EP005: Creating and Operating a Functional Medicine System with Dr. Peter Osborne

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.

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Perfect Practice. Today I have a very special guest with me, somebody who I've worked with personally over the last few years, who's near and dear to me, who's an amazing inspiration, an amazing practitioner and clinician, and somebody who has changed the landscape and face of functional medicine over his career. So today I get to interview my mentor, Dr. Peter Osborne. Peter, welcome.

Thank you so much. Satchin. It's a pleasure to be here with you.

Well, thank you. I appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule to speak with us and share with us. You've done tremendous work in our industry and you continue to push the boundaries of what's possible with your clinic, Origins Healthcare in Sugarland, Texas. I want to give people some context about how we met and how we know each other. I think that'll really paint a good picture and set this up nicely. So we met about four years ago now in California. You were delivering, I believe it was your second Functional Medicine Success Summit, and I had the privilege of attending. I read your book prior to coming, which was the Functional Medicine Success Blueprint. So thank you for publishing that. And I was able to not only learn tremendous amounts of information during that presentation, my pen was on fire the whole time. My eyes were wide open. I had never seen somebody speak so elegantly and deliver such valuable content at a conference. Normally when we go to conferences, it's all clinical, and then you really don't know how to turn that into a business to be able to actually serve your community. So that really opened up my eyes to the amazing opportunity that functional medicine provides us to serve our communities and to serve our fellow man. But you gave me a lot of clarity and direction and confidence to take massive action, and that's what I did. And a year later, I was actually on that stage, which I was very gracious to be on. And I've been on a second time this last year in 2018 so, you know, I've learned so much from you. I've not only seen you online taking massive action, you know, in summits and with all the online work that you do, but I've gotten to work with you personally, one on one in a mentorship capacity. And you've really changed my life. So thank you, Dr. Osborne, for your commitment to our profession, to your commitment to the patients out there, and to all the practitioners around the world who you serve through your mentorship. Thank you so much again for your.

Time for being here. Well, you're very welcome. I'm honored to be on your show and just want to help doctors really, really see what they're capable of doing in saving more lives.

I lovingly call you the smartest working man in healthcare. You've really built quite an amazing clinic and amazing process and systems that have allowed you to scale quite exponentially. So I'd love to dive into that. Where does this ability to create systems come from? Did you have training in this? Is this something from your childhood? Where do you get this skill set?

From necessity more than anything else. You know, time is the only non renewable resource and I am notoriously, if you talk to my wife, I'm not very time. I'm not very time savvy, meaning I don't manage my time well. At least you know, that's what she would tell you. So creating systems and trying to be a better husband really for me is what it boiled down to. I wanted to be able to spend more time with my family and do more there, but I also needed to be able to replicate myself so that that could happen. So really the root origin with many things and many improvements in my life, it comes directly from my partner.

Okay, awesome. So that definitely is gorgeous and brownie points there. I love honoring my wife as well. And that's part of why I do what I do and how I do things. So it's great to see that we have that commonality. And I bet a lot of practitioners listening to this would agree that having a supportive spouse is absolutely critical to their success, but also honoring that spouse. And therefore, in order to do that, you have to honor your time. And so thank you for sharing that. I appreciate that. So what inspires you, Dr. Osborne? Obviously you have systems in place to replicate yourself, but what inspires you to actually do that, to serve so many people in such a high capacity? Where does that drive come from?

