EP129: Timeless Practice and Personal Growth Concepts for Functional Medicine Practitioners

Hey Sachin, and welcome to the Perfect Practice Podcast. It's my mission to use this podcast as a platform to help holistic, heart centered practitioners transform the world. I think we can all agree that the world needs more of what we have to offer now than ever before. And I want to take all the information and all the knowledge and experience that I've gained over the years and leverage the community and the contacts and the mentors that I've had over the years and and share some of the most valuable nuggets that I've picked up over those years. I also want to bring special guests on so that they can share their valuable wisdom and knowledge with you as well. Each episode is going to be packed with valuable nuggets of information to help you grow both personally and professionally, all while moving you towards more impact and more freedom. I'm excited that you're here. I'm excited that you want to grow and learn to. So let's jump right in. Hey everyone. I am so excited for our next speaker. He's graced the stage many, many times in our community and that's because he's my personal mentor. In fact, Dr. Peter Osborne, who you're going to hear from, is the first person I actually cut a check to and said, help me. I met him in California at a conference he was hosting called Market Functional Medicine. And the way I actually ended up at that event was because I downloaded a lead magnet ebook that he created on how to build your practice. And as a result of that, I got on his mailing list and came to learn about the upcoming events that he was hosting and ended up going to one in California. And that event literally changed my life. There was probably a few hundred practitioners that were there and it was wonderful to hear somebody who was a few years ahead of where I wanted to be, so open and willing to share his knowledge and his wisdom and literally holding nothing back. And I still remember this pink shirt that I was wearing. For whatever reason, that shirt just keeps popping up in my head as I'm visualizing this story. And at one point Dr. Osborne asked, hey, like, who wants to go on a hot seat? And I normally wouldn't do this, but for whatever reason, I felt this calling inside of me to raise my hand and, and I went up there on this hot seat and he gave me some wonderful advice that I immediately applied and it made an instant difference in my practice. And so it's with great amounts of gratitude and with so many blessings that he's provided to me and indirectly, you May not realize it. To all of you, you know, this event probably wouldn't even be happening right now if it wasn't for the lessons that he taught me. So without further ado, welcome. Dr. Osborne. Thanks for joining us today.

Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. Happy to share.

Yeah. You've always been such a wealth of knowledge and in so many ways. So for me personally, I want to thank you for being such a great father. I want to thank you for being a role model husband, a practitioner, a clinician, and an entrepreneur. This event is really about the entrepreneurship, you know, approach to, you know, running a functional medicine practice. And the reality of, hey, this is a business, and we have to make sure that we are fulfilling the needs that our business actually has. And as practitioners, you know, early on in our careers, it's. It's, of course, very important to always have a focus on our clinical outcomes, but we can't have clinical outcomes if we don't have business outcomes. So the two are very dependent on each other. When I started to get to know you, one of the things that I realized is not only how great you were and how smart you were as an entrepreneur, but how absolutely brilliant you are as a clinician. And I was actually so, so impressed by your knowledge and your training and really your passion to keep learning. So I'd love to start off by asking you, where does that drive and passion come from? Because been doing this for decades now, and for those of us who are just starting out, sometimes we do something for a few weeks and we feel tired, or we do something for a few months or even a few years, and we get tired or we feel exhausted. So how have you, A, found that passion that you can keep tapping into, and B, how have you maintained longevity in doing this all these years?

Man, those are good questions. So the passion. I don't think I did anything to find the passion. I think the passion found me, honestly, and I think that's true for many functional practitioners. A lot of them come through it because they were sick and they had to find a different way to get better. Not me so much, Although I have used functional medicine to get better for mold, as we've talked about before. But for me, the passion was in the lack of knowledge and the lack of care and the lack of empathy and the lack of discernment that I saw in medicine. Because when I went through school, it was, you know, chiropractic training. Right. Which is pretty much root cause at its. At its core, I Would say the original functional medicine, like the OG Functional medicine is chiropractic, right? People don't realize that, but Jeffrey Bland got his start teaching in chiropractic schools before he became the guru that everybody knows of him today. So. So my exposure to medical environments, because when I was in school, I got to go to the VA hospital and do rotations and in different types of expert, you know, like rheumatology, neurology, orthopedics, family practice. I worked in a family practice for two months, did all the exams for the doctor there. Like, they didn't even see their own patients, right? And so, like, I was just blessed to have that kind of training in when I was going through my chiropractic schooling. And so when I got to see both worlds, like, I got to see the chiropractic world and then I got to see, you know, the actual real medical world, it was like there was no jealousy at all of the medical world. You know, like, sometimes chiropractors have that. That kind of, I wish I was a medical doctor kind of slant or whatnot. I never felt that way because going into medicine, it was like, these guys are really one. They're inadequate. They don't really. Most of the. At least the ones I experienced didn't have empathy, didn't care too terribly much for their patients, didn't spend the time with their patients, ran businesses, but didn't run what their businesses should have been about. And I love what you said a minute ago, which is functional medicine is very unique in that you first have to be a great clinician. That in itself takes a lifetime of practice and learning. But you also have to be a great business person because hospitals aren't going to send your patients. Doctors are typically not going to refer your patients, not when you're new anyway. They're not going to refer you a ton of patients. And so you have to understand business, but you also have to. It's like two businesses, right, merged into one, in a sense, two very complex businesses. Because entrepreneurship's not for everyone and functional medicine is not for everyone. I would say the passion for me came from seeing the inadequacies while being trained in the adequacies and saying there's this huge gap because 99% of patients will see traditional doctor, but Only less than 1% of the population actually will see a functional practitioner. So let's make that different. Let's change that outcome so that more people will spread this and we can help more people. So I was just really passionate about Helping people. And I think if you're not that way, you should quit. Like, you should just hit the end button right now and just leave. Because honestly, the way that you're going to be successful is if you love people and you have great empathy and great concern and that you care and that you're going to do what it takes, which means you're going to study on the weekends. It means you're going to read extra. It means you're going to spend more than a 20 minute allotted appointment with a person if they start crying. And you need that time to spend with them, to help them. Like that's what it means. You have to care enough about the job and enough about the people that you're, that you're promising to help. And it's not just about the money. You know, one of my mentors taught me, you know, help the people and the money will follow, but don't go for the money. If you go for the money, then, you know, then you're a shell and you'll never be happy and you'll always be looking for what you're missing. So for me, the passion was already there. And I think most of you probably watching this, if you are into functional medicine, you're probably already super passionate.

