From Pain To Power: An Entrepreneur’s Story of Success

align your practice podcast with Dr. Cliff Fisher where your best practice and life awaits you. Are you tired of running a practice on your own? We want to come alongside you with experts to help you create your dream practice in your dream life. Here is your host.

All right, tribe. Welcome to the line your practice with Dr. Clifford, Dr. Joe brought to you by line life, where we'll give you the tools to find and create your line life. And you know, Joe, I know we're talking a little bit about it before and I know I'm a huge fan and my family is a huge fan of a Siva, and this whole month we're going to kind of talk about from soup to nuts where Seba came from what it's about and how, how it came about. And then why we should use it why it's best for our patients why it's best for the doctors why it's best for our team, because I all those people in my life use a Siva products and we're really thankful for him. So how did you receive a start? And I'm like thinking you're like in your basement like I'm in my head?

Yes, it started with as most entrepreneurial journey start, I didn't always start as a business like some people think even our own profession, like Dr. Eric with scared wasn't like, this is my dream business project, or Dr. Francis and his bonfire dream of wellness. These aren't all started as let me create a business, it's usually we're frustrated about something and we feel we want to dedicate the energy to solve it. So and as Steve Jobs said, we have to be dumb enough to believe we can solve the problem to actually engage in it. Because if we're dumb enough to think it, we may put the excessive amount of time, energy money and focus into the thing to get an outcome. But if we knew upfront, we'd never do it. That's what Steve Jobs said. So for me, it started with diversity of healthcare, with with my own father passing away in the hospital. And it was I'll tell it a really shortened version as tight as I can, because it's very, the disparity of that situation was so shocking to me as a person, that that could actually happen in modern day medicine. They were giving him an injection to prevent him from having an arrhythmia. And I literally run downstairs call my sister and asked her to look on PubMed for the drug and its side effects. And they said, well, it's causing like kidney failure in like the majority of the rats in the study. And it's going to cause you know, lack of being able to manage fluid. Well, I run upstairs, open the door, they injected it in. And it was like, I don't know if it was minutes. But it was a short period of time that it stopped his heart fluid built around his heart, and it caused the heart to suffocate and I watched him a pass from suffocating and his heart stopping right in front of my eyes. And that amount of anger and pain is such a dramatic moment that you're there while it's happening to your own family member that you love, and you're watching it go on. I got a study a month later from a research publication that stated that the purpose of that drug was merely to facilitate a nutrient, but they had to alter the mechanism of it so they could patent it. And unfortunately, it creates all these side effects. But it was a lack of iodine is what you're trying to give the patient but that's 20 cents an ounce. So they have to make it fake, patented and synthetic to make it patented, make money off it. So to see that, you know, within a month period of time, that experience created such a disparity in my mind, my heart and then I wanted to I wanted to never have that happening yet. So my dream was to someday have hospitals use nutrients instead of drugs. I was like, I gotta solve that. And about four months ago, a Siva got introduced into a hospital, I'm teaching, going to be teaching over 300 medical doctors from er to oncology, every department how to utilize Integrative Nutrition in the hospital setting. So the full circle of that there wasn't that wasn't the only that was the trigger and the lightning. But for me it was being in practice and seeing gaps and mediocrity in the delivery of nutrients, which is really what the fuel was, but the spark was the event like in most entrepreneurial journey.

So now where were you at in practice at that point? So had you How long have you been graduated?

Ah, I'm so bad with dates. It was probably 15 years ago, I was in practice. I believe I had about four or five locations. And I was in an obsession on outcome. And really, I built a clinic people think oh, you must be great and marketing great. Really. I was just a crazy clinician that couldn't sleep if people didn't get better. I wasn't this like incredible. It's just that I was loud. And I was unreal, relentless on my vision and my conviction on actual healing, but it was not really this refined market.

So in your practice, then did you do nutrients at that time?