When I was training early on, one of the things I did was I did a stent through the VA hospital in the rheumatology department. And it was during that time that I realized just how horrid the model was. These were veterans. I'm a veteran myself. And they would come through this system, and they would just basically be plugged in as a number. Everybody would pretty much get the same litany of medications. Nobody really ever got better. Nobody really ever, you know, everybody was basically given a fatalistic attitude about their condition. There's nothing you can do about it. Keep taking the drugs. When your joints are completely destroyed, we'll do surgery. And, you know, it was at that kind of pivotal moment when I realized, this is a horrible way to look at approaching autoimmune arthritis. I delved into the literature and the research, just trying to find some solutions and answers that were better than the ones that were currently being offered. It got me into the realm of the world of gluten sensitivity, and it got me into the realm of fasting and food and why it was so important and how you could literally, how you could stop somebody's pain within 48 hours if you fasted them, if they had an autoimmune rheumatological condition. That was kind of my first endeavor. But really what prompted me to reach more people and really, really build systems to try to achieve the 100 million mark, which is my personal goal. I want to help 100 million chronically sick people, was a little girl named Ginger, and she came to see me. She was one of my first patients. When I opened my private practice and the doctors had given her a terminal diagnosis. She had six months to live. So imagine being the father of a little girl, and the doctors look you in the eye and say, your daughter's going to die. Go home and prepare for her funeral. She's got six months. To me, that's a horrifying. That's a horrifying, absolutely horrifying predicament. And for her, it really boiled down to diet. She was allergic to blueberries. She was allergic to gluten. So there were some pivotal foods that we had to change. And literally, what happened within six months is we saved her life. She came to me originally with a permanent stent in her arm for IV because she was in and out of the hospital so frequently, and today she's in her 20s. She's gone on to play volleyball and do a number of different things that she would never have had the capacity to do. But it was in the first six months, this critical first six months, where I actually, literally watched her life be saved from diet change. That information to me. And that outcome to me was so powerful that I knew, look, we've got to get this information into more hands. How many other parents are out there being told the same thing? How many other people are out there struggling with an autoimmune condition that are just saying they're just being told here, take a dmart or a non stroidal anti inflammatory and some methotrexate or some biologics. These drugs are very dangerous. They cause cancer, they, they cause vitamin and mineral deficiency, they cause immune suppression, they don't really solve the origin and they lead to a miserable existence. And that's to me quality of life is more important than quantity of life. Live the years you're here. These people were just basically again, they were just being railroaded and told there was nothing that could be done. Again, my first experience was in saving somebody's life. So there's nothing like that to light a fire right under me. Absolutely it lit the fire under me. And from that point on we moved forward creating systems. That's when I founded Gluten Free Society. That was step one or phase one if you will. We created the online. We created the online community with information that people could access freely. From there we created doctor training programs so that we could teach doctors how to deliver the same type of life saving information. And then from there we created more doctor programs to educate doctors on how to be successful in their practice so that they having that education could deliver it in a successful format. From there we created a greater awareness and a greater spreading through books and through online platforms and membership programs that people could go through and tutorials that people could go through. So all that really Satchin created a huge systematic approach at the main goal, the main endeavor which is train 10,000 doctors, reach 100 million people.

