EP075: Building your dream practice 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 and 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 Perfect Practice. Good morning. Today is going to be an amazing, amazing day and I'm super excited to kick it off with my mentor, Dr. Peter Osborne. Dr. Peter, thanks for being here. Thanks for enlightening us and sharing with us your brilliance. I'm excited to chat with you and really learn more about your strategies moving forward, what you've done to build such a successful practice. And I'm also excited to ask you what all of us can do to really become successful moving forward. With everything that's going on in the world right now, I think this conversation is really, really timely, really, really valuable and really important. So I'm excited to share this time with you. So thank you again for being here.

Oh, you're welcome. And thank you for putting on such a wonderful event and putting it out there when practitioners need it most. Really applaud your efforts in putting this whole thing together.

Well, you know, I still remember that conversation that you and I had. It was a very difficult conversation and I was literally sitting in my sauna and we were talking about what we were going to do about this event. And you know, as my mentor, you were actually one of the first people that reached out to me and said, hey, like, you got to think about this. And I was like stubborn and gung ho and saying, no, we're going to do this no matter what. And then I had some time to sit with it and I was in Portugal and things were going a little bit sideways and I said, okay, they closed all the borders in the US and all travel from Europe is being shut down and it's probably only going to get worse before it gets better. So I want to acknowledge you for having the foresight to actually plant that seed in my head so that we could actually pivot and make this shift and make this available to as many people as possible. So I did want to offer honor you for that and I appreciate you for always, always being a voice of reason in my life for the past five years.

Well, you're welcome. I'm just glad I could reach out to you and offer up any suggestions that might improve the wonderful things that you're doing.

Thank you. Well, let's. For anyone who's been living under a rock that doesn't know who you are, let's start off by at least giving everyone a little bit of background about you. Where did the journey of Dr. Peter O. Born start?

Wow, that's a big question. So for me, it really. For functional. We'll start with functional medicine, because that's really, I think, imperative to this conversation. I'm trained as a chiropractor, a former, I'll say bodybuilder, but never professionally so. And my interest in nutrition was really sparked by my desire to bodybuild on an amateur level. And so I knew from even before starting graduate school that it was an important component, that nutrition was important. So I kind of geeked out on biochemistry and anatomy and physiology. When I got into chiropractic college, I was very blessed because my grades were really good. I was kind of a teacher's pet. So I crawled under the wings of some really good mentors, Ron Grabowski and Susan Grigsby's PhD in physiology. And so they took me under their wing and really helped me get into some of the rotations and internships so that I could go and study under family practice medicine. Like, I was able to do rotation for several months in family practice medicine, really see what was happening, not just from a chiropractic perspective, but I got to see what chiropractic school. It's like what the enemy's doing. Even though I don't consider medical doctors to be the enemy at all. It's just kind of the philosophical differences, right? So I got to do rheumatology. I got to do family practice. I got to sit in on surgeries. I got so much more than the average chiropractor is able to get from their chiropractic education. And it positioned me to really think even stronger about functional medicine, because what I saw in rheumatology, to me was very sad. It was disheartening. I'm a veteran. I was in the Air Force. I served the country. And, you know, here I was working in the VA hospital, and these veterans were coming in with severe autoimmune conditions, right? And so the treatment, the standard of care was methotrexate. At the time, this was before a lot of the biologics became more Popular and were available. So methotrexate was the kind of gold standard. Methotrexate and steroids and nonsteroidal anti inflammatories. And they were given these drugs until their joints failed and then they were offered up surgery for total joint replacement. So this was usually after 15 or 20 years of destroying their health with drugs that deplete the ability for DNA to help them heal and repair. And their folate levels are so low and they can't recover their cartilage. And so now they want to do a surgery, a scheduled trauma and expect that these people are going to heal. And what would happen inevitably is a lot of their surgeries would fail and they would be in worse shape than they were before. And so to me, I was just watching this happen and unfold. And in the via hospital it was very, it was like this huge red tape beast, right? So everything was done, regimented. You couldn't bend the rules, you couldn't question the rules. If you ask questions, you were discouraged. And I asked a ton of questions. I was the chiropractic intern going through there, so I had like the carte blanche to be the one who asked questions. And all the other interns were like, shh, be quiet, don't ask questions. And I was like, no, I'm here, I'm going to hear, I'm going to learn as much as I can. Why are we giving methotrexate when it depletes folate and folate is necessary for the synthesis of new cartilage? Like that makes no sense. Why aren't we looking at diet? Because there's 100 studies out there that show that fasting and gluten free diets can help even in diseases like rheumatological disease, rheumatoid arthritis. Why aren't we doing these things? It doesn't make any sense that we're not at least exploring those options. I was promptly told to be quiet and to just listen and behave like a good boy. And of course I'm there to learn. I'm paying. I'm paying for my education. I spent a quarter million dollars paying for my education. Don't tell me to shut up and not ask questions. That's the way I look at it. I'm paying you so that I can become an educated person and help more people. And so I was discouraged. In the VA hospital, they shot me down three times. I offered up three different possible research studies that we could do on patients within the va and I was shot down. And so when I left, one of my very first clients in practice was a little girl with a terminal diagnosis. They gave her six months to live. She had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and she was in and out of the hospital so frequently she had a permanent stent embedded in her arm. And the doctor looked at her mom and said, look, your daughter's got six months to live. You need to go home and get her affairs in order and prepare for her death. She brought her to me out of desperation. This is what pisses me off the most because that little girl should have been brought to me first, not last. All we did was change her diet. I say all we did. All we did was put her on a gluten free diet and she was allergic to blueberries. We made those two changes and she made a full recovery and graduated college few years ago. So this was a little girl who was supposed to die at the age of nine, who's now gone on in the world, graduated from college and is doing wonderful things in the world, all because we changed her diet. And of course I knew that she was going to live six months in because the medicine, we were able to get her off of medicine within a year. The stent came out of her arm in six months. And that's what happened for me. That's where my beginning was. My beginning was this little girl was supposed to die. She didn't because we changed her diet. That was like my epiphany moment of I have to get this information into the hands of as many people as possible because this is not about improving quality of life, this is about saving lives. This is about people who would otherwise die if they don't have this information. It's such simple information to sit back on it. And so that's what for me started the deep dive into functional medicine and the passion behind what I do.

I love that super powerful story. And I did not know that you were into body. I can tell you're in great shape. I've always known that. But I didn't know you were in bodybuilding. That's awesome.

I never competed. I just, I body built for myself. Like there's. We all have that internal vanity and you know, we actually. I've never shared this, so this is a first for your audience. So I used to dress up and go to the Renaissance festival and so that was something I'd done since I was about 20 years old to meet a buddy. We would dress up like barbarians and so a big kind of progenesis to bodybuilding. Was we wanted to look good without our shirts on. So we'd go to the Renaissance Festival. And we've been doing that for, gosh, we've done it now for 20 years. And so that was always like the thing that sparked the desire to look good without a shirt on. So, you know, take that for what it's worth.