Yeah, that's so important. And I just want to emphasize what you just said, the frustration that you felt. I think many of us can agree. I know there's medical doctors that are watching this, chiropractors, naturopaths across the board. I think that's the general sentiment of many of the people that we work with, at least because they see the opportunity to be of greater value to people. And they see that if this was their parent or their child or someone that they loved and cared about, that there's so much more that they could offer that person. And when we know better, we do better. So I know you and I are in agreement that people are doing their best with the information that they have. And that's unfortunate because this is not part of our core curriculum and our core training. Right. So even a lot of the things that I've learned over the years I picked up outside of school. And so it's important for us to be constantly evolving our skillset and learning new things so that we can be of value. And our customers these days, our clients and our patients, they're learning at lightning speed. So we've got to keep up with them as well and, and make sure that when they ask us, have you read this book or have you listened to this podcast or do you know about this? We don't have to know everything, but we should know what's trending so that we can speak intelligently about it. Because our clients are learning at light speed these days.

Yeah, no doubt. I mean, it can be very challenging trying to keep up with the literature and today with the Internet. And now it's not even just the Internet where you do a search, but it's like you can go listen to world class doctors who run some of the most successful practices in the world, talk clinician speak, right? I mean, you could spend five hours in a day just learning and absorbing information from others who may have a different expertise than you that, you know, bring you to closer to a cutting edge of other topics. So it's like your patients have the same access to those interviews as you do. So you've got to put time in your schedule, you've got to dedicate time in your schedule for study. Because if you don't, you know, doctor means teacher, right? To be a teacher, you have to be a perpetual student. One thing I learned in college wasn't what I learned in college, it was I learned how to learn. And I think if everybody walks away with, with the, with the knowledge that you will never be the end all, be all of the knowledge. You have to be open and humble to understanding that we don't know what we don't know. And you have to be willing to dedicate time to encompassing more knowledge so that you can help more people. And if you don't know everything, that's still okay. Like, don't, don't take that as oh, no, I don't know enough. Take that as oh, I need to always continue to learn more. And, and I'll grow in my practice and I'll grow better at, with age as wisdom and experience kind of season me, right? So, so, you know, I'm a better doctor today than I was two years ago, than I was ten years ago, right? And I'll be a better doctor next year than I am right now because of that attitude.

Yeah, it reminds me of Jim Rohn. He talks about, you know, how he continues to develop his and sharpen his sword, right? And so as clinicians, we've got to keep doing that. And man, there's so many rabbit holes that I've gone down in the last few years in and of themselves, right? So becoming a breathwork facilitator, going down the whole rabbit hole of how to breathe correctly and I'm like, oh my God, how come nobody's ever talked about this. How come very few people, even in our profession, are bringing up how people breathe? And it's so foundational. So we're always learning new things. We're always picking up new skills. What I'm curious about is being as busy as you are. How do you fit that into your schedule? Are you listening to podcasts? Are you listening to audio books? Are you setting aside time each day to read or to read the literature? What's your process like?

Let me back up just a little bit, because, number one, I would say get really good at something first right? Before you try to get really great at everything. You know the old trade, the old saying that jack of all trades, master of one. Sometimes people say master of none, but it's actually jack of all trades, master of one. Like, I'm the master of gluten. Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, that's what I'm known for. That's what if people out there, whoever heard of me, probably know that I know a lot about gluten, right? Because I mastered that trade first. That was the biggest for me. The biggest change in my clinical life was understanding that topic better than anyone else so that I could apply it clinically better than anyone else, so that I could have better outcomes, so that I could have better referrals, so that I could have more business, right? And then that became perpetual, right? So I mastered that. And now, from one mastery, we can broaden our horizons. So how I broaden my horizons is my week is set up in such a way where everything is organized and there are time blocks for everything.

So.