Thank you for sharing that. Building all of these things that you have, you've probably made some mistakes and taken some wrong turns along the way. Can you comment for those of us listening who are just starting out, who want to do some of these things they might have besides gluten, they might have another niche that they are interested in serving humanity with their message. What are some common mistakes that you made early on that you feel were pivotal learning moments for you and things that you would advise people to do or not to do?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think probably the biggest mistake or mistakes had to do with timing. So for example, those of you who are listening, who are just starting out, maybe you don't have a surplus of revenue that you can drop $10,000 into a new website or spend the money on software for automation. A lot of it in the beginning is it's a lot of grunt work on your own. For me, I built my own website, figured out how to code. I built my first website. And although that wasn't a mistake, the mistake that came was I failed to relinquish the control over some of these things, like coding. Like, I'm not a coder, I'm a doctor, right? But I figured out how to code because there was a need and I couldn't afford to pay thousands and thousands of dollars. So for me, initially, putting in that work was important. So don't want to devalue those of you who are listening. Work, burning some midnight oil and working and putting in a little bit extra in the beginning. But the mistake I made was not transitioning away from those duties and tasks soon enough. So, like, what I did is I created an environment where, you know, I built the website, I coded all the back end, only I knew how to fix it or change it if something happened. And so here I was, I was seeing patients in the clinic. I was writing content and material to help educate, I was creating programs to help educate. But I was also responsible for being the web guy, right? And although at first it afforded me to be able to even do that, you know, the mistake was not moving away from that quickly enough. Because once the money starts rolling in, it's really important to identify if you really want to grow and you're really, really serious about stellar growth and building the team, you have to know when to outsource. When do you make the decision to say, I'm not going to be a webmaster anymore and I'm going to hire somebody to do that? That's probably one of the biggest mistakes I made, was just holding on to a lot of those duties longer than what I needed to. And now when I'm faced with a decision of do we need to bring a new team member on for this, that or the other, I don't hesitate if I know we've got systems and we want to scale and we want to do more and we want. I want to reach more people, I won't hesitate to spend money to hire somebody because I know that investing in my company, investing in my business, is the quickest way to more growth. And a lot of doctors get paralyzed in that moment where they're like, can I really afford this or can I not afford this? And, you know, there's no perfect when you're in that moment, making that decision. Sometimes it's a tough decision to make. But I would say the number one thing you can do is pull the trigger faster on investing in your own company, investing in your own business. And don't bog yourself down with being the webmaster, being the cleaning attendant of your office, being the person who fixes the printer when the printer breaks. Right. You don't want to be that person in your office. You want to outsource those things as quickly as you possibly can because it frees your time up to grow in other areas, which is really where the magic happens. Yeah.

One of the things you're big on is your 5%. Why don't we dive into that a little bit? Yeah.

