Ep #27: Transitioning from Practitioner to Entrepreneur with Founder of Perfectketo, Dr. Anthony Gustin

Dr. Nicole:

This is the Integrative Entrepreneur podcast where it’s not what you do, but how you do it. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs brought to you by entrepreneurs. We have been building a multi-million dollar healthcare business for over 10 years, and we have weaved together, some of the best information for the people that are doing the best work in the business. This includes Dr. Demartini, who is a master in human behavior, to Verne Harnish, who has created the methodologies of scaling up that has scaled many, many of the best businesses that we all know of. We want you to not only have a business that you love, but also a life that you love.

Dr. Nicole:

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Integrated Entrepreneur, hosted by the Institute for Integrative Wellness. I’m super excited to have our special guest here today. Dr. Anthony is someone that I have been in touch with, I guess, what would you say? Like a year now we’ve kept in contact, maybe longer?

Dr. Anthony:

Yeah. That’s probably now like three, four maybe.

Dr. Nicole:

Oh my gosh. Yeah. But I guess we talked a while back, and we were showing each other our labs and going through it because of our functional medicine background and focus. Through that time though, he has become the founder of a pretty big company called Perfect Keto. It’s been really awesome and exciting to see him embark on that and grow it to see what it is today, and that was one of the big things that I wanted to feature here on the podcast is, as practitioners or as entrepreneurs in general, we start somewhere, especially as practitioners, we learned nothing about business, we often flounder for months, maybe years, and we look at these big businesses and we’re like, wow, how do they do that? How do you grow that? How do you manage that? At least I can say that that’s something that I have pondered.

Dr. Nicole:

I’m super excited to be able to hear about your journey and the trial, the error, the good and the bad, and really share that with our audience so that they can learn from that experience, going from practitioner to entrepreneur of, I guess you would classify it as an e-commerce side, right?

Dr. Anthony:

Yeah. I mean, if we’re talking about mistakes, [crosstalk 00:02:38] the time we’re recording that, we will see.

Dr. Nicole:

Well, why don’t you tell everyone a little bit about your background, because you have a unique background from practitioner to entrepreneur of this company?

Dr. Anthony:

Yeah. When I was growing up, I knew I wanted to be involved in healthcare, I was just really sick and overweight when I was younger. My family were all Central Minnesota classic standard American diet, no activity, just a recipe for disaster. When I started figuring that stuff out, I knew I wanted to be involved in healthcare, then I figured … my dad owns his own business, and I knew that that was also the path that I wanted to take, which was to have my freedom to be able to set my own schedule, do my own things and not work for a large company or a business. When I chatted with a lot of our family, friends who are physicians or in healthcare in general, most of them who worked as a surgeon is this or that, or basically saying, “Hey, working in a hospital is essentially working at this giant thing.” And so, looked out how I wanted to practice, which is be more preventative and help people with things to actually get them better instead of just patching them up, as well as running my own business.

Dr. Anthony:

End of high school, I realized that chiro and the DC Wood program was really the only path that I saw that fit all of those things for me. Did that, and so it was on a fast track, and did undergrad three years, and then did chiro School straight through with a master’s in sports rehab. And so, I knew I wanted to focus on athletes and high end population with a mindset of if I can work with the best of humans, as far as physical performance, I would learn from that and help trickle that down to the rest of the population. So, when I got to school, this was in 2012 is when I graduated, I went down to San Francisco, I just wanted to stay in the West Coast. There was no particular reason why I chose that area other than that. I don’t know, at that time, I think that this glow of silicone Valley and being in the Bay Area was really magnetic, and so I went down there and opened up my clinics.

Dr. Anthony:

What I realized very quickly is that even though I really enjoyed working with people one-on-one and getting my chops from a clinician standpoint, my favorite time that I spent working was actually building the clinic systems, the process, the systems, and like having this machine that runs without me, without me being there. I think that what happens is a lot of times the clinician thinks, oh, my job is just to be there all the time, and when I’m not there, nothing should happen, and there’s no other thing that I need to do. I go there, I see people, I treat them and I leave. I am more so building something that lasts without me being there. That was something that I certainly learned early on, but within two years, 2014, we had six locations doing primarily musculoskeletal work and sports injuries, things like that. There’s a lot of people in San Francisco who are really … they’re the hard charging weekend warrior type, but also work a lot through fit population, but people who are smart, affluent, et cetera.

Dr. Anthony:

It was challenging for me at least to figure out a way in practice, like I can get their knee pain or back pain or wrist pain to go away pretty easily, but having them build a framework for their life around how they should be healthy and approach thing from a integrated holistic way, not just, oh, I need to start doing these things where I’m sitting at my desk for forever. So, I came up with a model of how I thought about things regarding nutrition, movement, sleep, and community and stress management, and I just knew that it was just repeating the same things over and over and over again to my patient population. I always felt like … I don’t know. I feel like it wasn’t enough for me, but my impact was extremely limited. And so, I started writing articles online, and that grew, and then I was like, oh man, the internet is cool. This thing exists where I can write something, and thousands of people, tens of thousands of people can read this whenever they want so long after I’ve written it.