I love that I always learn something new when I talk to you. So when you, when you graduated, then when you started off, did you start your own practice? Were you working for somebody else?

I worked in a practice for, oh, several months until I found out that all my work, I was in the community, out doing public engagement every day. So, like a lot of the things that you teach and a lot of things that are important to build a practice, I was out there doing. I was going to, calling HR departments and going to health talks and doing lunch and learns. And I was out there just hustling, you know, the hustle. But I was under somebody else's practice and what was happening is my patients were being diverted to this other doctor. So like all this hustle that I was putting in, I wasn't able to get out what I wanted to get out. So I, once I figured that out, I left and I just took the deep dive and I, you know, I went to eight different banks looking for loans. The eighth bank gave me a loan. So persistence paid off and I got a loan for about $50,000 to do my build out was supposed to cost me 150,000, but I found the cheapest guy I could find and we salvaged stuff and we just basically, we got our hands dirty trying to do this build out to make it happen. So, yes, so very early on I realized that to work under somebody else's wing, my independence is too great. I wasn't going to do well in that environment when my patients weren't being directed to me after working hard. So I decided to just open it up on my own.

So going back a little bit because some of us have had a childhood experience, or we've had something happen to us even as a young adult or teenager that kind of light this fire under our butts to really either help a lot of people. I know you share the story about the young lady. Sometimes it's being denied something as a child or as a teenager that sparks that interest. I know a lot of entrepreneurs that I've spoken to kind of have something to prove, in a sense, and that's one of the things that leads to their success because they're just so Driven by something at a subconscious level. Have you ever identified anything like that for yourself?

Oh, yeah. I mean, there's to say it didn't come from an internal desire to want people to feel like I was smarter or was more skilled or had a greater skill set at being able to help would be a lie. I mean, that's where some of it came from. So like me growing up in early childhood, I went through probably a rough childhood. We were poor. I mean, there was no money at home. I had. In all, there were five siblings and we shared the same bathroom. And not that that's such trauma, right, but there was abuse in the house. And so from that regard I was always striving and trying to do great things, like to get the attention that was good attention and not the attention that was bad attention. And so I think that was ingrained in me very early on. I was also an obese child. At 12 years of age. I was probably about 45, 50 pounds overweight. And one of the reasons why is my mom. She would shop at the discount Dolly Madison Bakery. She'd buy all like the 39 cent zingers and that kind of garbage food and she'd stock the freezer and you know, in the summers that's we were, that was it, you know, the freezer stocked and you know, we kind of basically took care of ourselves to a large extent. And so I wasn't taught really great nutrition. And it was athletics that got me the attention that I was looking for. Because at athletics it was up to me. I could excel, I could practice more, I could do better, I could get praised for doing that work. And so it was through athletics that it was able to lose a bunch of weight and regain my health in a sense, like going back to the core of. We all have a story about. Maybe many of you have a story about you were sick and you changed your lifestyle. Well, for me, I was a young 12 year old who was obese and I just wanted girls to look at me and I knew if I didn't change my diet and my lifestyle, that that was never going to happen. And so that was a strong push. But beyond that, I wanted people to see that I was smart and that I could do well. So that pushed me in school, that pushed me to be a better student. I was top 10% in my class, went off to the Air Force, came back, went to graduate school. Beyond that. So I had that desire and that drive and then I had really great mentors. I really have to give credit where credit is due because I had people that recognized that I did have a gift and a passion for what I wanted to learn. And then they took me and they saw that and they helped mold it. And so without those people, I don't think I'd be the man I am today. I don't think I'd have the success that I've been able to achieve in life without them. So I've got to give them that credit as well. But, yeah, I mean, I think we're all driven by some childhood experiences. No doubt that I was as well.

Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. I'm always curious about what the origin story is for people. Right. In terms of what drives them. Of course, as healthcare practitioners, we all want people to feel better. We all want people to, you know, to. We want to reduce people's suffering. But I always find that there's just some. There's something else there and that serves us right. And in some cases, it could be the thing that holds us back. But I find that people who are really successful like yourself, it actually drives them and it motivates them, and it becomes, I don't want to say their North Star, but it kind of guides them in life. And then you mentioned something else, which is the power of mentorship and having somebody that sees something in you, that believes in you, that can see a brighter future for yourself that sometimes we can't always see. And that's one of the things that drew me to you and kind of, I was blessed to be taken under your wings because you saw something in me that I didn't see in myself. And it's just beautiful to be able to bounce ideas off somebody who doesn't judge you, who's there to help you, who's there to lift you up and, you know, and be proud of your accomplishments, because that's something that, you know, many of us may not have. You know, my parents worked really hard growing up, and they did a lot for us, but they were not our mentors. They gave us orders, but they didn't necessarily mentor us. And so sometimes we may lack that, you know, that mentor figure in our lives, and having that in our businesses can be extremely valuable, especially because you can learn through somebody else's mistakes, but also through their victories. And then that way you can repeat the things that worked really well for them and then avoid some of the challenges and pitfalls that they encountered. So I always equate mentorship to a time machine. You can collapse timelines readily through other people's experiences. Do you Want to give a shout out to any specific mentors? I know that you mentioned that you really admire them, but is there anyone specific that you want to acknowledge right now?

