. Families, we do giveaways for the kids.

And what is it, you know, on Monday morning, how's the culture back in the office after that?

Yeah, it's usually we waste a few hours looking through photos of Sunday. And you can't get around that. That's part of the culture, so you just let them do it. It's lost productivity. But they're on a high, they're buzzing. They carry that through to clients. Clients want to see the photos. Our mail here is obviously scanned for multiple reasons, and for the 48 hours post an event like this, so many emails are going to clients with photos, haha, check me out, stuff like that. And it is, it's a good buzz, but you know, it's beyond just turning to work 9 to 5 and sitting at a desk and going, I'm going to just crunch numbers or whatever. It does, it makes it fun.

That's good. Very good insight and very successful insight. So we could talk all day, but we've got to wrap it up there. Also too, Bioengineered, sorry, is a sponsor of Meet Your Fitness Marketing. So these guys continue to develop and invest into professionals to put the word out there. So check them out and they'll be floating around. And where, I guess, when people want to know more about this, where can they find you guys? Are you guys floating on Facebook or where can they get in contact with you

guys? Both are on Facebook. Otherwise, websites, www.bioengineered.com.au, www.bioceuticals.com.au.

Easy, we'll put it all up for you.

So

check it out, and it's on Make Your Fitness Marketing, and a great insight to a growing, very growing company.

Mate, thank you very much.

Thank you. Cheers.

Take care.