Dr. Anthony:

So, I started focusing a little bit more, and that’s what segwayed over time to where I’m at now, which is not practicing, I guess, very dumb now from a clinician standpoint where I used to be, but they invest into, how can I impact people and take that framework in my mind of, what do I want to do all along, which is help people be healthier and do that in different and more creative ways. And so, that’s always changing for me.

Dr. Nicole:

I have a question about this, and I swear this podcast, everyone is for my own benefit, by the way. My question is that, knowing what you know now and going through all of the hoops to grow Perfect Keto to the capacity that it is, thinking back to being a practitioner, and then obviously finding that your passion was the business and the building side of things, what is your words of wisdom from a capacity of, can you be a practitioner and still grow your company and be the CEO, obviously with not necessarily being in the office seven days a week, or do you feel that if you want to grow your company to a large capacity, that it’s virtually impossible to stay as an active practitioner in your clinic?

Dr. Anthony:

I think you can do both, but I think you need to be realistic about where you invest your time. There are two very different skillsets, I think that the person who gets you used to treating people … I was doing, when I first got out of school, like six and a half days a week, and it was nonstop. I’ve seen patients from like 7:30 AM to 5:00 PM, doing notes on top of that and trying to run the business also. And so, I was like, okay, I want to focus on the business, so I stripped away those days slowly and slowly. I mean, you can have a blend and do a few days a week of patient care, and then also a few days a week of running your business, if you want to actually be the one who runs the clinic and the business. You don’t have to have that mindset and be doing both. I don’t want my story to mean that anybody who’s listening to this thinks that they should do that path.

Dr. Anthony:

There’s plenty of people who are really great clinicians who love that one-on-one time. I really like working in a very different way and building things that lasts without me, and so that’s a very different approach. So, both of those things, and if that’s the case, I guess that it’s certainly possible. Although, I don’t think that the full 9.00 to 5.00 patient schedule every single day while also running a bit and scaling your business is sustainable. I mean, I think that you can add extra hours in the day, but then you just have a really imbalanced life and you burn out like I did.

Dr. Nicole:

Yeah. Exactly. That brings me to the next question, is that, regardless if you’re the person who is going to split your time and do less patient hours and grow the business, or if you’re the person that is just going to focus on the growth of the business, when you were going through these steps, I guess, what happened that you knew okay, I needed to hire certain people, and how did you choose? I have no idea if you had strategy at this time or you look back and you’re like, oh, I wish I had better strategy, but who did you hire sooner than later to start getting Perfect Keto off the ground?

Dr. Anthony:

For my clinic system or for Perfect Keto?

Dr. Nicole:

No. For Perfect Keto.

Dr. Anthony:

Yeah. I mean, that was just a very needs-based thing. We hired somebody really, really quickly to help with just all the admin stuff. The way I think about all business in general is I want to master, figure out, take apart how something works, and then figure out how to put it back together if that works best for the business. And then after that, systemize it and hire somebody who can maintain that. And so sometimes, where you’re at, maybe you don’t have enough revenue or profit to be able to outsource those things as far as full-time roles, so I’ve had other businesses where I’ve hired outsourced people from the Philippines, versus just contractors in the US. It just, I guess, depends on the amount of work that you do have, and it gives the balancing act of where do you want to invest your money as well? I mean, the same thing that I did in my clinic, which was, as soon as I started it was okay, how do we onboard people? What is this process like?

Dr. Anthony:

I just think about the visit as a whole as a product and think about this like, how can the product be as best as the humanly can be? When someone walks in, obviously, how do they find you? How do they schedule something? What is the intake like? When they come in, how are they greeted? All of the stuff. I just think through the product as an offering first, come up with here’s a system on how to do this, here’s what you say here, here’s this form there. And so, hiring for that was the first position. And then for Perfect Keto, is the same exact thing. As we launched the company, we had products and the whole goal there was to educate people about a ketogenic diet as something that I was using a lot in my clinic, and there were no products to help people with it, there was no information and there were no relationships or community built, and so those are the three things that I wanted to focus on.

Dr. Anthony:

And so, the same thing of like, if the problem that they have is they want to try ketogenic diet, whether that be for fat loss, performance or mental performance or whatever it is, how can we give them the best package where they can solve their problem as fast as possible? And so, as soon as I dug into that, I was like, okay, we need to have content, this is how the content needs to be written in research, et cetera, here’s how we’re going to get in touch with people who are reading about this, otherwise and build a community, here’s how we do product, et cetera, and launch and scale and do marketing that way. And so diving in, figuring out what makes sense, what’s the most impactful thing you can do, systemizing it, and then once you have a bucket of these things, handing it off to capable people and then letting them run with it. I think that’s another thing too, is like, my way is not always the best way, but at least at first, having to understand everything that happens in the company for a long time is really essential.