Yeah, I mean, I had academic mentors that like Dr. Ron Grabowski, Dr. Susan Grigsby, super great, super wonderful people, super great mentors academically. And then I had business mentors. I mean, a couple of my best business mentors. One is Bedros Coolian, which is an interesting story at the time that I was looking for a mentor in functional medicine from a business model perspective and it didn't exist like there were. I'd gone through as a chiropractor, I'd gone through maximized living coaching programs. There's another program I went through called Pinnacle. So I'd gone through different mentorships there, but they were all high volume chiropractic practices. My heart wasn't in it. I didn't want to adjust 500 people a week. It just wasn't for me. My heart kept drawing me back to nutrition, but there was no mentorship available for that. So I created a model and I took that model to somebody who was doing mentorship in the fitness industry. His name is Bedros Kulian and those of you may not have heard of him. He owns a franchise called Fit Body bootcamp. There's like 400 locations across the world. So he's a very successful guy. But at the time I just said, look, I'm going to just go and attach myself to this guy and kind of learn what he's doing. Because he was applying a lot of the principles of Internet marketing. He was applying a lot of the principles of content creation. So when you look at the strategies that many of you, if you don't already have, and I know those of you who are in Sachin's mentorship is a great decision to get in his mentorship because he's teaching these things. But content creation is critical to growing your practice without the need to perpetually market your practice. And this again, this was not being taught because the Internet and social media was barely brand new at this time. And we're going back in time 15 plus years ago. So Bedros Kulian was a great mentor of mine and his partner, Craig Ballantyne. Some of you may have heard of if you've subscribed to early to Rise, which is an Internet entrepreneur independence subscription you can get online, but they also do a magazine. But these guys have coached some of the biggest names in the industry, whether it's the nutrition industry or whether it's the fitness industry. These guys are kind of like the behind the scenes mastermind. So I went directly to them and I worked with them for several years. And I just applied a lot of the concepts they were teaching to functional medicine and kind of crafted my own model. But without them, I would not have been able to really craft my own model intelligently. So like you said, they compressed time for me and they really taught me strategies that I didn't know even how to implement those strategies. And the reason that happened, I'll share this too, is I made a huge mistake. And I want to share it because I want others to learn from this mistake. See, I had this idea. I had this idea to create a supplement line that addressed drug induced nutritional deficiencies. Okay. And I had a partner in it, doctor, he's an internal medicine doctor. And we went into a partnership together to create this product and this brand called Nutraceutical. The idea was to blend supplements with medicines. And here's the mistake I made. This was purely a preventative product. It wasn't designed to treat a problem, it was designed to prevent a problem. But it was designed for people who don't care enough about their body to even question the medicines. If you think about the business model, it sucked. People that want to take drugs, want to take drugs. People that don't want to take drugs generally will take supplements. But there's not a hybrid in between where it's very, very successful. But we invested over $50,000 apiece into building this business and watching it fail. And it was that. That was before I sought mentorship. So I'll back up and just say, before I got smart and compressed time and hired Bedros to be my mentor, I blew through $50,000 that it didn't have to blow through making huge mistakes and ended up with $36,000 worth of product inventory that never moved. It sat in the office and didn't move. We ended up having to give it away and we ended up having to throw it away because it all expired because we couldn't sell it.

So if I come to your house, I'm not going to see Nutra bottles that you're taking, right?

No, no, not at all.

Oh, man. You know, you know, it's. Thanks for sharing that. I know that, you know, it's experiences like this that it's so great that you can look back and kind of laugh at them and share them openly with other people and be vulnerable. One thing I want to come back to is what you said earlier, where you got resourceful right. So the solution you were looking for didn't exist and you got resourceful. You went in a lateral industry that had a very similar message, health, fitness, wellness. And you were able to find somebody who could get their eyes on your work and mentor you from that perspective. And I think that's important for all of us to understand is that resourcefulness is one of the keys to success. Resourcefulness brings out our creativity, it brings out our ability to innovate. And sometimes it's also good to get an external or different industry's perspective on your industry because then you could create something that's never been created before. I don't know if you know who Naveen Jain is, but, you know, one of the things that he talks about is, you know, he's not a rocket scientist, but because he's not a rocket scientist, he comes into that industry with a new perspective and so he can look at it from a different vantage point and then ask a different set of questions than what we might ask and what other people in our industry might ask. So even if you do have somebody in your industry, it's always good to connect with people in complementary industries or even completely radically different industries to have a perspective on what you're doing because they can give you some insights and ideas that you may never have thought of. You know, a lot of times in functional medicine, we might be emulating what other people are doing or what we think is the way things should be done because of how other people are doing it. But that doesn't really lead to innovation. It leads to, you know, copying or at least, you know, ripping other people's style off. And if we go to other industries, then we can, we can bring in new innovative strategies. And I think that, you know, that's probably something that can serve a lot of people right now, especially because of everything that's going on right now, as you're well aware, as everyone who's watching is well aware, you know, our worlds basically got flipped upside down over the last little while and we don't know what the new normal is again, right? And I hope it's not. I hope things don't go back to the way they were. I hope they turn out to be better than the way they were. And right now, you know, the world's attention, you know, if it's not on the news, it's on, it should be on people's health. And so I'd love to know how you're being impacted by this, what pivots you're going to make and what suggestions you have for people who are either in a brick and mortar practice and. Or who are considering going into a virtual model.

