EP001: Becoming a Successful Functional Medicine Entrepreneur with James Maskell.

Welcome to the Perfect Practice podcast, where we share the most innovative strategies to help you build a successful functional medicine business, attract your ideal patients, serve your community, and get paid what you're worth. Each episode is packed with practical steps that you can take to immediately grow your influence and serve more people. Our mission is to share golden nuggets from successful practitioners, technology experts, and innovators from around the world. Your host, Sachin Patel, is a functional medicine success coach, international speaker, and best selling author. He's calling in all his favors to bring this information to you so you can create your perfect practice.

Hi everyone, this is Sachin Patel and today with me, I have a very special guest, a dear friend of mine, James Maskal. This is episode one, and there's no better person on the entire planet that I could think of to interview besides James. James, welcome to the podcast.

Yeah. Such an honor to be the first one. Thanks, Sachin. Great to be here with you. Such a. Such a pleasure to be here with your audience. And I know this podcast is going to help a lot of people.

Thank you. And speaking of helping a lot of people, you've probably helped more practitioners in the functional medicine space than anyone that I know. And that's why I really wanted to get some of your insights and what you've learned about functional medicine as an industry, the trends that you're seeing, maybe some insider perspective that you can give us. Really? Really? Let's talk about some big picture stuff instead of getting into the granular things. We'll save that for some other shows, but let's really inspire people today and teach them and demonstrate to them the value of what they bring to the world so they can wake up feeling inspired and empowered every single day. You up for that?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's my favorite topic.

All right, awesome. So getting into it. Just give me a brief history, if you could, for those that don't know you, how you got into the space, because you don't have. You have a health background from the sense of how you were raised, which we'll probably get into a little bit, but tell us how you actually shifted into this arena.

Yeah, so I was actually C sectioned out of my mother's womb by one of the founding members of the American Holistic Medical Association. My parents were part of a community that was very much involved in, like, the genesis of the industry. And I pop out and I have a chiropractor and I have a homeopath, and I think this is just like what normal people do until I realize and I go to school that no one knows what any of those things are. And actually, like, I'm now the only kid in school whose mom insists that they're not to be given antibiotics. And yes, so here's my mom with like no medical training at all, you know, predicting the downsides of antibiotic overuse by over 30 years. So that always stuck with me and thought, okay, you know, what's going on here? Got into normal school, sort of had a rebellious phase where I thought I needed to be an investment banker. And you know, very, very quickly, a year out of university was just like, this is, you know, this is not my thing. I want to be an entrepreneur. I want to get involved in doing something with my time on this planet that's, that's valuable. And I actually got a degree in economics and I think that's actually how I see the whole industry, and that's why functional medicine appeals to me so much, is because, you know, America and every other country around the world right now has a serious problem. And that problem is chronic disease. Lifestyle driven chronic disease. It's between 75 and 80% of costs in America. It's the number one diagnosis now in every country around the world. You know, I grew up mainly in England and South Africa, but In South Africa, 10 years ago, the number one diabetes, the number one diagnosis is TB. And now it's type 2 diabetes. And so, you know, so it's all around the world, it's happening. And so 12 years ago, I took the plunge almost 13 years ago now and I moved to America. And it's interesting the way things work. The first, the first job that I had was working in a clinic. And you know, this is where it all started really, because I didn't know this at the time, Sachin, but it was actually the best run clinic that I've still, still ever see. Maybe apart from your practice, but this was a wellness center in Gainesville, Georgia. So not even metropolitan Georgia, Atlanta. This is like rural Georgia. And you know, the people who ran it had been in the spa industry for like 10 or 15 years before it was actually part of my family. And the thing about the spa industry is that they had worked out 10 years, 15 years before anyone else how to run a cash business. Right. Because there's a lot of the same factors in place. You're taking cash, you're doing retail, you're doing rebooking, you're working with independent contractors, you know, all of that stuff, how to do the front desk system, structures, all that stuff is the same in the spa industry, as in, you know, the modern functional medicine cash practice. And so I worked there for a year and a half. Half the time I was spending getting the place busy. So I was doing sales, going out to meet people in the community, bringing them in, you know, just sort of getting the word out there in, like, a direct selling way. And then half the time I was on the front desk, and I learned so much about that, so much about how to run the business, and it just all was in my brain before I. So then I started to be a sales rep after that. So I was a sales rep selling to doctors. And that was my 10,000 hours of experience in this space. I mean, I spoke to. I put 100,000 miles on my car in three years. I visited every small town from Virginia to Maine, which is my territory. And I met with every kind of practitioner, from a Reiki person in the basement of their house through to a specialist in a hospital who didn't realize why I was there and literally everything in between. A lot of chiropractors, a lot of naturopaths, you know, some functional medicine doctors. And, you know, I just really understood it. And what I understood straight away is that I was never going to be the clinical guy. I didn't want to be the clinical guy. I didn't really have an inclination towards the clinical guy. What I had learned from working at that clinic was that incredible changes in health trajectory were possible when given the right type of medicine. The first two clients that I ever met were parents who had turned into practitioners as a result of recovering or seeing their own kids recover from chronic childhood illnesses and, in a few cases, autism, where they'd lost the diagnosis. And I was fascinated. I was hooked. I was like, this is it. I care about economics. I can see the cost trajectory of health care going in totally the wrong direction. I can see people getting better from diseases that things never know. It makes me think of, like, you know, the film, the Big Short section. Yep. Like, you know, everyone's very sure about what's happening and that, you know, costs never go down and, you know, there's no real problem until you actually go to Florida and you actually go and see the people who are living in these massive homes with no income, and the whole thing's a wasteland. And then you're like, holy shit, something's way off here. And that was the moment for me. I was just like, look, people can get better. A chronic disease is not for life. You can reverse it if you get the patient engaged into Their care if you, you know, if you. If you can support that. So that was the first phase, and that was amazing phase because, you know, I really didn't know what I was doing. I'd gone from being an investment banker to essentially like a supplement salesperson, sort of door to door. But I love the Northeast of America. I was with my wife, you know, she's then my girlfriend, now my wife. We were sort of, you know, traveling around, and it was, you know, it was a really. It was a really fantastic experience. So that was the, you know, sort of what got me to a point where I really understood the industry.