Dr. Nicole:

It’s interesting because it sounds like it was slow and steady, like you were really careful about deconstructing, reconstructing and making sure that things made sense and had strategy behind them, which I think is so huge because just from my own experience as a business owner, I am the action taker, get stuff done, and I want it done yesterday, which has caused me to do so much more work and not get as far as I should with the amount of work being put in. What’d you say?

Dr. Anthony:

I still have that problem.

Dr. Nicole:

But I love the intent and the strategy behind that, of taking that time. I think that that’s just so important for people to understand that our practitioners that are listening, because you really do have to know the ins and outs of all the positions in your business. And you can tell me if you feel differently about it, but I do think it’s so important to break down the procedures and break down the operations and to really understand how to get every position or department working to it’s best capacity. Of course, it evolves, but it’s really trying to create that foundation.

Dr. Anthony:

Yeah. The foundation is the most important part. We just hired a CEO, so I’m stepping down in that role. He’s pretty much trained up, but for instance, he’s been on for, I don’t know, three months and he doesn’t know what some of the roles even do on a day-to-day basis. And so, I think that when there’s certain levels regarding like … he has an executive team and then those people have a hierarchy, they were like 47 people, I guess, not that critical to know every single thing that’s going on your business at all times. I think that once you build the foundation to a certain point, then the whole business as an organism can evolve without you having to shape it and shift it in certain ways. I think that that’s a really exciting point, but for me, that’s also the point that’s like, oh, if this thing is going the direction I want it to go, and I don’t have to put these inputs in, then I just want to go do something else. That’s what happened with my clinic in the first place as well.

Dr. Anthony:

It was at a point where we were at six locations and we had all of this stuff systemized, onboarding new clinicians, treatment protocols, onboarding marketing, everything was going exactly as it needed to go. I was like, okay, I’m irrelevant at this point, and then once it gets to that point, the way my brain works, I like to take on a new challenge and try different problems, and so that’s where I was at, and one of the things that shifted my mentality from clinic to scale the businesses. That’s where I’m at right now again. I get to a point with this whole business where it took three years to scale it, and it’s at a point now where I think it still has a lot more potential, but in general, a lot of the area it needs to go, it’s just like, I’m not interested in it, which is retailing and scaling the more traditional CPG company.

Dr. Anthony:

I can step away for three months and come back, and people … I don’t need to manage anybody, that whole, what we have as far as an ethos of the company, which is put out the best clean products possible so people get off sugar and vegetable oil, and create the best content possible where people can learn from it if they want to do something that looks like a ketogenic diet.

Dr. Nicole:

That’s awesome. I just want to say a quick thank you to our sponsor, Purium, who makes the highest quality organic and non-GMO super foods on the market. Everything is grown with love and intention, and dehydrated raw and living at 60 degrees Fahrenheit to maintain its nutrient density. Check out ishoppurium.com and use our code, IWG, to get $50 or 25% off your order.

Dr. Nicole:

I have two questions, but we’ll start with one. Going back to the clinic, I’m curious, because obviously, a lot of our followers are practitioners, some type of healthcare practitioner and definitely many chiropractors as well, but when it comes to hiring doctors, firing doctors and really just managing your team of practitioners in your practice, do you have any words of wisdom of what does that look like? Is it having a lot of consistency between the practitioners, having them scripted talk the same talk, giving them some level of flexibility or freedom? Is it really just come down to give the patient the best care possible? It sounds like your practices were very … they had really solid operations, so I’m just curious that, because I feel like doctors, depending on where they went to school and their belief systems, there’s a lot of variability between what they believe is best for the patient.

Dr. Anthony:

Totally. Yeah. I think there was a lot of stuff, I think systemizing and just reflecting on things is the biggest possible advantage you can have as a business owner. What people don’t typically do is sit and reflect, what is the point of this business? Whether it be a clinic or an econ business, what is the point of this business, and then what are our values? I think that once you start there, you can put a nucleus. And then on top of that overlay, a systemized and an always evolving process of how do we hire and train people that fit with that goal and those values.? My goal as a clinic system was I want to help people with sports injuries or musculoskeletal pain, and our values with that are we buy into this movement system or think that movement should be X, Y, or Z, and have these underlying threads that inform our goals and how we get there, then you can go out and fit people in.

Dr. Anthony:

But even when you do that, I think reflecting like, okay, we hired somebody, didn’t go well, [inaudible 00:19:04] has this thing of, pain plus reflection equals progress, and that’s really important when … You’re going to hire wrong people, even if you have goals and values set, and it doesn’t matter for any business. I mean, this is a really, really important thing, that you look back and say, did that go well or not? And if not, what can we do better, have a system for it and update it and update your models and your principles. But I think that what a lot of people don’t do is they don’t define the goals and they don’t define the values. And so, it was like, oh, well, somebody who’s good at treating people, was like, well, okay, if we had that mentality, musculoskeletal stuff, and we brought in somebody who was really good at gynecological exams, it’s never going to work. Well, that’s going to be a really weird offering, the business is going to start to fissure in really weird ways.