So, like, my clinical schedule is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. So those three days, I'm not trying to study extra, I'm not trying to do more. But then I have Thursdays and Fridays completely free of my practice, so that I have time blocks dedicated to research, time blocks dedicated to writing, time blocks dedicated to doing interviews, time blocks dedicated to running or thinking about my business, and even time blocks for my family, time blocks to. To be at peace, for meditation, for exercise. So it boils down to just being organized and being. Having intent, thinking about what it is that you want. So many people want to be successful, but they don't think about what needs to happen in order for that success to happen. And I can promise you, organization has to be a big, big part of your thought process, because if it's not, there's too many rabbit holes, there's too many distractions, there's too many shiny objects that you can get Pulled into. And another mentor of mine, you might know him, Craig Valentine. If, I don't know if your audience. Craig's a great guy. Craig, he used to say, stop it. You know, he would cuss at you. He would just say, stop it. He would be like, you're going in too many directions. Just stop. Think about the direction you need to be going. What is the one thing that you can do today that serves your clientele that will increase your revenue? Focus on that. Because otherwise everything else is just a distraction.

Right?

If you're, if you're wanting to learn about this thing over here, but it's not really a necessity for you to be a great practitioner today, right? But, but by doing that, you're ignoring the major systems problem in your office or you're ignoring the major technology problem, you know, that you have with delivery or emails or whatever it might be. If you're ignoring the things that will grow your business for, for the chase of the knowledge that may not be necessity, a necessity today in your, in your, in your practice, then you're going to be continually chasing success and being unsuccessful at it. So you've got to find the needle movers. You have to identify those things first and foremost and then structure your day around those priorities. Because prioritizing what you do is just as important as taking action.

Wow, that's really good advice. And as you're saying that I'm thinking of all the things that I'm avoiding and going down rabbit holes and getting distracted and feeling like I'm doing something. This is a trap that I want to say that I fall into. And I think as humans, we all probably fall into them. If we don't have systems or somebody cracking the whip and telling us to get our act together, it's easy for us to go down a rabbit hole and feel like we're doing something productive and beneficial because certainly it's, it's beneficial to know more knowledge, but it may not be the exact thing that our business needs right now. And we almost have to view our business as its own separate entity, like a plant that has needs. And if we ignore those needs and eventually the plant starts to wilt and then eventually it dies. So I love that framework that, that context that you provided because it's easy for, for really anyone to be distracted by a whole bunch of different shiny objects, right? And so stop. Pay attention to what those shiny objects are, be aware of them, but then really focus in. And what I'm hearing you say is really focus in on what's that thing that's going to move the needle for you. I know Brian Tracy calls us eating the frog. Right. It's probably the thing that we're avoiding doing the most that is going to make the biggest difference for us. And once we get that behind us, then of course there's going to be other things that pop up. But we can, we can see an immediate benefit from, from unbreaking whatever is broken in our business.

Yeah. And I would say too, because I know a lot of the people watching, many are doctors, many are health coaches. And I, I see the trend over the years of, of professionals seeking knowledge to get certifications, to get additional degrees. You don't need all that. Those are shiny objects. And I know some of you may be thinking, but I need that degree for credibility or I need that certification for more credibility. I can promise you, if you're getting people better consistently, that is your credibility. Nobody's ever looked at my initials, frankly, except for assholes. I'll just be frank and challenge them or question them. I don't even practice with a DC license. I practice with a pastoral license. Right. So, so like my, my doctorate of chiropractic. I don't, I don't use that. I keep it. I still am. Right. I've gone through that. But I don't like, I use what's called a pastoral license to actually see clients. And so nobody ever says, hey, you're not qualified because of that. And I don't need to seek additional credentialing or additional letters behind my name and be distracted by doing that because I've seen doctors and I've seen healthcare providers get stuck in this, oh, I gotta get in this three year program or this two year program. And it's such an unnecessary distraction a lot of the times. Now I'm not saying that if you feel unknowledgeable about the topics that you want to get trained in that you shouldn't get trained in them. I'm just saying don't ignore the things that will grow your business and improve your client's health by, by chasing something that may not be necessary because you believe you need more credentialing. Nobody cares about your credentials. Honestly, the ones that do, who cares? Look, we're in functional medicine. People coming to us are running away from medicine. They don't give a damn if you're a medical doctor or an osteopath. They just don't that failed them. So they're seeking a new model and you are that new model. So embrace it. And don't try to go and get criteria credentials that are of it. Right. If we want to escape that model, knowledge and wisdom is what's for sale. And so your credentials matter less than your outcomes. So focus on outcomes before you focus on degrees.

Yeah, such a good point. You know, at the end of the day, people want whatever makes them feel good. And if you've got a repertoire of helping people, which you can only build up by helping people, then that does a lot of the credentialing for you, as you said. So again, great advice. I love how you hold no punches back and you just kind of lay it into us. That's what I loved about you, because as my coach, you would just say it as it is. And the benefit of that is that there's no sugar coating and this allows us to actually, as receivers of this information, take action. Right. Without any having any ambiguity in what we should be doing. I think that there's, you know, this day and age, like knowledge is, is. Is valuable as, as we all know, however, it can be acquired from many different sources. And in fact, if you're passionate about something, you're going to learn at a faster pace than a course can probably deliver it to you at. So, you know, the credentialing may matter to you, you know, very superficially, but as Dr. Osborne says, it doesn't really matter to our clients. And I found that to be. People want to know if you can help them and if they're being referred to you or if what you're saying really resonates and lands with them. That's ultimately what they really care about.