Well, you've done such an amazing job raising awareness around functional medicine. And, you know, this profession is so indebted to your efforts. You've traveled all over the world. You've held a functional forum for the first Monday of every month for several years now. You know, I see how much work and effort you put into it, and to be honest, you make it look really easy. But I know it's not because I've spent a few days with you last year when we were in Guernsey, and it was just amazing to see your work ethic and the dedication that you bring to the profession. So as a functional medicine practitioner, I, I thank you. And, and I'm so happy that you're able to share this story with people so they see, you know, what it took. And that backstory, I think, is really, really important. And when you said something, actually got goosebumps. And that's usually, you know, to me, like a positive affirmation that, you know, the. The most successful practitioners that you encountered were the ones that had recovered their health or their child using functional medicine. And I think that, you know, the why behind why practitioners do what they do is so huge and such a big part of their story. Is that a theme that you see over and over again in practices?

Yeah, look, you know, it's not easy to be a functional medicine doctor. It hasn't been easy. And when I say functional medicine, like, you know, I wasn't really into functional medicine at that point. I actually didn't know what it was until I started going to the conferences. So, you know, to pick up the story. Now I moved to New York, I start a practice management company, I start a website company with teaching doctors how to run a successful practice. Based on my experience of this other chiropractor that I was partnered with. My wife is making websites for doctors. Like, you know, I was getting excited about teaching doctors social media because we, you know, the first event that I ever did by myself was on how to use social media for functional medicine or integrative medicine. And, you know, I realized no one had a website, a dynamic website where they could actually, like, post a blog. You know, this is in a day when 70% of Huffington Post traffic was coming from Facebook, and no practitioners had a dynamic blog to be able to post their own content. It was like, right at the beginning, 2005. So, you know, we're doing that for a while. And, yeah, we started the Functional Forum. And, yeah, look, everyone who came to functional integrative, naturopathic, holistic medicine, you know, before 2012, say 2013, typically, all of them had some kind of story because it's not easy to run one of these practices. And so you had to have a story to sort of keep you going. If it was easy, you know, there would have been a lot more people came across. And so, you know, what we set out to do with the Functional Forum, what I really realized was I got put on stages sometimes. Like, I got to speak at this practice called Heal Their practice, this conference. But I realized, like, the conference game was very old and stale. And I also realized that functional medicine sort of had the combination of, like, good branding and a sort of a repeatable system where everyone did it the same to be able to scale up. I think the question that I was asking in 2013, that I didn't see anyone else asking, was, okay, if we sit here, my partner Gabe and I, and we go, okay, if this is the future of medicine, if we can reverse chronic disease, if these doctors can reverse chronic disease on the regular, how do we get 100,000 of these types of doctors and not 10,000 of them? Like, how do we 10x the number of doctors? So that's really what the genesis of the functional Forum, let's make the content online for free for anyone to see and not have to, like, hide behind the paywall of a conference, that doctors would have to pay and fly and all these kind of things, like, how could we just be a spark to get doctors to want to do this? So that was the genesis of the forum. But ultimately, yeah, like, you know, I sort of think about the first year of functional medicine where, you know, the doctors that were doing it at the beginning were doing it out of a moral obligation to practice this type of care. They felt called to do it. They'd seen that it works. They wanted to be a pioneer. You know, I'm sure there's a lot of doctors in that timeframe that Got it, that understood it, but didn't go down the path of building a practice because they had kids in school, they got a mortgage to pay, you know, they got costs, and they couldn't see a way to sort of build a successful practice from that. So our first thing was like, let's radically reduce the barriers to find out about functional medicine. And then let's get into seeing like, can we radically reduce the barriers to have a successful practice? Because ultimately, you know, we realized that that was a big piece too, is that we needed way more successful examples, systems, structures to be able to take a sort of a non physician entrepreneur towards being a successful physician entrepreneur. Because ultimately it was physician entrepreneurship that had, you know, that was allowing functional medicine to be way further ahead in America than in like where I grew up in the uk, where the idea of being your own doctor, of hanging your shingle and doing your own private practice is extremely foreign. It's just becoming not foreign today because of the movement that's gaining so much momentum. But for the kids that I went to school with, who are doctors, who I went to university with, the idea of private practice to them is extremely foreign.

Yeah, and you bring up a great point, which is a trend that we're seeing in so many different industries right now, and that's democratization and decentralization. So what Functional Forum did many years ago is they decentralized and democratized all this information that was only available to doctors who could physically be there at these conferences, financially also be there as well. And so the movement just essentially exploded as a result of you guys being so willing and capable of, of sharing this knowledge and using technology, leveraging things like social media and YouTube to get this information to as many people as possible. And, and I don't know what the numbers are, maybe, maybe you can tell us, but you've probably influenced, you know, over a hundred thousand practitioners and you've lit the spark under their butts, if you will, to actually recognize this movement and you've paved a path for them to have some traction if they're looking to turn this into a business and a financial endeavor as well. So it's, it's just great to see how quickly things like ideas like this can expand and, and just, it's just awesome. And just witnessing it from the sidelines, I know it's, it's probably a whirlwind on the inside, but from the outside it's just kind of magical to watch. And I, I do recognize you have a team, so I do want to acknowledge Them as well. Maybe you want to give them a shout out too, but you've got a great team on the back end that, that does some fantastic work and is. Is very aligned with the mission as well.