Dr. Anthony:

I think that getting clear on your priorities of like, this organism that I’m building, this thing that I’m working on as a business, what are the goals? What are the values and how do people fit into that?

Dr. Nicole:

Yeah. Do you adhere to the saying that you hire slow, fire fast?

Dr. Anthony:

Hire fast, fire fast.

Dr. Nicole:

Got it. Love it.

Dr. Anthony:

Yeah. Obviously be intentional and don’t hire sloppy people just because you’re desperate for sure. Be intentional, but I think that there’s a lot of different areas too here if you’re looking at an organization … I don’t think that rule applies to every single person. Some stuff right now, like for instance, some of the opening roles we have at Perfect Keto like a copywriter, for example, if we find somebody who we think may fit and we spend a couple hours vetting them and get them in for a month contractor position, then if they work out long-term, great, but if we try to spend four months finding the perfect person, the opportunity cost of spending time on that is just very high. Whereas for finding the CEO who took over from me, very, very slow process. So I think there’s a spectrum of roles that you put on, and the importance of getting them on fast because they can do something critical for the company needs to be done that’s not totally like a linchpin in the business.

Dr. Anthony:

So if they mess something up with an email in copywriting versus they over spend $5 million, I mean, those are two very different problems and irreversible problems. I mean, it totally depends on the role.

Dr. Nicole:

What made you decide to hire a CEO externally opposed to internally?

Dr. Anthony:

I mean, everyone that we had hired internally at Perfect Keto, we’ve basically trained from what we learned, and I think that the important thing for me going into this industry of making products that people consume is doing things in a very non-traditional way. And so, we ran and marketed things as a tech company first, which is very different, and so all of the industry people come from large food companies or just had this really weird, old sense of how to market things. Well, we’re not at a stage where we all that is codified and we’re in a really good position where that’s the e-comm growth is happening without any other attention other than like who’s running right now, what we needed was somebody who has run a large organization and has also gotten in scale and retail several times. And so, the CEO that we brought on is really, really excellent at the stage we’re at, which is about focusing on details, compliance, all the boring stuff that is required to get to the next level that I hate, he loves. And so, that type of stuff, is the direction we need to plan right now, where are we going to be in five years from now, and how are we going to slowly get our way there?

Dr. Anthony:

I mean, this thing like, as a business grows, it goes from a speed boat where you can shift wherever you want, to like, oh, let’s go over here, and then over here, to a cruise ship or a large tanker that you have to be very careful about where you direct the boat, because it takes a long time to shift course. That’s where we’re at now because of the size of the business, so it was just very different skillsets. Maybe in five years, the company will outgrow him, who knows? Maybe he’ll adapt to it. There was nobody who had that experience that wanted to take that on who is internal.

Dr. Nicole:

I guess there’s a lot of businesses, they always say there’s a fear around hiring an external CEO because the internal people that have been there for long periods of time, they won’t necessarily have as much respect because they haven’t worked their way up or they don’t know enough about the business. Have you had that experience, or did you have a process negate that experience?

Dr. Anthony:

Yeah. I mean, it’s been a slow onboarding process. He started early May, he started early February. I think that just over the last couple of weeks, is when he’s been really been taking the reins. I mean, he’s fit so tightly with our values that it’s just not a problem. I think that again, when you have a goals and the values really, really set, it just makes that so much easier. That in our culture has just been so reinforced over the last three years, I’ve seen him, not to say make decisions that are not good for the business, but he’d throw out ideas and 15 people will go, “Oh, no, no, no. That’s not how we do things at this company because of X, Y, or Z reason.” Our culture is so tight and our values are so tight and communicated so frequently, and he aligns with those. Everyone’s going to have a little bit of a mismatch here or there, but no problem so far. He’s actually been additive in a lot of ways for culture too.

Dr. Nicole:

I love it. I think there’s a lot of people with smaller companies that don’t understand the value of goals and knowing your values, knowing the company’s values and culture. I know in my personal journey, I went through a pretty significant road bump with completely losing the culture in my practice. It is something that once it’s gone, it’s a mess, and it takes significant work to get it back, but you can get it back. I’m just curious, what are some of the practices that you guys are enforcing on a day-to-day basis? They could be the most simple things that are constantly reinforcing the culture.