Yeah. So I think foundationally, if you're in a brick and mortar practice and you haven't already positioned yourself to be somewhat online, somewhat available digitally, now's the time. Like, let's not dwell on the fact that you haven't done it, but let's dwell on the future of the fact that it needs to be done. Because even if you, let's say COVID 19 never existed, you should have already been thinking about positioning yourself this way 10 years ago. The market trends are moving and the reality is if you look at your phone, there's a doctor app now. You can do consults with a doctor and get a script sent to your pharmacy in 10 minutes. Like, this is where the technology is taking us. And so if you. It's not that you shouldn't want to maintain a brick and mortar. I'm not encouraging anybody to leave their brick and mortar. Because if you're happy in one on one relationships and seeing people in a day to day basis, there's a great need for that too. But part of being successful at business is having the ability to diversify yourself and to spread your ability to be effective to more than just one angle. Because the reality is like, for me, the reality is I'm a chiropractor. So here I'm doing this functional medicine. I'm under a spotlight. Like, people are looking at me and there's some people that don't like my message and don't like what I'm doing and we're at war. I mean, I'm not at war with them, but they're at war with me. And that's the reality. That's the nature of the beast. They're looking to try to find a way to take me down. They're looking for a way to accuse me of practicing medicine without a license. They're looking for a way to maliciously shut me down. Well, if I only had a brick and mortar practice, right. I would be so overexposed if something like that were to happen. So now what do I do now how do I take care of my. How do I help the millions of people that need this message if I'm limiting my message to what I can reach in a brick and mortar? I've done the math. You've probably all done the math. I mean, in a brick and mortar practice, I work three days a week, Monday through Wednesday, and I see seven people a day and that's it, right? 21 people a week. And I do that on purpose. Now, if you do the math, you're not going to be able to see more than about 400 people a year doing it in that way. Now, my goal is to reach 100 million people. So if I want to reach 100 million people and I'm only seeing 400 people a year, that isn't going to happen. There's just no way it could ever possibly happen. Now, that's not to say that the person reaching 400 people a year isn't just as successful in the way that they're viewing those one on one relationships and just as successful in getting people better and healthy. I'm not trying to downplay the one on one relationship. What I'm trying to say is you want to diversify your ability to reach more people, whether that's, you know, doing online consultations or whether that's creating information that the general populace can have access to to improve their knowledge about how to improve their health. I mean, I look at it the way one of the reasons I started Gluten Free Society and I started it back in 2010, and the precursor to that was something very different. And I got smart. I told you I got smart and I kind of figured some things out because there were several attempts to do that before I got smart and they failed. And so when we finally got smart at it and we started it in 2010, it was because of that little girl that I talked to you about earlier, Ginger, because she almost died. That was the driving force. And I knew that there are in the US 46 million cases of autoimmune disease that are not getting help. Their answer is biologic medicines and steroids and early death and cancer. Like that's no way to live your life. So I knew I had to reach more people. And that's what started Gluten Free Society. So it started with a simple mission. Look, just get the information out there. If people read it and they find value in it and they apply it, then you've helped them. You didn't have to see them, you've helped them already. But here's the glorious part of that. If you help them and you've never met them, then who do you think they're going to come see when they're ready to engage in a personal one on one relationship? They're going to come see the person that made the biggest and profoundest impact on their health when no one else could. And that's the power and the glory of the Internet and using technology to leverage your knowledge and demortalize your knowledge into content that can then be utilized by people, total strangers, right? Whether they buy from you or not, it doesn't matter. You can give it to them for free. Because by paying it forward, by paying your knowledge forward, you're not paying it back. A lot of people have this misunderstanding and I, and I, I hate it when I hear somebody say to pay it back. Paying it back insinuates that you owe somebody something, that you are where you're at because you took something from someone else. Now don't get me wrong, we have a whole society that's built on knowledge. And there are a lot of people that we know, we know today because of the work they did, but we pay it forward just like they paid it forward. So we pay our knowledge forward by giving of it freely, right? And then that comes back to us through the universe in so many different ways. And one of those ways is through monetary increase. Especially if you do this intelligently and you monetize your content. But my advice would be, don't create content that's only for sale. Create content that is free and give it away. And give away your best content. Give away your best information for absolutely free. Don't charge a dime for it. Because when you give from the heart with your greatest gifts, the average person out there receiving that gift will only probably apply 10 to 20% of it. But it's such a great gift, Even applying only 10 to 20% has such a profound impact on their health and their life that again, when they're ready to engage in a more serious relationship with you, a doctor patient relationship, a practitioner client relationship, no matter what you're into, whether you're a health coach or whether you're a doctor, there's going to be a profit and a. I'm just going to say it like this. I'm going to clear the air. I'm going to talk in terms of business and not in terms of chivalry and like goodwill. I assume anyone on this conference already has good ethics and morals and an intent to bring the best to the people and that they're not in it for just making money. Like, if you're here for that, go away, we don't want you here. But if you're here because you come with a giving, loving heart, then you're in the right place. So I'm going to, now that I've said that and I've cleared the air about that Aspect I'm going to talk about business because it's important to understand business is what runs the world. How much money you're able to generate and make is what's going to help dictate your freedoms to be able to help more people. Like, how many people would I help? Sachin, If I made $100,000 a year in a small practice, there's no way I would be able to afford building a $50,000 website and paying a videographer and a full time IT person and a whole crew of people and writers to be able to generate the content to help more people. Like, because I make so much, I can give so much back, right? And so part of creating and devising an Internet strategy where you're in the world of content, right, is that you're able to give. And in so giving, you're also receiving. But in receiving, you're reinvesting back into your business and you're further diversifying your capacity to continue to be successful. And I know I just said a whole lot of stuff right there, but I think if you just kind of understand the concept, it's that your knowledge, immortalized in digital content, whether it's video, audio or the written word, has the power to save and change lives. And you should give that away for free. But in doing so, you should also have a paid version of your content that's organized and clearly thought out so that if people really want to access it to a greater degree, they can. And they can have some degree of guidance with that. All that being said, there's never been a better time to do that than today. Like the technology that we have today at our FingerTips didn't exist 10 years ago, didn't exist five years ago. Like, to do what I'm doing today would have cost me, and did cost me, right, hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire coders and creators to build out certain customizations. Whereas Today you pay $29 a month and you got a funnel product, right? And all that software is built in and it's automated. You know, you pay a couple hundred dollars a month and you have a CRM that's super robust and it has an affiliate center inside of it, it has a shopping cart inside of it and it has all these amazing features, right? So what we can do today with technology, like there's not an excuse, there's no one listening to this today that should have an excuse where they say it just can't happen because it's too hard, because the technology is all there and it's at your fingertips.

Yeah, I love what you're saying. And it's a concept that we call karmic currency. Right. Where you're paying it forward. And here's the thing, you never know who's going to see it, when they're going to see it, and the impact that it's going to have on their life. And there's two aspects to every business. And I just had this conversation earlier with a client earlier in this week, and what I was telling him, you know, he's kind of scrambling right now with everything that's going on with COVID And he was in the midst of transitioning his practice from a brick and mortar to adding more diversification to his practice and adding a virtual component to it. And of course, his timeline was six months has been compressed to six days. Right. Like, we're just trying to do this as quickly and as rapidly as we can. And I love working with him because one of the first things he said is, I don't want to focus on money making money right now. I want to focus on being of service right now. And with everything that's going on right now, that's what people need now more than ever now. Don't turn down any sales, you know, don't turn down the opportunity to serve somebody more deeply. But at the same time, I think this is a great time where people's attention is on their health. They're looking for leadership, they're looking for guidance. And this is a great time where your content can really strike a chord, because people are looking for answers that they're not getting from the television, they're not getting it from their place of employment, they're not getting it from their government. So they're going to be leaning on people like us to put our best content out there. And the thing I wanted to say is that there's two aspects of your growth. The first aspect is positioning. So how are you positioned in the prospect's mind? And then the second one is profit. And so usually the profit comes after the positioning. So if you just go into every engagement and every relationship and write every blog and put every piece of piece of content out there with the intention to make profit from it first without changing the position in the consumer's mind, then I think people are going to encounter a lot of challenges and difficulties that way. But if you go in with the idea that, hey, I want to increase my and elevate my position in the prospect's mind, in their heart, in their soul, so that when it does Come time for them to either do business, they're going to do it with me, or when they think of someone they love that's facing a challenge that I'm describing, then they're going to refer that person to me. Some of our and this might be the case for you too, Dr. Osborne, but some of our greatest ambassadors and sources of referrals are people that have never been patients of ours, but they believe so much in what we do and what we offer that anytime somebody in their family gets sick or a friend of theirs gets sick, they're instantly referring them to us because of the position that we have in that prospect's mind. Now, they've never paid us anything. So the profit that we've earned from that particular person is zero. But through their referrals and through the positioning that we've created for them, it's been exponential. So I definitely want to encourage everyone to take that message and run with it, because what Dr. Osborne is saying is something that I want to definitely echo, and that is give out your best information, do it freely. And there's a math that goes beyond our bottom line in our business, and it's the universal math. And it always has a way of rewarding you. Sometimes it's going to be financially. Sometimes it's going to be getting that perfect parking spot. Sometimes it's going to be finding that perfect soulmate. Sometimes it's going to be the right opportunity that opens up for you. Sometimes it's the things that money can't buy. And when those doors open up for you and when they're always opening up for you, that's when you know you're kind of on the right path. And I think gratitude and awareness of those things is how you cash in that currency. So these are excellent points. I love talking about this kind of stuff with you. It really lights my soul to know that we have the same value system. It's so important that when you study people who are successful, they have a very giving nature. And they find in them this reservoir of basically an infinite source, an infinite reservoir that the more they pour out of themselves, the more they're able to pour out of themselves. It's just a never ending faucet, so to speak. And that's how you know you're living your dharma, which is like your truth based life. So when you're really passionate about something, don't hold back. You know, give as much of yourself as you can, as Dr. Osborne is saying, and that's going to be super impactful and it might not pay off financially right away, but it's going to. It always pays off in the long run.