Yeah, no doubt.

So one of the things that you mentioned is your passion about gluten. And I know we've talked about this in previous interviews that we've done. My question for you is, how do you not. And maybe this is a question for myself, I tend to get bored very easily. And so for me, it's, it's. I almost have a hard time committing to something. So how do you stay so committed to the topic of gluten? What. Or really any topic in general, like, what is it that that drives you? Because again, there's so many different things that we can learn about. But what is it that makes you passionate about that one topic and what makes you capable of staying in that lane?

Outcomes. There's no diet that helps people more than the gluten free diet done properly. And you can ask that of any practitioner and they'll probably give you a very similar answer. Now, they may Answer you and say, well, keto, but keto is a gluten free diet. Carnivore is a gluten free diet. Look at all the diets that are popularized post the gluten free boom. And they're all gluten free diets with a twist, right? So it's outcomes I can stay passionate about. Great outcomes. Because great outcomes pays the bills, right? It builds your own self esteem as a practitioner. If you're not getting good outcomes, you lose. You know, self esteem is very important. Ego is very important in this work. Because if you're not helping people, then that shows up in your body language, right? That shows up in your practice, that shows up with your employees or your team members who see people coming in and not getting better. Like it's, it's harder for them to speak of, of how awesome you are to potential customers if they don't see outcomes that are life changing. So for me, staying passionate about something that works so well is very easy to do. Now, one of the other aspects to staying passionate about something without getting bored is to build in your lessons with automation. So from a business perspective, like how did I not just get so sick and tired of talking about gluten hour after hour after hour all day long in the clinic? I automated the process. And so this is, this comes back to, instead of chasing another degree, I thought about my business and said, how can I shave 20 hours a month of talking about gluten off of my plate and still make sure that my patients are getting the education and the time and attention that they deserve? So we automated the process. We switched from a one on one meetings to webinar style meetings where we have 20 people in a webinar room and it's an hour and a half webinar and at the last five minutes I'll go on and answer questions live. So I shaved 20 hours for five minutes of questions. And that to me preserved my time to do other things and not get so bored, right? And so anytime you have mastery over a topic, you know, when you're, when you're developing mastery, you're passionate about it because as you're teaching it, you're learning it, right? So there's a, there's a phraseology that is learn, do, teach, right? So when we learn something that it psychs us in functional medicine, then we apply it in our practices and do it right. And then as we're doing it, we're teaching it to our patients and that's where mastery comes. But once you, you're past the, the teaching aspect. Teaching a long enough period of time, teaching creates boredom, right? Because it's, it's like, okay, who. This is why professors at colleges have assistance. They don't want to teach their classes. They have such a mastery. They don't want to keep talking about it. They want to go do more mastery of other things. So they bring in assistance. So what we did is we brought in technology. And I would encourage anyone listening to this, this. Anytime you can automate a process in your office, but still deliver the value of the, of the education that you're trying to give your clientele, do it. That's part one of the aspects that's made me so successful. I mean, if I hadn't had automation in my practice, I would be working six days a week, booked out six months, because I would have to be present in every of all of those different appointments. And using technology allowed me to automate me. Not, not, not me hiring somebody to try to mimic me, but me, personally, me. So I want my patients to get me. Not necessarily. I don't want them necessarily to get a, a coach or a nutritionist. Now, there's nothing wrong with the doctor hiring people to come in. That was just my preference. I wanted them to get me because I was building my name and my reputation. And I felt like it was important at the time to automate around that fundamental piece.

Piece. Yeah. There's a book that was written about Naval Ravikant and Naval talks about four levers that we can pull in our business. The first one is human capital. Right. So hiring more people. And we always know that there's challenges that can potentially come up with that. I mean, there's very positive aspects of hiring new people, but there's also challenges that can be associated with that as well. So not the. Necessarily the best, I mean, a lever to pull, but not the most leveraged lever. The second lever that we can pull is capital. Right. So people can give us money and we can capitalize a business and then give them a return on it. Not the best lever to pull either, because you're on the hook. The other one. Other two. Which are the two that I see you doing very well. One is media. Right. So you've taken this presentation that you've done perhaps dozens, if not hundreds of times, accomplish mastery in it, documented it, you know, so you've recorded it, and now you're able to replicate yourself, right. Digitally replicate yourself. You could be anywhere else in the world and you could still provide the value and then you could jump in, answer the questions that people have. So it's just as good as you giving it live. But you don't have to do that anymore. So you've leveraged media. And the second, the fourth lever, rather the second of the two good ones, is his code. And it's taking our process and codifying it, which is something that you've also done as well so that others can replicate the successful results that you're getting in your clinic. So you're pulling those levers really, really well. And it's perfect to have that conversation now because it's reflective in the work that you do and how you do it. And I love something that you mentioned about the waiting list because there's so many functional medicine practitioners, people that are, let's just call them successful for lack of better term, but have six month waiting lists or two year waiting lists and they almost wear it like a badge of honor. And I think you and I can agree that they're probably not leveraged, not pulling those levers that they could be and should be. And so people unnecessarily suffer, waiting for them to be seen and maybe they go somewhere else or maybe their health deteriorates rapidly and even further and they can't even use functional medicine to that point. So I love that you're pulling those two levers and it's benefiting not only you, but it's also more importantly benefiting your clients as well.