So, you know, one of the things I used to do on a personal note is I used to spend on the weekend, I'd spend three to four hours in my yard mowing it, weed eating. And I'm kind of an anal retentive. I like my edges to be perfect. You know, every blade of grass should be the same length kind of thing. So I might mow the same patch three times, you know, to get that effect. And I was spending all this time mowing my own yard. Right. And here I am, I'm a doctor in it. When I'm in the clinic, I can, you know, I'm generating thousands of dollars an hour. But here on the weekend, I'm mowing my own yard and I could literally pay somebody $20 to do that. So it, you know, it looking at my 5% and what I would say with the audience who's listening is be brutally honest with this. Take a piece of paper, draw a line down the center, on the left hand side, right at the top, right your 5%. And on the right hand side, write stuff you shouldn't mess with. Right. Things that you shouldn't be doing. And so on your 5% side, you really want to cleanly focus on what it is that you do that no one else can do, that can't be outsourced. What are the things that only you can do within your business that makes your business grow or that makes your business better. For me, that was seeing patients, that was writing content and material, that was producing videos, you know, that was formulating products. You know, there are certain things that only I had the capacity and knowledge to do, and that's where I needed my time to be focused. So that's what I call my 5%. And then on the other column, it's the things that you do that Distract you from focusing on your gifts. So that's mowing the yard and edging, you know, spending four hours on a weekend doing something that you could pay somebody 20 hours or $20 to do. It's not picking up your own dry cleaning. It's not washing your own vehicle. If your wife has a honey do list around the house and she wants you to be a handyman. If you're not a handyman, it's not being the handyman. It's recognizing, where do you outsource things. Because again, if you spend two hours being the honeydew handyman, and that two hours could have been spent doing other things that could have automated your business or that could have accelerated an element in your business that saved you 20 hours next month. And that 20 hours was then allowed to be able to see more new patients or to do more content creation that would generate you $100,000 this year. What's the smarter move? So it just, it becomes, in a sense, it becomes recognizing where your best gifts and strengths are. And if you're wondering, how do I do that? Like, as a doctor, your best gift and strength is seeing patients. It's got to be otherwise, how do you build a clinic? But you have other gifts and strengths. Think of it as if doing this creates energy for you. If it creates mega excitement and mega energy, then it's part of your 5%. If doing it sucks your soul and leaves you weary and leaves you exhausted, then you have to either one, figure out a way to offset offset it or outsource it, or make it simpler so that it's doing less of that to you. Because there are certain things I don't like to do. For example, I hate answering patient emails. I find them to be one of the most redundant tasks in the world. Not because I don't want to take care of my patients. It's a very important job, and really, I'm the only one who can answer them. But I've created a system within my office where my staff brings the emails in, they ask me the questions, I give them a verbal answer so that they can actually go do the rest of the job and the rest of the work. That's an example of me not spending three hours firing back, answering emails with patients twice a week, and just spending 30 minutes with my team so that they can handle that for me. Again, there are certain things that in every business that you're not going to like but have to be done by you. So find a way to minimize your time constraint and your energy loss into those things. Find a way to focus on the 5% of things that you are gifted and talented at that bring you the most energy and joy, and outsource as many of the other things as you possibly can as quick as you possibly can. Also, again, keeping in mind where you're at in your business, if you can't afford $100,000 in salaries to outsource a lot of different things, you're going to have to get to a point where you can afford that. That's part of recognizing when that transition needs to happen. As you grow, your business is an important part. So going back to what I said earlier, which is some of the biggest mistakes I made were not outsourcing. Soon enough, I hung on to jobs and tasks a lot longer than what I should have.