Yeah, no, the team's been amazing. You know, the team that we have now, and actually that's probably one of the themes for this year for me is, you know, evomed is not about me, it's about the team that we've created. Like Uli Isolo, you know very well, you know, one of the top marketing automation people in functional medicine. You know, he really gets the marketing automation. Like I was talking about marketing automation and email automation at the Heal I practice conference in 2012. Right. So, you know, I'd be talking about it for a long time. I can't actually execute it very well. Like, I can use Mailchimp and I can use ActiveCampaign, but I can't run Infusionsoft. I can't build funnels. So having someone who really knew what he was doing, he was our first hire. Even before my partner came on to work for us, Uli worked for us. And he's amazing. And, you know, Ann has built these whole meetups, 500 meetups around the country, and supports them. Nicole has created a structure for these entrepreneurs to connect to each other and get, you know, motivated to, you know, to be accountable to their goals in sort of like a group environment. Gabe, my partner, is incredible. He spoke on the first functional forum. He's got a lot. You'll be hearing a lot more from him in the future, but he's incredible, works with the team at getting the most out of the team. And, you know, there's many, many more that we've. We've got on the team now. We're just, you know, creating an engine that for the next 10, 20 years, however long it needs to be, as this whole thing hits. If doctors want to be an entrepreneur and want to build a successful functional medicine practice, we want to either catalyze them towards getting the resources they need to do it or be the resources they need to do it. Ultimately, we just sort of acted as a gel at the beginning when I went to my first IFM annual conference in 2015. So two and a half years ago, I was stopped the first day that I was there by a woman who was like, I was a family medicine doctor. I hated my life. I watched the functional forum. I binge watched the rest of them. I, you know, I got, I got in touch with a company and now I'M built, I'm doing functional medicine every day and it's amazing and I love my life. And that was the first, that was the first time I heard someone say it. And now it's kind of a thing. You know, 50,000 people downloaded the book. I get like a lot of stuff on social media all the time for people who are making that journey. But the first one you always remember and yeah, it's been, it's been great to be see and it's really exciting to see the movement. And I think 2018 is going to be a breakout year for the movement.

Amazing, exciting times for all of us. And you know, there's lots of people, I was just talking to some of my teammates this morning. There's lots of people, the majority of people who will be in the functional medicine space in the next three to five years actually haven't taken that plunge. They know that this is the right thing. They feel it in their hearts, they know it clinically, it's the right thing. It makes sense. You know what, what have you found is holding some of these people back from making that plunge? With all these resources available to them, all this information available to them, what is it that's holding people back and how can we solve that?