And I would say it benefits them more, even more. And the reason why is that by using technology, not only do they get to participate in what feels like a live question and answer session, and it is a live Q and A, but it's just a recorded first part. They get access to the replay. So, you know, like if you were doing one on one meetings with people and didn't have something else to give them, they could go home and they're going to forget, remember their brain fog, functional, functionally sick patients. Right. And so they're going to go home and forget 50% maybe of what you said in the appointment because they were overwhelmed with, you know, with the symptoms that they're coming to see you with. And so now you're allowing them to take that same information and watch it at their leisure, pause, rewind, etc. And so to me, it's an even better solution that delivers better customer service.

Yeah. And I guess it prevents them from having to go home and try to explain it to their spouse.

That. And then there's a third benefit too, which is it Saves your staff an inordinate amount of time answering questions. Part of the deal with functional medicine is it's a one on one care, right? You're trying to deliver high educational value to people so that they can spread their wings and fly away from you. Right? You're trying to fire your patients. Basically no other medical model really works with that in mind. But we all do in functional medicine because we want them to get better. So if we educate them, they can, they can fly on their own. And you know, part of that education is staff time. Right. They inundate your staff with questions and phone calls. And so if you provide, using technology, if you leverage yourself and provide an overabundance of information that they can bookmark, save, rewatch, you know, your staff can now allude to these things. Hey, you know what, that's a great question. I want you to go to minute seven in this video and let Dr. Osborne explain it to you because he can do a much better job than I can. Have a great day. And it saves them the time of having to try to explain that. And it's just, it works out better for everybody because it, you know, again, it delivers better value while simultaneously saving the one non renewable resource for you and your staff.

Yeah, and you know, you touch on something when you say staff. Many people who are starting out don't have staff, so, so it ends up being, you know, them taking the email or taking the phone call. And once you're on the phone call, then, you know, it's hard to say, hey, go watch me at minute seven. Right. So, uh, it's great to have that tool and resource available at our disposal to prevent that call or the email from happening in the first place. Um, and I love, I love how you're so able to leverage your time. And that's one of the things that we've done in our programs as well, thanks to your teachings, is, hey, we don't need to repeat ourselves over and over again. And if we've said this really well once, then, and it's exactly how we'd say it now if we were saying it live, then we can be leveraged. You could literally be, if you wanted to be having dinner with your family while the webinar is playing, or while the training is playing, and then the second half or the last portion of the training, you can come in and do the Q and A and everyone wins. Right. So there's a lot to be said about that. One of the things that you mentioned is for practitioners to stop chasing degrees and designations and additional training that it really distracts them from being really good at that one thing that they need to be a known for getting clinical outcomes. What else do you find for people who are just starting out, what else do you find keeps them stuck and prevents them from really taking meaningful action in their business?

Mostly the distractions. Besides the degrees and the diplomas and the other things, it's the distractions of things that they shouldn't be focused on. And this is especially true if you're starting out and you're new. Think of every way that you can leverage yourself as being your first priority and not an afterthought. Because what'll happen, you know, if you don't have any employees working for you, or maybe you have one or two, right, the printer breaks, right? Or you need paper or you know, your computer battery is dead or whatever it is, you know, whatever minutial things that happen during the course of a business day that shouldn't really require your attention. Like if you're the breadwinner in the practice, you shouldn't be doing jobs that you could hire somebody to do that are, you know, 15 or 20 an hour jobs in the way that you have. And at first, sometimes you do have to do that. I don't, I don't want to discredit any of you who are in the trenches working and burning, because that's what it takes initially, it does take that. And I, you know, don't fool yourself. There's a lot of work. You know, success looks great on the other side, but there's a lot of work that it takes to get there. So I don't, I don't, I don't want to say that doesn't require work, but if I could do anything differently, one of the things I would have done a lot earlier in my practice would have been to leverage myself better. And so think of your business. Part of it is we're in our business all day long and instead of thinking about our business, we're in it, we're working it, right? And so have time in your schedule where you think about your business and how you can improve it and how you can leverage yourself, because that's really what is going to save you. It's going to save you resources, financial resources, time resources, relationship resources, that you're going to save them all by leveraging yourself to the nines as much as you possibly can. And that's when I was new, that's where the website becomes an important thing, because the website is a leverage piece, Right? Because the website houses your content. Whether you're good at writing articles or you're good at creating video or, you know, whatever it is, you use your website as a hub, right? It's how people find you, but it's also where you can send people to get additional information that save you time from having to explain it. So if your patient's going to like, I'm really not sure about this particular topic, you say, look, I've got a perfect article. It's, you know, thousand words long. I want you to go read it. If you stop questions, come back and talk to me. Like, leverage yourself as much as you can. The more you spend that time leveraging yourself, leveraging your brain to serve your communities, the easier it gets, right? At first it's a lot of work because, you know, at this point we've got, I think on YouTube, like 1500 videos and like over a thousand blog posts like that took time to write. So. But the more you think about focusing on those tasks that will serve your community, that can be leveraged, the better off you're going to be. The sooner off you're going to be better. Like your business just seasonally gets better and better and better and richer and richer and richer as a result of higher service.