Okay, that makes total sense, and I would definitely concur with that. There's a lot of people listening to this, including myself at one point, that we're doing things that are not. Forget about the pay grade, right? They're just not things that are necessarily in our 5%. And because of that, doing these things keeps us from doing our 5%. And that's the greatest cost. That's the lost opportunity to get your message out there or to be of the highest level of service to your customers or your prospective clients. So I definitely would agree with that. And here's the thing. Like, some of you might like answering emails. That's okay. That might be within your 5%. That might light you up. So what you like and what I like and what Dr. Osborne likes can be completely different things. Now, sometimes we might not delegate tasks to other people because we hate them so much that we don't want to put anyone else in that same misery. But what you have to remember is that some people actually love doing those things. Right? Some people love coding. It does something for them because everyone's wired a little bit differently. Some people, you couldn't pay them to get in front of a camera or to get on a podcast like this. Whereas someone like Dr. Osborne or even myself, we love doing this. So everyone's 5% is going to be different. And I think that it kind of leads into the next question, which is, how do you build that team around you? What have you found is the best way to build those people around you and identify the people who would love taking those tasks off of your desk or would not mind doing those things?

I think for me, first and foremost is finding people who already like functional medicine. You don't want to hire and maybe I'll get in trouble for saying this, and I don't mean it to be offensive, but you don't want to hire the unhealthiest looking person in the world and put them on your front desk when they're bringing in a box of donuts and a soda every day. They're obviously not aligned with the message. So finding the right team is finding people who are aligned with the message of functional medicine. One of my favorite ways of hiring is actually sending an email out to my existing patients or clientele because a lot of those people have already gone through your program. They've already gone through what functional medicine can do. So a lot of those individuals, if they are looking for work, they're so impassioned and you've changed their life to such a great degree that they want an opportunity to share that with the world. So those are some of the best hires. From there, it's just looking at what that person's skill set is. There are a lot of tips on hiring. Some people would tell you hire based on passion first and then just find a place in your company to put that person because that person will do great things wherever you put them. But sometimes when you're new in business, you can't go at it with that mentality because if you hire a person and you only have money to hire one person, you have to find the person that's good at the job that you're looking to fill. So. So again, at first, if you're looking to hire, I guess this depends on where you're at in your practice. For me, my first hire was to hire somebody to run my phones, to answer the phones, to collect money and to speak with patients as they were checking out. So from that perspective, you gotta find an outgoing person, somebody who's not scared to talk about money, somebody potentially who again, has the ability to smile and be friendly. Think of, don't think of somebody who has an introverted personality. We use different personality tests. So like there, there's Colby, which is a good one to ascertain somebody's strengths in terms of where, where they, where they function and where, where they get energy and what kind of capacity of work that you can put them at doing. There's disc, there's also the Briggs Meyer personality testing, which, you know, ENTJ is a good, is a good person for a front desk employee, because those people are extroverts and they're also intuitive. So you want to make sure that again, that you have somebody who's intuitive and can kind of not have to come to you and ask you every single time the exact same question. They want to be somewhat intelligently intuitive and can roll with the punches, but also be extroverted enough where they like to communicate with people, people, and they enjoy talking to people. So it depends on the place, the appointment that you're trying to hire. When we're hiring a front desk person, it's a little bit different than when I was looking for an assistant versus when I was looking for somebody to run all my web and backend Internet technology stuff. So again, personality tests can help you, really help you identify where that person's strengths are. But from a hiring perspective, here's the system that we use and this might be helpful for those of you who are just starting out. One of the things I hate doing is spending time interviewing. Interviewing, in my opinion, is if you've got 20 resumes and you interview 20 people, probably 18 of them are sucky, they're horrible interviews. Those people are not qualified to be in the room with you and they just completely wasted your time. And so we have a filtration system that we use. So step one in our interview process, or even in our finding candidates process is we have a very specific set of instructions. And that specific set of instructions can be something as simple as we make our potential employees send a fax, not an email. We want them to fax their resume and we do that on purpose. We want to make sure that they're willing to look, you know, listen to that instruction of faxing it. But we also want to make sure that in that fax that they're using the right headline. So we make them fax the resume and in the subject line, we ask them to put the term gluten free warrior in the subject line. And if they, one, if they send us an email instead of a fax, we throw it away. Two, if they don't put, if they send us a fax, but they don't put gluten free warrior in the headline, we throw it away. Those people are not going to be qualified because they can't follow simple instructions. So, so we want to make sure that again, this is part of our filtration, that we're not spending a bunch of time in an interview process wasting our time. So step two, if they pass that first test and their resume qualifies them for the position, we ask them to film a short 2 to 3 minute YouTube video and send us the link. And we ask them to just basically in this video, let Us know why they think they're a good fit for the Origins Healthcare team. And so in this YouTube video, what we can do is we can actually analyze their ability to communicate intelligently. And so we're listening to their vernacular, we're listening to the way that they come across. We're seeing if they're smiling. Right. Which basically we're basically pre interviewing them before we would bring them in for the interview, so that once a person passed these two filters, now we can get them in the room and interview them. But now that the interview pool is much smaller, so whereas maybe we had 50 candidates coming through, now we only have really three, three solid interviews that we can do. And from those three solid interviews, again, if each interview takes you 20 minutes, then you've spent, literally, you've spent an hour finding a really greatly qualified new person for your office instead of spending 5, 10, 20 hours doing a bunch of interviews and being frustrated with the lack of talent pool that's coming through the door. So that's probably one of the best pieces of advice I can give you on finding a team member is have those pre qualifiers in place so that you don't waste a bunch of time. Yeah.

And I guess the fear that some people would have is they would leave out really good candidates. But, you know, a good candidate is somebody who's going to follow basic instructions. And, you know, I think it goes without saying that that's a very important skill, especially when you bring on new team members. They have to be able to follow simple instructions. And if they can't do that, then they're not going to be able to follow complex instructions when things get a little hairy. So I think that's very important. And, and I think it takes a lot of courage for somebody to record a video like that. But that person's gonna be in front of people, right? That person's gonna be connecting with your patients. And if they have an excellent video presence, that could be a talent that could be utilized as well that most people would not discover through a traditional interview method. So you can find hidden talents in people as well. I think that's a brilliant idea.