You know, physician entrepreneurship I think is limited, Sachin. You know, I'm not convinced that everyone should or can be an entrepreneur. I think it's easier than it's ever been. I think, you know, it might, it'll continue to get easier. As you know, your programs and other programs make it easy for people to, to be successful. But I saw the limitations on physician entrepreneurship and that's kind of the reason why two years ago I decided to do what I'm launching this year with New Health because I realized, especially in England, I just realized most countries aren't like America. America is unique in that you have a lot of people who are willing to do their own thing. The culture of entrepreneurship, it's really ingrained into Americans in a way that you'd be very surprised is not really like that in the rest of the world, especially countries with a history of socialized medicine. And so that's why we decided to build new as a payer solution, right? Could we employ doctors who want to do the right thing but have never wanted to build their own practice? Could we employ health coaches who are ready to take the role of really facilitating the lifestyle delivery and could we put them together in decentralized platform to be able to make it super easy for payers, you know, employers Countries, insurance company, insurance providers, the people that actually pay for most of medicine. You know, could we, you know, could we find a way to get them involved in what they love without, you know, the only journey to this being entrepreneurship? I think that is, you know, the biggest thing that I realized two or three years ago. I was like, am I really going to like bash my head against the wall for the next five years trying to get people who clearly have no interest in entrepreneurship trying to be entrepreneurs? Or am I going to be the entrepreneur and step forward and put the right resources together to be able to bring functional medicine to more people than would ever pay to go to a practice that's run by a physician entrepreneur. And ultimately that's what's guiding me now is that I realize the first question I asked was how could we get 100 times or 10 times or whatever, as many doctors we have now doing functional medicine? The second question I ask is one, what would it take for an insurance company or a payer of any variety to actually to want to deliver functional medicine? Because clearly there's some benefit to it. Like if you have someone who has been on expensive drugs for 10 years and they get off them because they're, well, which you see in your practice and I see in practices all around the world, there's an extreme value proposition there, right? You just change the trajectory of the cost. Now who that's valuable to actually really shows you what's really going on in the medical industry. Because guess what, it turns out that's super valuable to employers, right? If you're an employer and you're literally paying the bill, especially if you're a self funded employer and if you're paying the bill for healthcare and you've got expensive employees and you make them less expensive, that's clear that there's an interest there and there's a straight line, right? Comes off the bottom line every time, right? Insurance carriers, I'm not so sure if they do have an incentive to cut costs because, you know, they, they are in a position where if, you know, let's say they're making a 20% margin on your insurance, if your insurance is 1200 bucks a month, they're making, you know, a couple hundred bucks. If your insurance is 100 bucks a month, they're making 20 bucks. So I think they want it to go up and that might surprise people, but I think it's actually the way that the system works and actually that's the reason why we have these completely, completely uncontrolled costs is because Hospitals, pharma and insurance companies only want to see the cost go up. And that's why you see just like ridiculous costs compared to everyone else. You know, unbelievably low return on investment or incremental new return on investment, marginal return on health care investment. And that's. We're going to go for the jugular this year and really get into that because ultimately we feel that, you know, we want, you know, we think that, you know, this is completely unsustainable and that solutions are needed all around the world to be able to bring down the cost of care. And we believe that functional medicine is