Dr. Anthony:

Yeah. I think a growth mindset is a really huge one. And so, whether that’s internally from what you’re doing from a task versus your mindset of how you approach your life in general, just having this thing where basically you want to improve and to improve. You have an idea and hypothesis, you test that thing, you look at the results, and then you either do it again, or go elsewhere with a new idea. I think that that mindset is really, really, really strong, and I think that’s what allowed us to scale so fast at the beginning, because as keto was exploding, everyone was so relentless about how we learned, learning to communicate in a lot different ways, I think that this strict growth mindset was very, very different than a lot of other businesses in our industry. I mean, that’s a giant one.

Dr. Anthony:

We have tons of ideas around how an organization should be run, and how people should approach their work. And so, this goes all the way down to, we were very prepared for this pandemic and that we wanted to have people know how to work very, very well on their own, and not have to have meetings and be in person. So, remote work for us has always been something that we’ve encouraged, even [inaudible 00:26:53] we’re in the same city, go away for a month. If you can structure your day, and I know this is impossible for people who are doing service based businesses, that’s really challenging. But if you can structure your day in a company where you can remove yourself and get all [inaudible 00:27:10] get done and still move the ball forward in a chaotic environment, nothing will stop you anywhere else.

Dr. Anthony:

This is why we encourage people, go travel somewhere else and work somewhere else for a month. Go to Columbia and work for a month there, totally great. And then, if they can switch up their routine and have everything be really, really tight and use our systems, then it just puts stress on the system before it needs to stress. And so, we’ve always wanted to do that at different stages and make sure people can handle this stress in a measured way, so that way, when things actually do get stressful, we’re very resilient and know where to go and know what our capacities are.

Dr. Nicole:

That’s awesome. Yeah. I think it’s really, really huge because right now with the pandemic, a lot of practices, even if they are primarily not doing hands-on care and they are focusing more on consultations, more of the functional integrative world, I think a lot of them chose to shut down their practices because they didn’t have any level of structure when it came to remote work. I think a lot of people are learning from that right now and realizing that this is something that can be done, number one, and number two is if you are trying to micromanage your team, oh, get on call, oh, did you do this, then that’s a sign that you possibly don’t have the right operations in place.

Dr. Anthony:

Yeah. Some people work really well in different environments, and we just have been very strict about that. And if somebody struggles with remote work or they’ve never done it before, I mean, in the interview process for us, it’s really challenging for us to make the call to bring them on. They have to be really strong in other areas. The people really like working in an office with people, some people hate it. I want to work with people, I don’t like having a lot of distractions. I was in my office yesterday, no one’s been in there for the last six weeks, it’s been amazing, and there was five people in there yesterday. And even having people like walking around and being in my visual field distracts me, but You should just know that as an individual and optimize for that. There’s different fits of people for different reasons, and if you want to build a culture where everybody’s in-person and has a very different vibe, it’s totally fine. That’s why there’s values of the organization itself.

Dr. Anthony:

I think that’s what makes it so cool, is that you get to build this thing that over time, it keeps adding in evolving and getting more and more interesting.

Dr. Nicole:

Yeah. No. I think that that is important is that companies should know that some of you are going to be more attracted to having that office environment, and then others aren’t going to want to have more of that remote business. It’s funny because for myself, I went away for a month, and I worked remote and I was like, yes, this is going to be a dream, I’m never coming back. And I was like, I don’t know if I love this. It was very eyeopening to me, I definitely loved the freedom and the ability to travel and still work and go for extended amounts of time, but there is an aspect of me that I get really excited about the human interaction and being around a lot of people. I laughed when you said, I’m distracted when people are in my visual field, because people always are like, how do you concentrate? I go to coffee shops where there’s a million people, and I thrive. So, it’s so interesting how different people’s brains are.

Dr. Anthony:

But you know what’s strange about that, is that I, in the same way, and I think working in airports and coffee shops or wherever is no problem, and I can focus, but something to do with when I know it’s my team member, they can come ask me anything, it’s a different thing for me, and I hate it. I don’t know why.

Dr. Nicole:

Yeah. No, I could see that though, because you’re the boss, everybody is like, hey, can I get you just for a second? It’s things that I never really thought about. But even our operations manager, she’s like, “People, they want a little attention from you.” And I’m like, “Really? Why?” And she’s like, “They just do.” I’m like, “Oh, okay.” Something that I wanted to ask too, in relation to growing your company, obviously everybody’s situation is different, but I’m just curious your feedback on the idea of, if you need to, raising capital or using investors, or is it best to try to fund your business on your own? I’m curious what your feedback is about that.

Dr. Anthony:

Again, very personal preferences. I prefer to always have your own capital and fund the business on your own. I think there’s more skin in the game there, and you have to prove out earlier on that you have a business model that actually works. We’ve gotten away from the idea of what a business actually is in 2020. I think a lot of companies right now are hurting dramatically because of it, where the point of the business is to make money. I don’t think that’s a taboo thing to say. That does not mean that shareholders get paid out ridiculous amount of cash? It can, sure, that example can exist, but if you don’t make more money than you spend, you will go out of business, and you raise other people’s money, you can play this game where you don’t actually have to prove a business model of this fictional thing of a runway. It’s insane to me, things like, we’re going to go negative for next 12 months before we have to go get more money and spend that. It’s like, no, no, the point of a business is to be profitable, to generate a profit.