Yeah, I did. I became a diplomat in nutrition and traditional certified traditional naturopath and I took the academic journey, like literally gone, no kidding 35 weekends a year for somewhere between 25 to 35 a year for 10 years. In this like in a candy store, learning like this is so exciting to understand physiology, I could not stop it was like, became like an addiction, because I could bring it back and serve the patient from morbid obesity to terminal cancer. And I was in like Candyland, getting these results that I couldn't stop. I couldn't stop the game, I was obsessed with it. And my family saw the passion, but also my obsession and like, I could let one case go if I couldn't get him better. And that's how it started. But in the practice, as you're saying I was using nutrients, but I try to use one company and I couldn't find where they hid all the different components. So I was having literally like 30 vendors and inventory manager was insane, I was expired products throwing away, so frustrated, because I couldn't find one company and do it all.

And so So you were at 18 different vendors or however many probably more but and then you were private labeling them. And that's how you were taking care of.

So the patients can see some continuity, what you can do is a private label a product, and I tried doing that for a while. And then I got even more granular and realizing the ratio of calcium magnesium is flipped the wrong way. And all these Maltese even with the professional brands, and then the fish oil, they're not using a nitrogen room. So they're oxidizing. And they're and then I would I would get so deep in it that I started seeing problems even with my favorite products that were labeled. So I took the jump and started formulating this was 15 years ago, and I said I'm going to create a line that's full transparent, which we are, which is like there's no hidden blend where we're trying to hide what we're doing is, as a clinician, I want to know what, how much of this ingredient giving because I want to look at the research and make sure I'm serving it. So we became totally transparent on how we created and what's in it.

And so how did you so how do you start like a formulating? Like, how do you start a nutrient line? Like was it like seriously, like in your garage? Or like, Where does something like that come from? Because I know you have the clinics, you're busy doing that. And then now you're like formulating, like, in my head? I'm like seeing Steve Jobs in his clinic building an Apple computer?

Or like, we talk about the craziness of an entrepreneur? Yeah, I think Elon Musk like is that the best way to start a business is digging holes in the ground and then going to space and then building cars. Is that sounds smart? No, it's that you're so frustrated that you start doing crazy things. So yeah, it starts in a basement with a kid on the hip. And sitting there with biochemistry of saying it's more complex. And people think it's not just putting nutrients in it's like you have to find out will this herb and this amino acid, combined off gas, create its own metabolic interaction to off gas, off gas, like literally create a gas inside the bottle, and you spend $40,000 on a formula. And all of a sudden the bottom of the bottles pop out and you can't stand them up. They fall over because it's off gassing something. And you don't know, because you just started. Yeah, only 40 grands worth. And then you do another one. And it's like you start by failing a lot and spending all your life savings with this passion. Trying to learn the lesson. So it's interesting is is delivery mechanism, the capsule, that what it's made of its interaction with the nutrients, the cross nutrient interactions, it's way more than what I thought, which is, what's the best research how much of the herbs Should I give. So that's how you start. I literally started my basement, one formula, and it was daily balanced the multivitamin, which although all the ratios were often most of them, the B vitamins were so low that you got to now buy a bee complex. So we created a multivitamin a stock, which is a full multi mineral full multivitamin and a full B complex. You don't need another B comp all into one with the right ratios. And that was a year or more project to actually launch that. So yeah, I'd say it's interesting because when you start you formulate things that are so perfect, like my first multivitamin was so perfect. And the biochemist that was helping me said Joe, you created the best formula I've ever seen in the world. However, it's so big the capsule you could lick it, but you could put in your mouth because it would be probably a foot long. The amount of stuff to put into this vital footlong the footlong Yeah, the footlong biter. So yeah, the story isn't funny on the journey because I don't know you then actually right? Oh, you got to fit it in the little capsule, okay. So it's really the beauty of it to me and my my love of it is taking clinical data, taking prof a different ingredient. And looking at outcome and trying to fit it in something to get the best value for the dollar. And it has to fit in a capsule. So is there's an art, there's a science, there's a, you know, it's interesting to do. And then my joy is being able to in our, in our line life company, we have a number of clinics and being able to hear the stories get feedback, and people doing lab tests pre and post, and actually seeing that artistic, scientific, artistic creation, change lives. And that's it for me, I it's, it's beautiful.