the operating system and different types of technology and community structures are what is going to really be able to do that. So if you've been sitting on the sidelines for a while and you just realize that you can't be an entrepreneur, you don't want to be, or you've been burned trying to do it once before, I think that people like yourself and others and us, we're going to smooth the way to make this as easy as possible. You can go and work for another practitioner, but ultimately we want to create the systems whereby people can make a good living being a predictable, strong living doing functional medicine, helping people without having to take the risk of doing their own marketing, doing their own accounting, and putting themselves in a position where they're an entrepreneur. On the flip side of that, I have done a few interviews recently, Sachin, of doctors who say, you know, I'm living a dream I didn't know I had. That's an exact quote from a doctor on one of our podcasts recently where she said, I didn't realize I ever wanted to be an entrepreneur. I used to work in the VA for 10 years, and now I love it. She's doing the Bredesen Brain Recovery Program and, you know, helping people, you know, reverse mild cognitive impairments and in some cases, Alzheimer's. And she's like, having the time of her life. So to answer your original question, I think fear is a lot. I think, you know, it's fear of the unknown. It's. It's fear of getting it wrong. It's fear of embarrassing yourself in public. It's fear of, you know, all the things that, you know, you have to know. One of my greatest teachers is Seth Godin. I've read every one of his books. I met him in person. You know, we email back and forth a fair bit. And, you know, he. The early lessons that I had to learn when I was like my, you know, Sales rep, entrepreneur, where I was just making calls and that kind of thing was just getting over that fear of public humiliation, of doing the wrong thing, of not being looked on. Well. And, you know, I think that most entrepreneurs or people who end up being successful entrepreneurs have to sort of go through the fire of that at some point in their. In their careers.

Absolutely. And, you know, it is tough because you're not just entering a new clinical model, but you're also entering a whole new compensation model. So it's different from every single vantage point and it's unfamiliar for a lot of people. And the nice thing is, is that there are practices now that are, you know, growing and scaling, and they are looking for committed, dedicated practitioners. Because a lot of people, their story is, I want to help people the same way I was helped. Not necessarily. I want to start a business that helps people the same way I was helped. So, you know, for those of you that are sitting on the fence, you know, there's no nobility in reinventing the wheel. And if you can get behind this passionate work that you're doing, then, you know, it's better to partner with somebody and let them handle those stressful elements of building the business if they're good at it, and you can handle the clinical side of things. So I just want to acknowledge those of you that might feel this way, because I know this is how a lot of people feel in the space. And there's nothing wrong with partnering with somebody else and pushing the movement forward instead of reinventing the wheel, because it can take a couple years to really get a practice up and off the ground and doing what you want it to do. So thanks for adding some enlightenment there. I appreciate that.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. And yeah, it's. It's been, you know, it's. It's a great journey that everyone could go on. It's super fulfilling when you get to actually doing it every day. And yeah, I see that small groups, I think, you know, small. I think small group functional practices are really exciting. You know, I think if you had a group of practitioners who all could deliver the clinical medicine, but then you had one out of that three that was more inclined to be step into the entrepreneur role. You know, the hardest thing about the micro practice model is that you have to be both entrepreneur and clinician, and then you have to sort of like, trend your way out of the clinician role to being more of the entrepreneur. And, you know, that's not always an easy process to do. But I know that there are people that are Doing it successfully.