When I would say, yeah, to me, it pays off every day. We get a letter, we get an email. Hey, what you wrote, what you said, the video you shot, you know, changed my life, saved my life, impacted my life in such a way that now I'm a better person. So those are, to me, those are just as equal of a reward as financial reward, because that's the fuel that keeps you driven. Because you will get to a point, I want to emphasize something else because a lot of people are out there talking about the brick and mortar switch, right, let's do the brick and mortar, but let's take that and let's go digital. And they think, okay, this is pie in the sky. This is going to be easy. Now a lot of our problems are going to go away. And the reality is, no, you're just inheriting a whole new set of problems. I want to be very clear that any business that you're in is going to. You're going to inherit a set of problems. And so the digital world itself is just as fraught with struggles and trials and tribulation. And it's when you can get feedback from your audience, feedback from those people that you're helping. Those are the things that fuel you through what I call the nose to the grindstone times. Because. Because this type of work is more equated to farming than it is equated to hunting. So, like when you go out on a hunt, like you're going for the kill, you get the kill. You have instant food. When you're going to farm, you've got to prepare the soil, you've got to till the soil, you've got to plant the seed, you've got to water the seed, you've got to kill the bugs or get rid of the bugs, you've got to pull the weeds. Like, there's a lot of work that goes into all of that, and that's equated to a lot of. In the sense to what you're doing with your business is you're farming out your passion so that you're laying out a groundwork that then starts to work for you. Because the more care you take in the land, the more healthy the soil is, right? The stronger and the more, the easier the plants grow with less insects because now they have their own immune systems. It's the same thing with your business, the same kind of analogy. The more you preplan out how to grow your business, the more help you get to the world and give up freely and the more they are thankful of that, then that provides you with the fuel that you need to excite your passion to keep going when times get tough. Look, there are many, many nights where I've just been like, man, I'm up at 2 in the morning, I'm not going to lie, I'm up at three in the morning, I'm up at four in the morning burning the midnight oil, getting the work done, laying the framework, laying the groundwork, because nobody else can do that for you. But now today I don't have to do that. Like the framework is in place. But there was a period in my life where I had to work 80 plus hour weeks seeing my patients, but also working on the side to get this other thing going. And I just want everybody in this forum to understand you're going to have to put in a shitload of work. Excuse my English, but you're going to have to put in a lot of work if you want to be successful. But the passion will drive you forward. And if you give great quality stuff, people are going to excite you back. And the way you're going to get that karma payment back is they're going to be so excited that you changed their life and they're going to thank you for it, that it's going to drive you and it's going to keep driving you forward so that nothing will stop you, even when your energy is low, even when everyone around you might be saying, oh, you need to quit. That's a pie in the sky. You don't, you need to quit doing that. It's too much work. You're going to burn yourself out. Like, ignore those people. If you love functional medicine and you want to help people, roll up your sleeves, roll up your pant legs, get in the mud, get dirty, get down in it. Like, get the work done, get it done intelligently. Find good mentors like Satchen. Find good mentors that will help compress the time for you, but get the work done in an intelligent way. Because the thing about the digital world is once you do the work, the work is done. Again, you've heard me say this. You immortalize what's in your head and you put it into digital format. That's work that never has to be done. I mean, for us, like an example of this is in our office, we use the webinar, and so the webinar as an educational platform. Instead of having 25 meetings a month with somebody who's gluten sensitive and teaching 25 different people in 25 different sessions about gluten. I have two meetings a month that are pre recorded. I get on in the last 10 minutes and answer questions. So I've compressed 25 hours into 20 minutes of work. But the education is even better because now we've added graphics and images and it's canned and standardized. So I know that today I didn't miss something. Like when I was delivering the presentation, I didn't say, oh, man, I forgot to talk about corn gluten today. Dang it, that person's going to go out and buy corn flakes, right? The information in the message is consistent across the board. It's uniform. You know, you didn't miss anything. So you can take that knowledge in your head and you can immortalize it and you can deliver better care, right, by doing that kind of thing. So there's so many different strategies, man, I'm going to shut up now. And I know you've got probably some input that you want to. You want to add into that, but.

No, I love your passion, man. It's really coming through. And, you know, our friend Joe Polish would say, this can and clone yourself, right? You've got, you know, once you've kind of dialed in that message and you know what you want to say, then record it and you never have to say it again. I mean, it, you know, even if it's not a webinar where you're presenting the information on gluten, let's say it could be something else in your practice. It could be teaching people how to do their lab kit. I mean, what are the questions that keep coming in over and over and over that inundate you or inundate your staff or what are the questions that you, you know, somebody's going to have? And you can basically nip those questions in the bud by creating automated content. So, you know, just to your point, Dr. Osborne, one of the things that we did is we, even though we review how to do your lab test kits with you in the office, when somebody comes in, they still forget because there's just so much information that's new to them. They've never done this before. So we created a video, and I learned this from you, that when they come in, the first email that they get from us is a welcome email. Then they get a survey email. And then we already know that the next step for them is to do their lab test kits. So we send them a link to where they can go to get More information on how to do their lab test kits. And if they have additional questions, then they can ask us. And that's eliminated, you know, 99% of the questions that come along with that. So if there's something that you're repeating over and over again, a simple thing for you to do is write those questions down and then maybe do a video on them or create an FAQ that you can have on your website and make sure you're sending that to people so they're not having to go on your website and search for it. They've got it in their inbox and you can automate that entire process and it just creates so much efficiency. You don't have to miss anything. The computer never takes a day off, right? The software doesn't take a day off. It does everything you need it to do when you needed to do it. Doesn't complain, right. It doesn't need health insurance benefits or any of those things. And it gets the job done. So think about that process and that efficiency that you can create, especially as you go virtual, because you're not going to have somebody always there. The systems can always be in place in order for you to execute. And I love how you have a hybrid model where it's not just a recording, you're there live so that you can answer people's more pertinent questions. Because there's that personalization because people are still looking for that, right? I think there's a fine line between automation and personalization. And the more, the more balanced we can keep those things, I think the better user experience we can get as well, so that people are getting their questions answered. You're able to make sure that they understand the material and the content. But then you're also being smart and you're leveraging your time and you could be using that time to do other things and help more people and even create more content if you wanted to.