Well, the other thing that the YouTube video allows us to assess is whether or not they have enough tech savvy. Right. To use their phone camera and from there upload it and grab a link. Right? Because I mean, those are, in today's business world, those are super fundamental things that your employees should be able to understand and do. And if you have somebody who has completely no tech savvy, Whatsoever. And if you know not, maybe not every position in your office is needs to be a tech savvy position. But this is particularly helpful if you're hiring for a position where you want somebody to do your Facebook posts or you want somebody to manage your social media or whatever the case might be. So again, you're just kind of pre testing them to make sure that they have a basic skill set where, you know, you're not going to have to teach them everything from the ground up.

Yeah, absolutely. And it also, if somebody doesn't know how to do it, there's nothing stopping them from learning. Right. And so resourcefulness is an important skill that we want all of our team members to have. So that way they're not coming to you with questions because most of the answers are available to them with Google and YouTube these days anyway. So you can go to YouTube and search how to upload a YouTube video and find out exactly, step by step how to do it. So resourcefulness, I think, is something that this also brings out in people as well. If they don't know how to do something, they can learn, and if they're not willing to do it, it just means that they're not willing to learn. It doesn't mean they're incapable of it because they could always find the answer in terms of how to do it.

Yeah, absolutely. I found my office manager and she's the most tech unsavvy person I know, but she figured out how to upload a YouTube video.

Excellent. Is that Sally?

Yep.

Oh, man. Lucky find. She's totally awesome. So the process works right there. It goes to show you the process works.

Yeah, absolutely.

So you're dropping a lot of sage wisdom, which brings me really to my next thought, which is, you know, being a functional medicine success mentor to several other practitioners. I'm sure you've had many mentors along the way. Maybe you can highlight some of who those people are as well.

Yeah, absolutely. I got to give credit where credit is due. You know, it's funny, when I started in practice, there were no functional medicine coaching programs. So a lot of what I learned about business early on was from some chiropractic management groups. And, you know, I didn't like the management groups for many reasons, but I liked some of the lessons. You know, in essence, I didn't walk into the management groups and I didn't walk away disgruntled because I didn't like everything they taught. I took the lessons that I felt like were really, really helpful and valuable, and I moved on. But so, you know, I was involved in several management groups early on because I didn't know really anything about business. And they were very valuable in helping teach me about structure and organization and the importance of systems. But there was no functional medicine training program when I was starting. And really every management group I was in was they were all high volume chiropractic. They wanted me to, you know, to adjust 100 people a day. And I just, I didn't want to do that. Just wasn't where my heart was. And I'm not saying that, you know, chiropractors that want to do that are wrong. I'm just saying it just, you know, wasn't for me. So I took, I took the business models and kind of basically rearranged them to fit what I wanted to do, which was functional medicine. Then I found one of the models that we implemented in our training was I needed to know more about online marketing. Again, there was no functional medicine online marketing resource. But what I found was a guy. His name was Bedros Kulian, One of my favorite mentors, a good friend of mine at this point. He runs fitness fitness franchises. So he runs a company called Fit Body Boot Camp and they've got 300 plus locations across the globe. But he teaches fitness trainers how to market. Right. And I found him, it was kind of a fluke. I found him at an online, not an online, but a Yannick Silver's Underground marketing event. It's a live event they do every year. And I met Bedros at this live event and we hit it off. I mean, I really liked him. He was a hard worker. I could see that. Anyway, I went out to Vegas and joined his Mastermind group. And that's really. He was hands down one of my best mentors. Him and Craig Ballantyne, they kind of work together to train people, predominantly fitness trainers, on how to market their fitness businesses. But the jump from a fitness business to a functional medicine business is not that far of a leap. So I got a lot of my online training through those two guys. And then, and I can't emphasize enough the importance of not having to reinvent that wheel because I invested over $100,000 before I got mentorship. And I say I invested $100,000 trying to build kind of a business on the Internet and it failed. It failed miserably. That's why I invested so much and lost so much. And that's when I really started to seek out mentorship. So don't reinvent the wheel. Go find a great mentor who's already done what you're trying to accomplish and learn from their mistakes. In essence, pay them to teach you their mistakes so that you don't have to pay 10 times more in making those mistakes. Some of my other mentors over the years, Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach, he's a great mentor. Joe Polish has been a great mentor and he runs Genius Network. Other mentors that I've had the good fortune of working with, Garrett Gunderson of Wealth Factory. You know, once you start making money and you want to know how to manage and invest and properly position your money and your assets so that you're at less risk for somebody suing you or losing the money, you know, for whatever liability reason you might have. Those guys are great at helping you protect your assets. So there's even more than one kind of mentor, right? There's business mentors, there's marketing mentors, there's financial mentors. And you know, one of my, you know, I have two other really, really what I would say are the people that have affected me the most in my life. And I go back again to my wife who, who has my ear every day. You know, she's a mentor to me because, you know, sometimes what I don't see, she sees. I'm a lot less cautious than she is. I. When I see something, I go after it. I tend to, I tend to leap before I look. In essence, I jump. And if there's alligators in a snared pit below me, I try to calculate how I'm going to land away from those things while I'm in the air. Whereas my wife is a lot more, she's a lot more calculated. So I take my ideas to her and she, being a master planner really helps lend her guidance. And then my father in law, my wife's father is a mentor of mine in so many different ways. A wife mentoring somebody I can look up to, somebody who's just done really great things in the world and in life that if I ever need advice, I can go to. Think of mentors as anyone around you has a stronger point of wisdom in an area that you seek to grow yourself. I'm a big, big belief or believer in growing. I think when we stop growing, we stop living in functional medicine. If you stop growing in terms of your business, in terms of your functional medicine knowledge, it's time to get out of the business. It's time to retain, retire. And I think that could be said probably for any profession. But always seek more knowledge than what you have because that's really, that's where the magic happens. There's a book. I can't remember the name of it off the top of my head. I have it on my nightstand. But it's just a book full of diagrams and pictures. And one of the most profound pictures that I've ever seen drawn is just. It's just two circles and one circle. It's a big circle that says one where everyone is. And then there's another, smaller circle that says where the magic happens. In essence, pull yourself out of the circle that everyone else is in and push your limits and grow. And sometimes that can be a little bit painful, but it always, always yields reward. At least it does in my experience.