It's funny, growing up daily balance, that's my wife's favorite nutrient. Like she's like, we have a whole like, we have a closet, literally like we have boxes of different nutrients. And we don't do anything that's not natural. And she's like, tried all these other ones. And when we finally found daily balance, she's like, this is the best, like daily vitamin that she's ever had. And so like her and I are on that. And it's really makes a huge difference in so many different aspects. And so, one of the reasons I feel like, I want to dive in is like, why is this important to the people listening? So as we're listening to this, why is this important is super cool, like your story is awesome. But why is this important? To like the doctor or the student?

I think we have to make a decision on a Hippocratic Oath of first do no harm number one, and then how do we best serve a patient? So I again, I didn't become a nutritionist because nutrition was my passion. It wasn't, it really wasn't. I'm not like a nutrition guy. I just wanted the best outcome. And when you really study the society if we really step out, if you were Martian, overlooking the country, the world and you look down to this sphere circulating through space and saying what's going on with that species as humans and we look at what we're doing to humans from birth. And the deficiencies these people are having the reason why children on on Ritalin because they're over there sugar addicts, because of their deficiencies in their their upbringing, and we look at the violence in the world. And we look at the depression and the divorce rate. And we look at, you know, all of these aspects of mediocrity of human experience of potentiation of human qcom. There is a major gap in what we're delivering the actual being to function at an innately high level. It's a massively deficient exercise, if you look at it from a berth on and I don't want to go on too far of a tangent, but just our own multivitamins don't have enough mineral in it to sustain optimal health. They just don't put it in. Because the research said folic acid, folic acid research paper that said it cause neural tube defects was 25 years before they put folic acid in. It's a 25 year cycle according to Sidney Baker and the of the I think it's the Giselle Institute. He wrote the book, detoxification and healing. And he said it takes 25 years. So we got to wait everything for 25 years to actually make something. But I'm looking at the society saying, this is a problem. So as chiropractors we're dealing with Pete humans walking in the door that are malnourished, toxic, overweight, and we have this altruistic mindset of we're going to remove nerve pressure and put them on their way to live this. There are human potential. Well, they're 180 pounds overweight, they're leaning back with this adipose tissue that is so destructive to the dura mater of the human body. It's pulling on the door of so bad because I'm leaning back my head forward, the whole mechanism is broken for neurology, then we have metabolic derangement of inflammation, inflammation compared to its Ed Palmer dealt with, it's not two times or three times, metabolic disease, chronic diseases off the charts that people are dying one or two in cancer. Five years goes one on a three. I mean, it's beyond me and what we're dealing with other patients walking in, and I'm gonna sit there and say, let me remove neuro pressure. Have a good day. Like my academic journey. This allows me to do that. If this allows me to do that. So I have to find A referral. Okay, weight loss. What am I going to do? The hospital? Weight Watchers? Where are they losing more muscle than fat, like, tell me what to do to help someone lose weight, or metabolic derangement. Tell me what to do with a pre diabetic patient, send them to the MD, like, help me solve a problem, because I didn't know what to do. And I asked my colleagues, and no one told me what to do. So that's, that's why, if you want to serve people at a high level, wake up, wake up with society, if you want to be a great chiropractor, and realize you have to solve the problem, whether you bring someone in your office to do it, or whether you find someone to deliver it for us to ignore obesity, inflammation, and the deficiencies and toxicity of our patients, so we don't speak up. That's malpractice. To me, that's how passionate I am about it. It's my practice if you choose to ignore it. So I don't know if that makes sense.