Yeah, I had a smile on my face when you said a thousand articles because I'm thinking those are not AI generated, boys and girls. Those are researched, written, typed up. Right? So I love your opinion on AI. What are your thoughts on it?

Don't rely on AI to give you good, reliable, informative articles. Because I tested it. I've tested a lot because to me it was a leverage piece. Right. We could leverage even more. I hire writers nowadays that are humans that do the research. But we tried it with AI and what AI was doing to us was it was spitting out false references. So we would put in very specific instructions about the article and the direction of the article and the way it wanted to go. We asked the AI to quote the references that it was using to write the article and put the footnotes in as well. And all the footnotes every time were fake. You go back to PubMed and you try to find the article that it was listing as a reference source and you couldn't find it. It didn't exist. So AI was actually artificially generated, generating fake resources. And so you got to be careful, you know, with AI, it's not, you know, maybe it will improve, maybe the next generations of it will get better and better and better. But as of right Now I would not trust A.I. remember this too. This is another good point. Your brain is your number one asset in this, in this arena it is. And outsourcing your brain and trusting an artificial source to emulate what, what you know and what you could put together, number one, it will dummify you. That's not a word, but I just made it up. It will dumify you over time because you're not using your own brain to generate your own content. And so you're not practicing and so there's a lack of practice. Number two, it could lie to you. And it's good enough that sometimes the lies look really convincing. Those references it gave me were super convincing looking, but I couldn't, when I couldn't backtrack and find them and read the articles myself, I knew this is not something that I can trust. But. But remember too, your brain is your number one resource. It is your reputation. And if you allow somebody to tarnish or damage your reputation, like, you know, business is about reputation management. And there's always going to be that say bad things about you if you're shaking things up. Like, you know how many I've had videos of people wishing I would die because of my attitude about gluten. Like, I mean, it's, I had crazy stuff sent to me because I'm shaking up the world. I'm shaking up the current thought process around gluten. AI can't do that.

Right?

Right. And if it does so in a manner that's wrong or inconsistent or isn't truthful. Right. In some way and you don't catch it because it was good enough to get past your radar, you've just destroyed your reputation. Now you have information that's out there that may not be accurate. And so it's going to poke holes in the armor of your reputation that other people, if they're trying to target you, they will, and they'll find that information and they'll dismantle your arguments using it, using your own A.I. generated content. So be careful with A.I. i mean, you can use it for certain things, but always check the work of the AI bot and always have an editing team or if you're, if you're the editor, edit it in such a way where you know there aren't errors.

Yeah. Such a good point. Like the point you bring up about developing the muscles. Right. It's like, you know, Jim Rohn says you can't have someone do your push ups for you. And so, you know, AI is moving so fast in so many different directions. And pretty soon here they're going to have automated videos that can be generated with all the B roll and everything and voiceovers. And it's like, to me that's fascinating because imagine meeting the AI version of someone and then actually meeting that person. And there are two completely different individuals. Their knowledge base is different, the way they talk is different, their articulations are different. And you're having like, it's almost like, man, I'd rather talk to the fake version of you because the real version of you is not as honed in as and has developed because you haven't built those muscles. So, you know, the one thing with writing, the one thing with copy is that yes, we can use AI potentially to help us and maybe create a framework or a blueprint to work off of. But ultimately we've got to do our own push ups. And that's really important from an ethical standpoint, but also from, you know, a reputation standpoint, as you mentioned as well.

Yeah, I've used AI a lot for framework. So we'll ask AI to give us a well thought out, basically an outline of an article that a consumer might want to read about a particular topic to give us a good outline. And then we'll hand that outline to a writer and then we'll have the writer do the research and pull the references and actually write the article that way. And sometimes I write them, I still write, I just, you know, at this time in my life, you know, I like to read and then I like to do a video and say, this is the concept, now go write it and here are the references. And then my, my writer can, can fill in the gaps. And part of it is your strength too, because I can write, but it's. Is it the best use of my time? No, not always. Sometimes. Sometimes it is if I'm enjoying it. But you have to also navigate and figure out where your skill sets are and try to leverage yourself on the playing field of where your skill sets are. I'm really good with video and ad lib, so I would rather do ad lib than spend 18 hours doing research and then having to compile and organize those thoughts in a certain way. So I'd rather get a synopsis, use video to describe my thoughts, and then have somebody translate those thoughts into the written word.

There you go, being leveraged. I love it. Smart man. I know you've got a few things that you're working on that are going to be helpful for health coaches and practitioners, practitioners in, in relationship to direct to consumer testing for gluten. I'd love for you to spend a few minutes on that and maybe we can share with people what you're up to and let them know how they can potentially use this to help their clients.