Dr. Anthony:

And then you get to choose as the business owner, okay, what do we do with that profit? Do we invest it here? Do I take that out to pay for my kids’ college? It doesn’t matter what it is, you get to choose. But the more times, and the more money you take from other people, the more you have to be beholden to what they want to do with the profit when you have it, but also the whole goals and the values and all this other stuff that you get from shaping your own business, those also get obliterated because now the investors are speaking here, they’re controlling things. I think that at the point we’re at right now, like I was saying, our staff is so tight, and we’re such a large company at Perfect Keto, Quito, we could take money now if we wanted to, or needed to and not compromise on other things, because we have leverage.

Dr. Anthony:

A lot of times, people, they’re desperate in the beginning, and they think it’s a shortcut. Like, oh, if I had 100K more, 300K more or whatever amount more, then I’ll get to where I want to be faster. And that’s just a complete illusion. [inaudible 00:34:03], this is my opinion, and there’s a lot of examples of companies who have raised money and done really well for the investors, for the owners, et cetera. But I am not a fan. I’ve refused investment dollars in every business I’ve ever done, and I still to date and have not raised a dollar, and that’s just the way I like to do it. I’m a little old school that way.

Dr. Nicole:

Yeah. No, I definitely think that that is huge. I think that even if someone is going to borrow, the same way you have to have this master roadmap if you’re not borrowing, you really need to, if you’re going to borrow as well, because you have to make something of the money that you’re borrowing and not look at it as oh, I just got this money, and keep my fingers crossed, hope for the best.

Dr. Anthony:

Yeah. That’s why I think if people want to take out debt, that’s a different thing than raising capital from investors. The first business I started before Perfect Keto, there was econ business called Equip Foods, and man, I maxed out my credit card to start that business, and it took a while to figure out how to get profitable with it. But then when I did, like, oh, now I know how to do this, and it forced me … it was that all the money I had at the time. I hadn’t paid off any of my student loans, I was living in San Francisco trying to scale, and all the money was going back from the clinics in the clinics that I wanted to start this as a business, everything was on credit cards, it was a massive amount of debt. I got out of that, then when we launched Perfect Keto, we were profitable day one and have been since.

Dr. Anthony:

So, I think that there’s just a different level of appetite for [inaudible 00:35:45] people have debt on themselves. I like that skin in the game, and the pressure forces me to do perform. Not for everybody though.

Dr. Nicole:

Makes sense. You had a lot of different companies, you’ve worn a lot of different hats, and I’m curious, as the founder, and you were the CEO at one point as well, but what are some things that you feel that it is not a good idea to delegate to your team or even your CEO at this point? What are things that you feel are the obsolete necessity of the founder of the company?

Dr. Anthony:

That entirely depends on your skills and what you’re great at. I think I’m just really, really talented at figuring out how people interact with the product and what they get out of it, and solving problem from a high level. And so for me, that’s the thing that I’m still most intimately involved in, is our product pipeline. And for other people, maybe it’s completely different, maybe it’s [inaudible 00:36:46] at marketing, and that’s all I want to do, and that’s the case, but even still, I mean, I think that you can always train somebody on what you know. That’s been the biggest challenge for me, is being able to extrapolate and codify all the things in my head, of like, what makes a good product good, and a good brand good, and how do I put that into words? And teach somebody else my view on it, because so much of that stuff just comes automatic to me. I don’t even have to think about it, like, oh, this is good, or this is death. We’re going with this direction, and not that direction.

Dr. Anthony:

When you’re a smaller business and you are able to control that stuff, you can just get away with continually doing that. Whereas I think when you have more and more people in your organization, and when you’re trying to pull yourself out of that actively, you really need to focus on how you’re communicating what you don’t know that you know, if that makes sense.

Dr. Nicole:

Yeah. Communication is huge. Yeah. That’s awesome. I know that one time when we were chatting, we were obviously talking about your move, and we talked about how you hired the CEO. We didn’t dive too deep into the conversation, but you just said, got burnt out and now I’m just making a change. So I’m curious, your feedback to the audience about work-life balance, and if there is a such thing, if there’s a time and place for everything, is it accurate to say that you’re gonna work your butt off maybe in the beginning of your business, and then you’re able to take those steps back as you hire and acquire your team? Or maybe that’s not accurate at all. I’m just curious, what is your feedback about that work-life balance from the start, to the growth, to where you are now?