Working on the business versus working in it is another big area that a lot of entrepreneurs and practices forget about. You get so busy, wrapped up in the day to day minutiae of your job, which is to treat and see patients or clients, that you never have time to improve your systems. And if you had the time to improve your systems, you could actually shave hours off of every week and have more time to do things and keep your life more balanced. For us, the webinar, we do three different webinars. For ongoing client education, we do a label reading webinar, we do a gluten education webinar. We do a food allergy and food sensitivity education webinar. And so that's three hours of appointments that I don't have to have with every single new client that comes through the doors. Now multiply that times 400 people a year and that's how many hours of time that you save that you have time to do something else with. And for us, it's always the strategy is always, how can we implement or improve our current customer service? Like, what is it that our customers wish that we did better? Like, this is something else that I think in this time, like so many people are driving to the online world and that's a mistake in this sense. They're driving to the online world sometimes for the wrong reason, to get away from people. Remember, we're in the business of serving people. So if your intention is to get away from human interaction, like and just have Internet interaction that has less accountability for you, you, it's the wrong move to make. You're not making the move from a place of the heart, you're making the move from a place of selfishness where you just don't want to be around people. Now you may be an introvert, you may not like to be around people as much and that's okay too. I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with that. However, remember, we are in the business of serving humanity. And so to better serve humanity, we have to ask the question, how can we better serve you? So asking your humans, right, asking the people that come to see you in your practice how you're doing. You mentioned survey. Yes, you should be surveying your office. How are we doing? How are we adding up? What services are we not offering that you wish we would offer? What things did you walk away with, with big question marks about that we weren't clear enough or concise enough with? You should constantly, constantly be trying to improve your communication skills with your clients and patients and your machine, I say your machine, your office is your machine. The cogs should turn smoothly like a well oiled engineered machine, because those are the things that keep you sane, those are the things that deliver the information in a concise way and in a clear way and in a predictable way. So that not only can you predict the outcomes of your customer experience and journey, right? Which is very, very important if you're trying to figure out what your return on investments are, if you're driving Facebook ads or if you're driving YouTube ads or whatever it might be. If you want to know what your ROI is, you have to really define how well your machine spins. Because if your machine is clunky and it's got rust in the cogs, then that one person that came from a Facebook ad who didn't get treated very well because your machine sucked, so now they go away with a bad taste in their mouth and they don't refer anyone. Well, okay, let's talk about ROI for a minute. Let's say it cost you $10 a lead. Just throw that out there as a number. It's nice and round. So that $10 that you spent to get that person in your office that turned into a disgruntled patient who then left a bad review on Google that cost you more than $10. Now that's costing you, you know, it's costing you sleepless nights. It's costing you. What the hell do I do about that bad review, how to respond to it? Do I need to get an attorney? You know, do I get Google to try to shut it down? Like, all those things are going through your head now because you didn't have your stuff dialed in well enough to create an expected result or outcome. It's very important that you think about your patient's journey and that you try to create a journey that's predictably pleasant, even if you can't guarantee the health outcome, because none of us can. Like, we don't predict the future in that way. You all know that. But you can predict that they're always going to get good care, that they're always going to be attended to, that their emails are going to get answered in a timely fashion, that they are going to have what they need, that they're going to have clear communication from your office about what they should take, how much to take, when to take it, whether it's with food, whether it's not with food, whether there are any side effects with it, whether they should follow up with their family practitioner. Like all the millions of questions that you field on a daily basis, you should have a machine and as much as possible, automated with a personal touch, so that you never miss the experience of making your patient's journey a better experience. Because by doing that, even if they don't get better, they're going to appreciate all that effort that you gone through and still leave you a positive review. And they're still going to refer people because they know that you've taken the time and you generally care enough about them to have taken the time, the efforts, the resources, and to spend the money to put that into their experience in your office. And if you're not thinking about those things because you're so busy over here trying to see your clients and patients on a daily basis. Then you're going to get stuck in your business. You're going to hit a plateau or a wall where growth ceases and complaints go up. It's what we call growing pains. Growing pains 101 is when you're so busy doing the business because your business has gotten successful that things are falling through the cracks now because you don't have enough time to create the care and the service that you've created the demand for, then your business begins to implode and fail. So when you're looking at this online piece and you're trying to go into this online world, these are the things that you need to be thinking about. And the best advice I could give you would be think about your patient's intimate journey. But don't just think about what it is. Think about what you would want it to be if it were you and you were sick. But also ask your patients how they want their experience to go. Right? And so you take all three areas of that information and you apply it and you create an automation system and you create a training within your team so that you can predictably guarantee that the outcome for that person is going to be pleasant most of the time. You can't please everyone most of the time. Right? And so then now, when you have that infrastructure in place, now you can get a real read on your ROI See session. I've never advertised like, I don't spend money on advertising. I'm not a big believer in it. And it's not to say that you can't do it and be successful at doing it it because there are a lot of you out there that are doing it. But I could never get right with it. And there was one reason why I could never get a true ROI when I was sending that information out there without having a system in place to send them back to. So I've spent 10 years building a system that I knew would complete a patient journey that was guaranteeing a predictable outcome. Before I ever spent a dime on driving ad traffic, it took me a lot longer to create the system simply because there wasn't a system already created. Right. And I just wanted to continue to refine it. Today I do spend money on ad traffic. And so I know that when I spend 30 cents to get a lead, which is about what we pay, 30 cents a lead through Facebook traffic, that I can predict that customer journey not only through my practice. But I can predict that customer journey through gluten free society, which is where we initially engage them, because we engage them on the level of diet change. That's the way my system works is we engage them on the level of diet change, we take them through a journey that's reproducible, predictable, we know how much we're going to make, we know what our ROI is going to be on that 30 cent lead because we have a 30, a 60, a 90 day, a six month out, a 12 month out. This is what we make per lead that we gain from ad traffic because we have the systems in place to be able to properly track it. And we're not just saying, well, we're profitable this month. I guess that means it's working. Like to me, if I'm going to spend the money, I want to make sure that it's absolutely working. And so my point is all these things that I'm talking about doing, there's technology that exists that allow you to put these things in place so that you can accurately track your roi. Because look, I had a conversation with one of my clients the other day. He was advertising in the Yellow pages. Now think about that for a minute. This Guy was spending $1,700 a month to be in the Yellow Pages, which nobody opens and reads, right? I mean the people that open the yellow pages and this is not an affront to the elderly, but they're Medicare patients, they're people that are looking for a doctor that takes their insurance. Look, if you're stuck in the insurance model in a functional medicine practice, I feel sorry for you. Not because you're not noble in trying to help somebody by letting them use their insurance, but because there's no traction that you'll ever get when you allow a third party to dictate what care and what services that you can deliver. And you allow a third party to dictate take the value of who you are and the value that you represent to that patient. When you're stuck in that model, what you're really stuck in is a model of devaluation. You devalue yourself and you let some other third party apply a fixed value to what your services are. And that's a mistake. I don't care who you are. If you're in that insurance model and you're allowing other people to collectively tell you what you're worth, you're never going to achieve the level of success that you're after after. So anyway, you know this guy was advertising in the Yellow Pages and he was spending seventeen hundred dollars a month. I'm like, why are you doing that? He's like, and he's stuck in a Medicare practice, so it's like he needs a chiropractor. So he's getting like what, 17 or $23 for an adjustment. Any nutritional care, any exam he does, any X ray that he does, he doesn't get paid for. So he's doing it all for free. Again, he's stuck in a system where they affix a value to his service that is lower than what the actual value of his service is. And he's paying money every month to attract more of those types of people. Like, it's a bad model. And that's what I mean. If you're going to spend money on advertising, you should know who your avatar is. Like, who is the person that you're trying to attract? For me, it's a 60 plus year old female with autoimmune disease whose body started to fall apart around decade number five, right? And so as their body fell apart and they went to five or six or seven other specialists and expert doctors have a handful of diagnoses and now they're so fed up and frustrated with the medical model that makes them prime and ready for somebody like me. Because before they go through all those things, we know and we can reliably predict that they will not comply if they haven't gone through that mindset. Not my office, they won't. Now maybe your office is a little bit different. There are different strategies and different offices have different avatars. But my avatar will not fully comply. We won't get those 90% compliance rates if we're taking on people who haven't gone through that gambit of pain. In essence, they learn just like you learn in your journey, they learn in their journey of pain and disappointment and bad doctors that that system sucks and it doesn't work. And so now they're ready to fully embrace something else. And we are that something else. So that's kind of think about your advertising as who's your avatar? So that you can set up your message to accommodate what's in the mind of that person that you're trying to attract. Because a customer is not a customer. Remember that if you're trying to get a customer, like I can send you 100 customers really cheaply, right? 100 very poorly qualified customers, which equals 100 wasted hours of your time and 100 hours of frustration, right? And that's 100 hours that we didn't have people who would comply in your office. So it really cost you more than what you think it cost you, right? It's the time acquisition cost, right? So you lose out because you've wasted time on people who weren't ready to comply. So your advertising should be honed into your avatar. You should know who your avatar is. If you don't get with mentor like Satch and he can help you figure that part out, dial that thing in, get your system set up so that it reliably and predictably can generate leads. Right? At a certain fixed cost with a known outcome. And even if those people don't become your patients, those people will become your customers. Right? So like gluten free society in and of itself is a multimillion dollar business because it's not dependent on my office. We draw leads to that funnel. That funnel then educates and serves millions of people every year. And then those people that it serves very, very well on a very high level that want to engage in a deeper conversation are now funneled into the practice. They now have the opportunity to know who we are and know what we do. And so then that prompts them to want to pick up the phone and call and say, hey, I love your book, I love your product, I love your message. I'm still struggling a little bit and I think I need a deeper dive. Like to me, I don't ever have to advertise again because I have a funnel that I can get 30 cents a lead and profit off those leads and it feeds my practice all day long. So that's where I think anyone who's listening should think about where they're pivoting, whether you're in a brick and mortar or whether you're in kind of the transition or whether you're already online. Remember that you have tiers of service, okay? And the way I want you to think about this is tiers of service are, okay, you have one tier of service which is free, and it's still a tier of service because you're serving, you're serving with your heart and you're giving away information that if any intelligent person were to actually take it and apply, it would alter their life in such a meaningful way, right. That literally you could save their life just with that. Tier one, right? And that's free. So there's tier one is free service. Tier two is what in the industry, what they call low barrier offers. Low barrier offers, what does that mean? That means maybe you sell supplements, maybe you sell a digital ebook, maybe you sell a membership to like A masterclass, like a 10 hour masterclass that you're working on. Because that's what a lot of these practitioners are working on. It's what a lot of people are doing. Excuse me, doing so, but it's a lower barrier of entry, meaning they can buy your supplement for $30 or $40, and it doesn't cost them thousands of dollars to come in as a client. They can try your product with your free information. So you're giving them two tiers of service at a lower cost value, but you're making back the money that you spent to get them in your funnel as a lead, Right? So tier one and tier two are designed to be free and then monetized to a certain extent. And if you deliver a high enough of a value of a service, then that brings them to the ultimate tier of service. What is that? It's working one on one with you as a practitioner. Your ultimate service, that's what costs the most, Right? And if you've positioned your pricing properly, and this is, you know, another conversation we could have if we have time, but pricing matters. If you are selling yourself at low rates because you have either a value proposition problem in your brain, right, or you're not properly positioned, your pricing, you can actually hurt yourself more than help them. Like a lot of you are noble and you just want to save people money. And I get it, I was there, Look, I was there in practice, struggling, you know, almost 20 years ago, trying to give away services to people. And the opposite of what I thought would happen would happen, meaning I gave the service away. They didn't actually apply the information because they didn't attach any value to the information they were receiving. So they just poo pooed on it and never applied it. And so they never got better. And when they didn't get better and they didn't refer and people that asked them, hey, aren't you seeing Dr. Osborne? And you're not getting better? Maybe he's not a very good doctor, right? So you actually end up hurting yourself by not having proper valuation in your practice. So again, tier one is free. If you want to give things away, create content, and that can be free all day long. And you can fulfill your chivalry inside your heart. Like that thing that drives you to just be helpful to people that brought you into medicine in the first place, that you said you have a calling to help people. And whether you get paid or not, that's what that first tier is. And if you're passionate about helping people, then get off your Ass and get to work and create content. Like, the biggest struggle that the people that I coach, the biggest struggle they have is they don't create enough content to generate any interest or to generate any momentum. And that's what you have to create. Create the content. But think about how, when you're creating the content, how you can repurpose the content to your existing clientele and to your existing customer base so you're not just creating new content all the time, that you can create some content and repurpose it, reutilize it, and, and use it over and over and over again. So you've got three tiers of service I'm backing up again, and one's free and one is low barrier entry, and then the third is you, right? And so again, you position your price at a level that matches your value is very, very important. And that's how you can earn a diversified living through brick and mortar, but also through the digital world, right? Where you have predictable revenue that's coming in online from online sales, so that if Covid ever shuts down your practice again, you have predictable revenue to take care of yourself, to take care of your, and to continue to take care of people who need your help. Because those people, there's millions of people that come to us every month, need our help now more than ever. And if I didn't have that as a business model, who would I be helping if I had to shut my doors? Those 400 people a year that couldn't come in are now gone. And so it's crickets, right? And the best message to an empty stadium goes unheard. So you want, again, if you want to diversify your practice, you want a business model that allows that diversification. What I've just done in probably 20 minutes of jabbering, is just kind of given you a 10,000 foot overview. The devil's in the details, but that's kind of the 10,000 foot overview of what you want to be thinking about.