Yeah, so we're working on an affiliate program for healthcare providers to use our DNA testing services through gluten free society, which is my hub. And so, you know, if you've got clientele or patients and you want to get them genetically tested for both gluten sensitivity, Celia and celiac disease, and you're not quite sure how to read the DNA and how to look at the alleles and how to, how to kind of interpret them, that's what we do. That's part of what we offer as a service. And so we're going into a model where affiliates can order those things and be reimbursed and have that accessible for their clientele as well. We're also doing food sensitivity, lymphocyte proliferation, food sensitivity testing, which is a very accurate way to help assess what people should or shouldn't be eating. And then in that next half of the year, we're looking at launching an intracellular nutrition deficiency test that will be direct for again, for affiliates as well. So those three services, we find our core services and people say, what was the secret of your early success? It was knowing those three facts about people that led to the greatest clinical outcomes and still do today. Yet we decided to go direct to consumer, but also go direct affiliate to practitioners.

Awesome. I want to ask you one last question, and maybe you can give me your top three responses. But if you were to have to start all over again, you woke up one day and everything was gone and you had to start all over again. But the only caveat is it's in the functional medicine and wellness space. What would you, what would be your first three steps that you would do?

Number one, I'd hire you. No kidding. I mean, I would hire the person who's doing it, who's done it, who's got it figured out. I, I spent my first two years in practice eating my own ego, right? Like, like, because I thought, okay, you know, you graduate, you, you know, you're ready, you know, I know better. I'm going to go do it right now. Made a lot of mistakes, and they were very costly mistakes. You know, it didn't stop me from becoming successful. Maybe it slowed that process down, but the very first mentor I ever hired doubled my revenue the first year. And, and I think about that in the Longevity game, Right? Because, you know, if you, you think about how you save your money, how you reinvest your money back into your company or whether you invest in the market, like time is of the essence, right. The earlier you make it and the more you can put away. The, the compounded interest is a magical thing. They get you to a place where you can be so much more comfortable and then money's no longer a pressure. Right. Because I could retire today and be just fine. I don't have to keep working, but I love to work. So I can. I will continue working. But I would have hired a mentor. I would have hired somebody who knew how to do it. So that's number one for sure, hands down, is just getting somebody on my team who could help guide me away from the mistakes. I spent. Gosh, we. I invested. It was over $50,000. I invested in a nutrition supplement company very early on and without mentors, right. I had a partner. So at least the blow is somewhat financially burdened by my partner. But company was a terrible idea and it failed. It was miserable idea. We developed a supplement product line to address nutritional deficiencies caused by drugs by pharmaceuticals. Right? And we thought it was a brilliant idea. But what ended up happening was people that take drugs don't want to take supplements, and people that take supplements don't want to take drugs. I didn't know that. I didn't have that experience. I didn't. I didn't have a mentor who could have said, this product idea sucks because it doesn't solve a pain point. It solves what you believe is a pain point. But the, but the level of education that's required to get a person to take your product is too great to overcome. And so it's a bad idea. Abandon it. I. When the product was failing and we had invested all this money and we had all this product stored in our. In our clinic, and we weren't selling it. It wasn't moving. So I hired a guy, his name was Buck Risby. And it went to one of his. His seminars. And he, He's. He's still kind of a quiet guy in the supplement world. World. But he looked at me and he said, your idea is terrible. And he, like, really. He, like, just totally, like, lambasted me for such a crappy idea. And I was just like, so offended, right? Because my ego was in the way. But that lesson taught me a lot. It taught me that he was right. Obviously, my product was bad. I couldn't sell it. I couldn't get doctors to want to sell it because they didn't care about drug induced nutritional deficiencies. They were doctors. So, so it was, it was a good idea in theory, but a terrible idea in reality. And, and a mentor a lot of times can help you navigate those things. I mean, just having somebody to bounce an idea off of or, or to, to help you navigate the unknowns. Right. You don't know what you don't know. So I'd hire you, Sachin, today because you've got the best thing going. Oh, thank you. Yeah. No, and I mean that sincerely. You know, I've, I've watched you grow and, and you know, I've stepped away from, from doing that kind of consulting, but I've watch better than I ever did. I mean, you ledger, you've leveraged yourself in that arena so fantastically well that a person would have to be an idiot to not seek out your expertise if they're trying, if they're new in the game and they don't know what to do, they really would be a fool to not at least call you and look at what you have to offer.

Wow. Thank you. I think that's the greatest testimony I could have ever asked for. We should just send the interview there. I appreciate that. I received that. Humbly. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. One more thing. What would be the next thing that you do? So hire a mentor. So you have somebody who's perhaps just a little bit further up the mountain, who has a different vantage point and a different view, who's willing and happy to share because they know exactly what it feels like to be where the other individual is. I can totally agree with that. And that's why it's kind of a full circle moment here. Because you were my first mentor and I always tell people how much that changed my life. To have somebody believe in you when you didn't believe in yourself or see something in you that you couldn't see in yourself. There's so much value to that and for that I'm eternally grateful and thank you for that. But what would be the next thing? Once they have somebody by their side and in their corner, what else would you do?