Dr. Anthony:

Yeah. It was a delicate balancing act. This tolerance for work-life balance and what you want to get out of life is something that evolves for every person, and is different for everybody at every different stage in their life. For me, I was very hungry in the past for acquiring skills, as far as like, I want to know how to run a business more, I want more financial freedom, I want X, Y, or Z. That drove me towards a mindset of output. And this could be a very long conversation about why I think this happened in the first place, but I think that I focused on doing my entire life and being a very driven person, and what kind of output am I getting, versus being as a human being. I think that if I would’ve known what I know now about just existing and enjoying life as a human, maybe I would’ve approached things in a much more sustainable way.

Dr. Anthony:

That business that I was talking about before, Equip Foods, which is the in-between of my clinic and Perfect Keto, so I actually just took that business back over and I’ve been just playing around with it and being like, oh, this can be done by not having to pound my head into the ground every single day and putting in 12 to 16 hour days all the time. But yeah, I mean, there is a inputs to outputs equation here, where the more you put into it, most times, you’ll get more out of it until that doesn’t work, until you’ve reached a point of diminishing returns, until you start burning yourself out. I think that for me, has been a really difficult thing to spot until I’m a couple months away from it, or it takes some serious spin off.

Dr. Anthony:

When you’re in it, it’s really hard to see, and that’s the trick that I think a lot of other entrepreneurs get caught up in, is they want to do these things to get motivated for a certain reason, then it’s one to five years later, and they don’t even realize they’re at a point where they’re not prioritizing their health, not prioritizing their relationships, just not making any time for themselves outside of work. I think that the danger there is that you get into a little bit of a unified identity where if work doesn’t go well one day, then your day sucks, and you have nothing else to fall back on. And so, what I’m working on now is more so diversifying my identity and how I think about myself, my place in the world, and the things that I care about. And so, if we have a bad day at work, but I have this amazing relationship and I can go have a good workout or I can go outside and enjoy the weather and all these other things, well then, I’ve insulated myself from this wild rollercoaster that sick of writing right now.

Dr. Anthony:

I think that I can get back to that, and run a company in a very different way. I don’t know, who knows if it’s possible? I mean, the three years in Perfect Keto’s history, I think we did $120 million in revenue and have grown like crazy. Is that possible without being obsessed and working 14 plus hours a day? I don’t know. I have no idea. I guess we’ll see next business I take on, what happens.

Dr. Nicole:

Yeah. Well, I appreciate the transparency with that. We go into a mindset of work your butt off, work your butt off, and we do forget what life is supposed to be. But I think that sometimes, maybe it’s just timing, maybe you’re going to have bouts of time that you’re working hard and other times that there’s more play, and other times that it’s more balanced. I’m sure that it looks different for everyone and where they’re at and what they’re trying to accomplish. But I’m very much a growth mindset as well. I don’t know, I always ask myself the question like, am I making this up that … I get really fulfilled by always being in that growth mindset and doing things that are helping me to move towards those goals, and then I was like, I don’t know, somebody just called me a workaholic? I don’t know.

Dr. Anthony:

Yeah. I mean, I totally get you, and I experience that as well. I took an entire month off last December to just figure out what that question was. I was like, oh yeah, I’m certainly just a workaholic at this point. Although, I do enjoy building things, and now I have a much clearer picture for me of what is fulfilling to me. And so now, when I’m working in a day, that I can look at it and be like, okay, I can choose what are the things that add to my plate that’s taken away? If there’s work is work, it’s all under this bucket, now I can categorize it and understand, oh, I want to do this because of a certain reason.

Dr. Nicole:

Yeah. I think that taking that step back in reflection and clearing your mind, detaching, is usually when we get the most clarity. I think it’s so essential, and a lot of us don’t take the time to do it.

Dr. Anthony:

Yeah. I think that when there’s guilt, if it’s 11:00 AM on a Saturday, you’re not on your laptop checking something, that’s when you’ve gone a little too far, for me at least.

Dr. Nicole:

Yeah. Yeah. I am married to a guy who’s similar mindset, and we’re also in business together. So I am curious on your words of wisdom for those people that are like you, that are growth mindset, entrepreneurial, that are potentially balancing a relationship with someone who is not of the same mindset. What are the words of wisdom there to keep things or keep the communication open, but also helping them to appreciate and understand the lifestyle?

Dr. Anthony:

Yeah. I mean, I think that I love relationships, intimate ones, and I love business partnerships. Apparently, you have the same thing in one, which is great. They force you to grow together and reflect and shine light in your own blind spots. I think that having very direct, open, honest conversations on a frequent basis that are set as review periods, for instance, when my business partner and partners that I’ve had in the past, as well as my fiance, we have all have fixed intervals in which we create open space for that relationship to be examined and for critiques to be brought to the table. You also have to be open to receiving that feedback. It does not go both ways unless you don’t do that. I mean, I think a business partnership is very closely into my relationship in that way, there’s too much on the line, there’s a separate thing of the business that if you’re not having these points where you’re chatting with each other and figuring out what’s going on, is this working? Is this not working? The business is going to die.