No, I love that. And I can see how it lights you up when you talk about it. You're just so passionate about helping practitioners reach higher levels of success that, you know, we're all capable of, you know, and, and both of us as coaches. One of the things that I can at least speak for myself that frustrates me is when I see someone with so much potential just getting in their own way. So sometimes we just have to get out of our own way, speak what's in our hearts. And I want to make sure that everyone understands that when Dr. Osborne first launched his programs, they weren't perfect. When I first launched my program, they weren't perfect. And it's the commitment to making them better over time that is less intimidating. So don't feel like it's got to be perfect before you launch anything. Things will break, things will need tweaking, things will need tuning. You just have to commit to that. Kaizen, we call it, which is that constant evolution of your process and product. And just to go back to something really important that you said, which is we can guarantee outcomes, but we can definitely guarantee service. We can guarantee that someone has an amazing user experience as they go through our program, and we can check in on them. As you're transitioning and going into a more virtual type of practice, realize that these tools weren't built overnight. Dr. Osborne, he built some of them in the middle of the night, but he didn't build them overnight. And neither did I, and neither did anyone else. You know, if you look at other practitioners or other people, they, you know, they've been at it for quite some time. So nobody's expecting anyone to become an overnight success, but you've got to put in the work and nobody else can do it for you. And I think that this is certainly the time that we all have, like, you know, where if you were in a brick and mortar and you're forced to kind of shut your doors for the moment just because of certain laws that are in place. I know for us, like, our physical brick and mortar is closed right now, but all of our appointments have migrated online, so we haven't missed a single appointment during this whole transition. Dr. Osborne was telling me the same thing earlier. He haven't missed. You've only missed. I think you said just one appointment, right? This entire time.