It depends on what kind of practitioner. So if you are a practitioner and you're in the insurance realm, say you're a doctor and you're in that insurance world, get out of it yesterday, like leave it, walk away, of course. Position your patients ethically into the hands of other trusting doctors that, that could do a good job taking care of them. But get yourself out of the insurance model quicker, as opposed to later. The year I got out of insurance, which was probably five years too late, we tripled our revenue, and I saw half the clientele. So, you know, it's no brainer. I'm less busy, I have less employees to have to deal with. The. You know, part of my. Part of what I want is I want my employees to be happy. Like, I want my team to be happy, and I want them to be, you know, invested in our practice. I mean, in our. My practice, we give profit sharing because we want our people to do a great job and take invested interest into our company. But when you have them collecting insurance, that's a miserable undertaking. Right. It makes a person's day horrible. You know, the fight, the constant battle and then the denials and all that other nonsense like remove the third party, they have no say in your care, and you shouldn't give it to them. Move away from it, and be confident that people are looking for your service and they will pay cash for it. So that would be the second. The second thing I would have done faster. I did it, but I just. I would say I would do it that much more quickly. And then probably the third thing would be I would have. I would have leveraged myself a lot sooner and. And not only leverage myself, but I would have hired a lot sooner. So, like, you know, when I opened my practice 21 years ago, it was me and my wife, and she's a chiropractor, too, but so it was like a mom and pop, right? And we went too long without bringing in help, but we were, you know, it's that. And that's always the judgment call, right? Because you're like, can I afford it? You know, am I making enough to afford it? And so there's that doubt, and you kind of hold back and you're hoping that it's the right move. But every time I look back and say, should I hire somebody? Every time I've said to myself, I did it too late. I should have done this last year. I should have done this the year before. I'm saying it right now. I'm hiring a doctor. Look, I've been in practice 21 years clinically, and I'm just now hiring a new doctor to come in and shadow me and kind of step in more to the clinical side to free even more of my time up. So I should have done that six, seven years ago, right?

So it's.

It's leverage yourself, but then leverage yourself with people. So leverage yourself first with technology as Quick and as early out of the gates as you can and then leverage yourself with people and have confidence and faith and trust in yourself and your business. That, that it's, that hiring that person is going to exponentially increase your freedom and to be able to help think about your business, which is going to grow your business and so that that investment is going to be absolutely worth it. When you think about hiring, think about the worst case scenario, which is if I hired this person for one year, what is the actual end of the year investment that I'm making and think can I with that free time, if that freed up eight hours a day, or if that freed up eight hours a week rather, or you know, 10 hours a week of my time, how could I use that time to reinvest into making the amount of money that I'm paying that employee? So how much would that employee help me leverage myself in other ways where I could, I could make up the difference. And, and you'd be surprised at how much if you, if you, if your mind is exploding with ideas but you're frustrated and you're sitting there thinking, I got so much to do, but I have only so many hours in the day. Get to leveraging as quickly as you possibly can because I always, I always waited too long for fear of, well, I guess it was for fear of financial loss. You know, I set up a nice lifestyle for my family and that was one thing I tried never to do is once, once we were, I would say we were successful right where I felt like we were successful practice. I never wanted my family to take a down sizing in the quality of life that I'd established for them. So that was one thing that I always was real cautious about. But even looking back, they wouldn't have had to take a downsize even if I would have made quicker action.

So you know, one thing you said that I think it's important for, for us to maybe even touch on a little bit more is when you hire someone, you can hire someone part time, right? So it doesn't have to be a full time hire. For those of you that are wondering how am I going to afford this or how am I going to hire somebody, here's what I've learned and to echo what you said, Doc, is that if you can find opportunities and work on your business for those 10 plus hours a week that you've now freed up and somebody else is also working on your business and leveraging what you're putting out there in the world more effectively, I mean, sky's the limit. Right. So I think we really underestimate how helpful someone else can be when it's their job. Right. A lot of times when we're doing work, we're not doing it as an employee. And so there's a lot of potential wasted time that takes place. There's a lot of lollygagging rabbit holes that we go down. And we can hire someone who can actually be more effective than we can be because they're actually getting paid to do it. Right. As an entrepreneur, one of the interesting challenges is nobody's paying us. We're paying ourselves, if we're even paying ourselves. So we may not be as committed sometimes, unfortunately, as somebody who we're paying to get the job done. Right. Well, it's easy to give somebody else deadlines instead of giving ourselves deadlines to get things done.

And on top of that, if you hire the right one, they love their job and it was a job you hated. So, like, it gets done better than even if you were doing it because there's a passion behind it. Versus. Oh, great, I have to go do this thing again. Like, right. You know what those things are? Those of you watching you. What are those things? Like, what are those things in the. In the realm of what you have to do on a daily basis that you dread? And those are the things that you hire out first. Like, those are the things that you outsource as quickly as you possibly can.

Yeah. So our mutual friend Joe Polish talks about half versus elf. And so the hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating things, believe it or not, the things that you despise and hate doing, Somebody loves doing them and could spend their entire lifetime doing it and do it with a smile on their face. Do it faster and better than we probably could. So, yeah, you have to trust that process. That's huge.

No doubt.

Well, Doc, thank you so much for your generosity over all these years, and I just always look forward to our conversations because you keep it real, you keep it raw, you keep it inspiring and enlightening, and you give such great advice. So thank you from all of us for being here and for providing such great wisdom and really excited for what you've got coming up. I'd love to share more details when they become available with our community moving forward so people can get the right testing for their clients as well.

Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. And thank you guys for watching and tuning in. It's been great.

Awesome. Well, have a wonderful rest of your day and send my love to the family.

Will do.

Bye for now, Sa. Sam.