I totally agree. Great points of knowledge. I drew a little circle on my page here, so I can remember that. Because I think that's super important for all of us, is to recognize that and to go where the magic happens. And what we have to offer our patients is as close to magic from the allopathic perspective as you can get. So go there. Go where people get amazing results and amazing outcomes. Now, that leads me to my next question. Since you did talk about having mentors, I know that you also have a mentorship program. Maybe you can talk about that. Like, if somebody's listening to this, who would be a good fit to work with you?

What we look for in our program is compatibility. What I don't want is. I don't want somebody because our program isn't inexpensive. There's a high value, but there's a high takeaway. And so we want people who are motivated to grow their practices. We want people who are compatible. Compatibility is very important to me because I don't want to work with people who are who I don't want to work with. At this point in my life, I can be a little bit more reserved. We're looking for doctors who want to grow their practice in an ethical and moral way and who are struggling in business and need ideas. Our system in our program is not a cookie cutter program. It's not the. This is the system that you put in place, and everybody does it this way. As I mentioned earlier, management groups. That was one of the things that turned me off about management groups is that that they had a system and they wanted everybody to run the same system. I don't believe in that. I think every doctor, every practitioner, has a very unique skill set and a very, very gifted talent. And my job is to help them understand and identify where that lies and how they can bring that out in a Manner that's consistent with their own ethics, morals, and passions. That's why we call our program the Dream practice. Because it's not my dream practice that I'm trying to build for somebody. It's not their dream practice. So compatibility is important because when they come into our program, I don't necessarily inspect or insist or demand that these doctors take everything from my office and then mimic it exactly and run it. I want them to, again, to know where their strengths and weaknesses are and how we can guide them to the practice that they want. For me, I love Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday in the practice. That's where I work. I don't want to work more than that. But there are some doctors who want to do five days a week. We have some that just want to do two. We have some doctors in our group that just want to be online. And so, again, it depends on what their goals and their unique aspirations are. And that's really what we're looking for. We're looking for people who don't necessarily want a cookie cutter system, but who just want to take their gifts and take them to the world in an intelligent manner. And they just need guidance.