Absolutely. And that could be a tough transition for people. Right. Speaking of which, you know, a lot of times a question that comes up, but I'm sure you've had it come up as well, is bringing on the right team members and scaling like as your business starts to grow and you want to step out of that clinical role or have somebody complement you clinically. I know you're a big fan of coaches. I know that new is basically implementing functional medicine trained coaches. How do you see that fitting into the expansion model of a practice?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I learned a lot from you here. Sachin is just that, you know, that, you know, I look at the future, we're moving towards value based care, right? Value based care is the way that all healthcare systems are moving towards and value equals outcomes divided by cost. So if you've got two practitioners that can get the same outcome and one cost 10 times less than the other one, then the value of that practitioner is ten times more. I hope that makes sense. That's just kind of math. You have to like put it out. So, you know, I saw that most of the most successful functional medicine practices, including yours, you know, was, was really using health coaches effectively and using health coaches right up to the, you know, to the edge of their, of their, you know, sort of scope. So implementing the functional medicine lifestyle, right? Getting people to sleep on time and sleep properly, getting people to do, you know, to eat, right, getting people to, you know, exercise, to meditate, to have community. Like, you know, the fact that doctors were delivering that kind of stuff is kind of undervaluing for them at a certain point. It was just, it was just part of, you know, the energy that had to go like, you know, there's the diagnostic role getting onto the root cause and then there's the behavior change role. And you know, most in most practices, this, you know, practitioner, solo practitioner, was having to wear these two hats, health coach and diagnostician. And so I just realized like, this should not be the same person. This should be definitely different people. And ultimately, you know, if as long as everyone was speaking the same language, which is one of the things that I love about functional medicine, where, you know, you have a consistent operating system that everyone's using together, that makes a lot of sense, right? You can have, you know, as long as everyone's speaking the same language, the patient, the coach and the doctor, let's just divvy up the roles and be super efficient. So in New Year, the front line is these functional medicine trained health coaches who are physicians Supervised. But what we realize, and Dr. Jeff Glad, he's my chief medical officer, he was the first one to say, he says he's way overqualified to doing most of the work that he's doing when he was just helping people in his practice because he knew that if he could get the lifestyle dialed in for most of his patients, the majority of chronic illness would go away. And that's without any fancy diagnostics. That was without a lot of other things. He was able to just do that consistently and build a practice in Fort Wayne, Indiana. That's why he was the hero of my book, is because it wasn't in New York, it wasn't in la, it was just in Fort Wayne, Indiana. And he's doing his thing. And so Jeff, you know, Jeff's a great example. So, you know, that's kind of where we started is let's see, what are the scalable systems that we can build. And we think health coaches are important, important part. I think that if you can get someone in your practice who loves it to do the heavy lifting of the lifestyle changes, you know, you can help as a physician, as a clinician, you can help a lot more people. And you know, we decided to use the health coaches for many reasons, but ultimately what we saw in our first test with new earlier last year was that, yeah, just as we thought, if you get people to engage in the lifestyle, the labs improve, the symptoms go away. And so you can save the very, very, very precious hours of the functional medicine trained physician for the tough cases, for the people who are on drugs, for the people who, you know, need to be told how to wean off those medications, for people who are really, really super sick and have a lot of different things going on where you need to get to the root cause. But as long as this is just one practitioner trying to do it all, all, I think we're running a super, super inefficient system and certainly not a system that's built for value based care. And if we're going to build things that are, you know, if we're building a functional medicine service that can be used by payers, people who pay for medicine, it needs to be efficient and it needs to prove that it can work. That's the other reason Satch we had to start new is because I would go every place I would go in the functional forum, every time I would go and speak, the one question I would always ask is how are you tracking your outcomes? Or are you tracking your outcomes of what you're doing in the practice and no one was so like, I just had to be like, dad, it's not like I don't love my kids, but like I have to just sort of come in and take control in a certain way. And I don't like using that, the words there. But if the whole community is not tracking their outcomes, you can't be surprised when we're not taken seriously.