We haven't missed any. We just. We had one in person. Our doors are still open.

Yeah. So there you go.

Everybody wants the digital, so we've offered it.

Yeah. So there you go. So when you have these systems in place. My apologies, I misunderstood. So when you have these systems in place, then your business is corona proof, Right? It's pandemic proof. Maybe that's the next summit. Pandemic proof, your practice. But there's so much to be said for that. And you know, Doc, you and I could go on. I know there's so much fire in you. There's so much that you want to share, and that's one of the reasons you host an amazing event that I've attended every single year, except one when I was in India for a wedding. But it's an event that I bring my team to. It's an event that I encourage my. Even the people that I mentor, I encourage them to come to your event. You want to tell us a little bit more about that, where people can learn more about it?

Yeah. So every year, this is our eighth year, the Dream Practice Functional Medicine Success Summit. And it's in October this year, October 16th through 18th, it's. If provided Corona doesn't come back in October, we may have to be online for it too, I don't know. But right now, as it stands, yes, it's scheduled. We've got an amazing lineup of speakers. One of the things that makes our event very unique is that we really do talk about the business of building your business, because I believe very, very passionately that there are a number of great educational platforms that are already out there delivering super knowledge to practitioners to be able to be better functional medicine docs and coaches, et cetera, etc. But I don't believe that there are a ton of business resources available. This was a passion project of mine. I go back to what I said earlier when I didn't have really a mentor in functional medicine that I could go say, hey, you've already invented this wheel. Help me kind of recreate that wheel. So what I try to do every year is bring different experts, different, not only experts in business, because like you said, we mix. We actually mix. We've got people that come in from different arenas of business, not just functional medicine, because they have something of value to add to the table. They have different insights and different perspectives. So we always have guest speakers that come in from that, but we also have guest speakers that come in from practice perspective, like they're successful practitioners like yourself, right. And like Dr. Dan Pompa, who's going to be there this year. And right now, it's not official yet. I'm courting. I'm not going to say his name because I'm courting him right now. I'm trying to get him to come speak, but he's a very, very successful practitioner with four practices. He built four practices.

So.

So we've got, you know, the people that we try to attract are already successful and we try to get them to give us like the biggest pearls, like the biggest moments of success, the biggest things that they've done that have helped them achieve, you know, kind of the level of success that they're at. Because at the end of the day, when you go home on Monday from this event, we really want you to be able to hit the ground running and start applying some of these very, very, I'll say, applicable pearls action steps that you can take to really expand and grow your practice and create a practice that is more along what you dreamed about when you got into this career field. None of us dreamed about having to figure out how to run a business. I'm sure maybe some of us did, but most of us, when we went into school, we didn't think, oh, gosh, I can't wait until I have to figure out how to, you know, like, close the books out at the end of the year and talk to my accountant. Like, those things are not the fun things, but they're important things. And so what we try to do is bring in the people who have mastered those areas and mastered those different arenas and mastered marketing and advertising and the business elements to basically to fast forward and fast track functional medicine. I truly believe functional medicine is the solution to our broken model. I truly believe the passion of practitioners is the fix to our broken model. But I also believe that if functional medicine practitioners can't get their business ducks lined up, then we'll never get this rocket ship off the ground. It's just not going to happen. We're too diverse. We're too different. We don't have an organization like the AMA where all the money is. We don't have a patent on an ICD9 code book where we have millions of dollars of revenue coming in that we can just blow on advertising everything else. We don't have those advantages. So what we have to do as individual practitioners is we have to take ownership. Just like you ask your patients to take ownership of their health and to follow your guidance in doing it. We ask practitioners to take ownership of their business skills and put the blame where the blame belongs. If you're bad at business and you're not achieving the success that you want, then you have to come to the Dream Practice event so that you can start getting good at business. And we encourage all of your listeners to attend that event. And also when your event launches, I encourage everybody to get to the live one. Because there's just something about a live event that's magical. Being able to hug somebody, shake their hand, like go into a room and have a conversation with them, have dinner with them. Like, that's just magical. And you should be doing. If you're in business, you should be doing as much networking as you can. So come to my event, but go to other events too.

I love that. Well, you know, Doc, thank you so much. Thanks for your leadership. Thanks for your mentorship. Thanks for your friendship. And I just love that we can have this amazing conversation. Thankfully, technology is working, and it allows us to do this in the face of everything that's going on. And I really, truly appreciate you. And thank you again for being with us.

Well, you're welcome. And likewise. Right back at you, man. I love you.

Thank you. I love you, too. And for those of you that want more information, there's a button right below this. Click on that, and I will see you at Dr. Osborne's event. And. And you know, stay tuned. We've got some more amazing information coming up. And once again, Doc, thank you so much.