Okay, excellent. And where can people learn more about that?

You can learn more about our. About our mastermind@marketfunctionalmedicine.com if you go to marketfunctionalmedicine.com you can actually sign up for. I have a free video series that you can access on how to start a supplement pharmacy. And if you sign up for that, we'll start sending you emails and education about how to grow your practice for free. And then if you're more interested in the Mastermind, there's a link on the right hand side with a brain and some gears, and that's the Mastermind link. So if you click on that, you can fill out a special request page and my assistant Sally can reach out to you and see what your goals are and kind of see if you're a good fit for our group.

I do want to mention your event because, as I mentioned earlier, it's one of my favorite events of the year. So maybe you can talk about that as well.

Yeah, the Functional Medicine Success Summit. We just wrapped up our sixth year of doing this event. It's kind of my baby in the sense that I really wanted to have a way where we could bring already successful people into the room and teach from the stage, not about the art and science of practicing functional medicine, but of business. What works, what's working, what's not working, what are the big pearls that doctors and practitioners could take away from a weekend of basically listening to some of the most successful practitioners in the world. That's really what we've tried to achieve. And every year we try to up our game. We try to improve our business model in the Functional Medicine Success Summit, just like every year you try to improve your practice. The whole premise is it's a weekend where doctors can come, practitioners can come, listen to some of the most successful people in the world, then get an opportunity as well to network with those same practitioners. So to me, it's one thing to go to an event and just listen to people speak. It's an entirely different thing to go to an event, listen to people speak, and then get the opportunity to rub elbows with them and hang out with them. You've probably heard this, I know this is a very cliche thing to say, but you are who you hang out with, right? And so I like giving doctors the opportunity, no matter where they are at, on their stage of success or on their journey, I like to be able to get them in the room with people who are at the highest level and people who are at the beginning level. Because I think mentorship is one of the most important things in the world that we can foster. Because if we don't do it, this knowledge gets lost.

Right.

And if we have a scarcity attitude, if every doctor is like, oh, I don't want to give my trade secrets because then I'll have competition. You know, the reality in functional medicine is we serve less than 1% of the population. So if we all shared everything that we knew about business and about growing and networked together, imagine seeing 10% of the population or 20% of the population. We'd all have, you know, year long waiting lists on our practice. We wouldn't be able to see all the sick people that needed to be able to be seen. Even if we all were competing with each other, we're really not competing with each other. So in the spirit of what we've tried to create, which is an event that is competition free and that is information sharing and it is mentorship based so that doctors can come and feel comfortable about talking about money and business, they can come and they can network with other people who are already successful and make connections that are potentially lifelong. And like the connection that you and I have made, I have no doubt it'll be a lifelong connection. And, you know, that's what we do. That's what we do every year at the Functional Medicine Success Summit is we just try to have the best event to really, really foster that.

Well, you've done an impeccable job. It is, as I said, the event that I have not missed since I've been there. So with that being said, I want to honor your time. I know you've got another interview. You're a very popular guy. Thank you so much. Dr. Osborne, my dear friend, my mentor, and somebody who I look up to continuously. You set the bar very high for all of us. So thank you for everything that you do, and thank you for sharing your wisdom with us today.

You're welcome. And thank you so much for having me on. And I just have to say, you know, those of you who are, you know, being mentored by Satchin, you're very, very lucky. He's a very, very special guy, and he's. He's gonna. He's got big things ahead as well and already is doing really great things. And I'm proud of you and so happy to see you grow and happy to call you friend.

Thank you. Thank you, Peter. I appreciate that. Have an amazing rest of your day.

Thank you. You, too.