Right?

Like no one takes us seriously. People think it's voodoo or it's woo woo, whatever. If everyone had been tracking their outcomes in a really efficient way for the last 10 years, we would have such a wealth of evidence to show that this was the new medicine and it would already be the new medicine. The reason why I call my thing new is because I want people, when they say it, to say this is the new way that things are going to get done. This is the new way that medicine is going to get delivered.

Right?

But then the K is at the beginning because we always knew, we just forgot. Like the older cultures had an understanding of how to avoid chronic disease. The Qigong medicineless hospital in China was all about getting behavior change, getting people into regular movement and connection and doing things in groups. There was a knowing amongst humans about how to avoid this kind of stuff for a long time. And ultimately I just feel like we need to be able to track these outcomes. And so ultimately all we're doing is of creating a structure where practitioners can do their best work. The technology is going to track the outcomes and we can deliver functional medicine to every person. And what you'll see later this year, we're going to do a 40 city tour. We're going to have some incredibly exciting announcements in March and April. But we see a future that by the time the Trump Presidency ends by January 2021, we think that we can have the majority of the people in this country doing some sort of functional medicine. And that's what I'm going to be doing with the next three years of my life. I don't know what you're going to be doing with the next three years of yours, the people who are listening to this, but if you have any inclination towards physician entrepreneurship, speak to Sachin or come and see us at the Evolution of Medicine. And if you're ready to play a part in facilitating the delivery of functional medicine and changing the cost curve of American medicine, we'd love to hear from you too.

Brilliant, James. That was so inspiring, man. Thank you, brother. How can people learn more about you? How can people get behind this mission? Learn more about Evomed and Functional Forum. Is there one centralized place you want people to go? Please do tell us.

Yeah, so goevomed.com, g-o e v o m e dash.com if you're a practitioner, go on there. There's tons of great resources. Find a community, build a community. Come to one of the Functional Forum meetup groups. We're going on tour later this year. We're going to go to 40 cities starting June 24th through to November 5th. I'm literally getting in an RV with my family and I'm going city to city to sell the functional medicine revolution, to sell employers, to sell local people on, you know, on seeing practitioners like you, I'm committing my year to making this year the year that transforms and functional medicine becomes the standard of care. So if you go to goevomed.com/tour, we're doing the practitioner pre sale right now. Later on, we're going to have individual tickets and everything for sale. We're going to go into sort of like the patient marketing at that point. We're going to do pr, we're going to do affiliate marketing. We're going to do all kinds of ways to get bums on seats to create a buzz. We're going to do, we're going to test every single person gets a hemoglobin A1C test. We're going to diagnose the diabetes on the road and we're going to, you know, and we're going to facilitate healthcare transformation in companies and churches and all these kind of organizations. I hope that you're going to come and speak at some of these events. Maybe you can even come in the tour bus section. But ultimately, you know, this is, this is what I care about. This is why I'm here on this planet. I think we've added a lot of value to the functional medicine movement in terms of inspiring and empowering practitioners to become physician entrepreneurs. Our next step is to be able to create the structures to really do this at scale and go beyond the practitioner entrepreneur model. And, you know, that's, that's what we're going to do this year.

Amazing, brother. Well, thank you so much. We'll be there on tour with you, I'm sure. I'll. I'll hop on the bus. Maybe we'll do an interview from the bus if we get a chance to. But thank you from the bottom of my heart, from the bottom of the profession's heart, for all the hard work that you and your team have put in. It's been amazing interviewing you, getting to learn a little bit more about you, and I'm going to see you a ton this summer. So excited to hang out and, you know, keep up with what you're up to. It's inspiring all of us and it pushes me every day. So thank you.

Thanks, Sachin. Great to be with you and glad to be the first person on this podcast.

Amazing. And I'll be sure to share all the links that you shared in the show notes as well.