No, that was awesome. And I think that, you know, it is really important because, you know, so often, like doctors will want to bring stuff in, they won't necessarily know where to turn to or where to go to. And so I think that's where, you know, we can put links in to you or, or Shauna, Dr. Shawna, Trisha, who does the weight loss, and then Josh, who's now one of the formulators also he has an amazing brain. I know, I learned so much from him every conversation, and I know we're bringing all these up. So in the next couple of weeks, you'll hear all of those people and kind of their specialty in that. And then I think bottom line.

I'm sorry to cut you off, say that again? Oh, no, go ahead. I know I like what you're doing breaking down the infrastructure, the practicality of it, this is more vision based, but then you you're actually spending the time over the next couple of weeks of like, breaking down a little bit more practical. And how do you do this, my, my, my talk today is all vision is I want you all on this call. If you're bringing in a product, do it for the interest of the human that you're serving, not for, there's always going to be revenue, don't mess up the revenue, like figure that out. But start with the heart as our good friend, Steven Francis says, Why are you going to do this? What's the outcome? And then figure monetization, the economics of it, you have to solve that because most people bring things in, they lose. But it's got to start with heart and purpose. It has to

Yeah, 100%. And, you know, we're all business owners and all entrepreneurs are we're students. And we're going to be that. And so making sure that we're not looking only at top line revenue, but like the profitability of this, and I think that's one of the things I think Steve has done is it's priced itself in a great space where there is a lot of profitability on it, so that the doctor wins too, because we're going to be shifting our energy to do these other things. And it's going to be shifting away from the other thing, or we hire just like you said, and I'm I'm all on board for hire.

There's two points on that. One is doctors don't like to sell. So what we did in Seba is create 100% money back guarantee, they could finish the ball, it's 90 days long, send an empty bottle 89 days later to the office and will replace the office of product I don't want doctors selling. Let them say listen, I believe this will create an impact, use it pay for it. If it doesn't work, just bring it back. I don't care. That's the freedom I want to give doctors number one. Number two is we priced a model in order to negate people that are going to play with nutrition. And there's enough companies out there, we're a boutique company, we're not the the company, we're here to serve people that want to integrate nutrition to serve better lives, not sell a few vitamins. So with the way we did the economics, the per bottle price is more costly, and another company, you might as well go to another company, case pricing is better than other. So I don't want you to stock 40 products of our line on your shelf and say, let me sell for No, no, no, no, I want to take the time that you're turning over nonstop, every single month, get a case make a better margin than any company and just use the ones that you're actually using the rest of it. It's online, that your patient, go online, get an affiliate payment, and just stay focused on on your core. That's my belief because I spread so far, and it became a mess. So I built the economic model so that it helps them be more successful utilizing nutrition because it can get out of hand if people just try to stock 100 products. It's not that's not the right way to do it.

Yeah, so if you're a doctoral student, and you're considering bringing in nutrition, like there is not a better person on this planet to have a conversation with then Joe and Shauna like so both their links will be down below there and you can schedule right on their calendar. If you want to talk about how to do that. Learn from the scar tissue. I think there's so much there. And if you want to learn how to serve your patients at the highest level possible, where you're not only getting great chiropractic care, but you're also then supporting that with the building blocks that are going to help them hold their adjustments better and not be taught sick or deficient? Because that's one of the things I see in our family like Yeah. No, go ahead, you know, finish it,

we have a little delay, I apologize. And that's saying with your own family, what your philosophy is in your family,

our own family like we we go to a fault, we literally go to a farm, buy the food right from the farmer, and we still did our bloodwork and we were deficient. My wife eats incredibly well, I'm not as well, I not as good. But like she had different things, we started doing the program, and all our blood results came back to like optimum results are just normal, what we consider is okay, or average, but like now she's in this optimal space. She's like, you know, 50 years old, she says, I feel healthier and better than I've ever felt in my life.

So, so awesome. And what we've shifted in two years ago with iva, C, we shifted two years ago to just be a service based nutrition company, not a product based company, although, although we have products, we're service company with great products, not a product company, because there's enough product companies out there, what we want to do is serve your integration. That's our passion. So do we have great products, yes, but our purpose is to help you integrate. So if you want to dive in deep, whatever it may be kids, obesity, functional metabolic derangement, whatever it may be detoxification, we will help introduce to you how to serve your patients, and whatever you're looking to do, not what we're looking at.

Yeah, and pre diabetics, and here's the thing, and this is the thing I didn't get, and why I'm really happy to integrate now is I didn't get like, my patients are gonna go buy crap anyways. So why don't they buy a good product instead of buy that stuff that they're gonna pee or poop right out, and they're not gonna get the bioavailability. And the sourcing of it is, you know, organic and healthy. And that fish oil, it's in the, you know, the right atmosphere. So it doesn't oxidate. And so, you know, just making sure that, you know, like, I want my patients to have the best. And that's what I really, you know, that's why it's easy for me. And like my five offices, we all do receiver products.

So, yeah, if you brought up the pre diabetic, I know you do some work with that great company en DC who's looking at once you have the neuropathy, or once you have the issue. So in our field of chiropractic, we're dealing with end game, we're dealing, we're doing the front end game, but what we want to do is prevent those things. And if you still have the problem, even in our profession, now we're dealing with the end stage of these things, diabetes or whatnot, right? neuropathy is Yes. Which is still a nutritional solution. On top of that, right? Yeah, and

we're, you know, I know we're working with you guys with a Siva with our end see company, exclusive nerve and disk centers so that they can have, again, the best products because you've already done all the work. So we just want to, you know, learn from you. And you know, you've made a bunch of things accessible to us that we would not be able to do and we would have spent years like you have, you know, 15 years to create a nutraceutical that will solve the problem. So we just went to the master. So thanks for your time on this. Joe has been awesome. Any closing thoughts?

Yeah, I appreciate that. Now, I look forward and I look forward to the future with proving a lot of the work with pre post lab tests on big data scale. As we collect 1000s of pre post lab tests to show the healthcare industry show conventional medicine show our society that we should get behind the innate healing potential of the human body and start skates stop skating around and looking at Patchwork, but embrace the beauty the creation of the human body and just inspire it with the right things such as good air, good nutrients, good love, good neurology and watch people reach their potential.

Awesome, Joe. I think personally, I just I want to thank you for your years of dedication and work and honestly sacrifice to create such an amazing product for our profession and for our planet. And I know it's not even just in the US or the hospitals. It's also globally like there's a bunch that goes to Europe. And so it's such an amazing product. So thanks for your time. Oh, yeah.

Excellent. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks. COVID sorry if people we had a little delay of internet here so I think we're overlapping a little it's not me trying to be rude to Cliff. A delay on that? No, I appreciate your, your your backing of this. This mission, this movement and collectively, its energy such as yours, the ripple effect of you, me and everyone who's listening. collectively together, we are making an impact on this planet. We are serving lives we are making impact. So every single one of you on this call I want you on appreciate you and have gratitude for you that you are making a difference. And the more we figure out ways to unify our collective consciousness unify are congruent. See if what we're trying to deliver, drop the ego and increase the humility. We're all learning how to serve this planet better. So I just want to give gratitude for everyone that's on the journey with us to do the right thing to people to to serve them to a better health and better life.

Awesome. So if you guys want to bring on nutrients or nutraceuticals into your clinic, a CV can make it easier, but this is a hard thing to do. And so if you want that scar tissue reach out to Dr. Joe or Dr. Shawna they'll be able to answer those questions give you the answers you need. Don't wait on this because our SIS you know, we're getting sicker and sicker every year. So sign up, get on their schedules talk about if something you're interested in. Thank you very much Joe