Dr. Anthony:

The same thing with an intern relationship, the relationship is the third thing, and that thing will die if you’re not doing this and getting everything on the open and chatting about it. I think that whether you’re in a relationship with somebody who’s the same type or a different type or whatever, all that stuff will surface. This goes back to this thing I was saying earlier of reflecting and being honest with yourself and with the other person on a continuous basis, just over and over and over again. I think that life is so busy and so crazy right now where if you’re not doing that, no matter if it’s assessing the values and goals in your business, is this relationship working, how do we improve here, and reflecting frequently and taking that time and carving that time out, you are going to get swept up in the current of life. And society and life and your friends or investors or whatever, is going to … you’re going to wake up one day, you’re going to look back and say, why the hell am I here? What’s going on with my life?

Dr. Anthony:

I think that that’s the most important thing. And even within work, I do not, and have never sacrificed that time of reflection, getting the advices, having some solitude with either myself or other people, and actually thinking about, okay, what just happened? Is this what I want? Where are we going here? And so, whether it’s in relationships or with yourself or with other people, it’s critical.

Dr. Nicole:

Yeah. I just love where you went with that because one of the final questions I wanted to ask is I know that you had just made a move, and you’ve been in Austin, and you made this very big decision to have a lifestyle change, and obviously to hire a CEO for your company. I know that some of the people that are going to be listening today are people that are maybe listening to this going, “Hey, I’m that practitioner that’s working that six and a half days a week, and I love to build things too. I actually get the most excited about creating the systems and seeing my business run, but whoa, that seems like such a far fetched idea to transition into that.” Or, “I’ve always wanted to have a tele-health practice, and to move my practice completely online.” Whatever the case may be, whatever big change that looks like, what are some of the words of wisdom for those people that are not fulfilled in this current moment, but are maybe apprehensive about taking that step towards what they really want?

Dr. Anthony:

Yeah. It’s a fantastic question. First, I would say if I can do that and be removed from that and do well, you can do that. If I can blaze that trail, trust me, I think it’s possible. I’m not special there. Two, get started immediately. Don’t wait. This is one of those things that people just put off forever. Three, actually a couple of years ago, right when we were transitioning out of practice, my best friend from grad school, his name Ryan Devel, also [inaudible 00:48:27], I focused on nutrition, started making all these products and scaling with online businesses. For me, what’s important was creating time freedom, location freedom, and financial freedom. Those are the three things that I optimized for that I think were really draining me in my practice. Him, the same way, he focused on movement stuff, and so he built all these online courses and products and everything. We actually did like 50 or 60 podcasts on this called Health Fit Business.

Dr. Anthony:

It’s been a couple of years that we’ve done anything, but we’ve documented a lot of stuff because we both were in the same point, left our practices and did this, and laid out every single way somebody could do this and structured it. I mean, I think that stuff’s still available, I’m not sure, I haven’t done it in a while, but we put out hundreds of hours, everything’s free, you don’t have to buy anything. If anybody’s interested, start there, listen to all of our podcasts, reach out to me with any questions, it’s very possible, and don’t feel guilty. Don’t feel guilty that you have student loans or you invested … I mean, your timing, I need you to be this person in this role, you can reinvent yourself whenever you want and make the life you want any time. It can be done and it has been done. I mean, manifest what you want, reflect and get after it.

Dr. Nicole:

I think one thing too is, not to completely disclose, but you’re young.

Dr. Anthony:

Yeah, just turned 32.

Dr. Nicole:

Yeah. So you have been able to learn these lessons at such a young age, but also, there’s many people that are still in their 50s that are apprehensive about doing what they truly want and really serving themselves. So, I think that that’s just a Testament to put your mind to something, and that if it really resonates and it’s really what you want, it’s within your values, that you can make it happen and truly have the life that you love.

Dr. Anthony:

Yeah. That’s subject to change too. I think that my concept of what I want out of life is shifting a lot over the last couple of months, which is okay. I hope my preference has changed, I hope that I don’t want the same things that I wanted when I was 14. I really don’t listen to the same music. I’d be a really weird person right now, if that was the case. The same thing with the rest of your life, what you do for work, maybe it is the same. Maybe it is the same from when you’re 16, all the way through when you’re 60. Maybe it changes. It’s not a big deal. Change is okay, I think that when people try to resist change is when you get into the most amount of problems.

Dr. Nicole:

Yeah. No, it’s so, so, so, so true. It’s just knowing that things are going to change, and that’s totally cool, and be able to roll with it and not be intimidated by it because so many of us get so intimidated by change, but it’s really just a part of life at the end of the day.

Dr. Anthony:

Yeah. Ryan and I, say change is the only constant.

Dr. Nicole:

Yeah.

Dr. Anthony:

We’ve been through a lot of crazy stuff in the last, I don’t know, four or five years since we’ve been out of practice.

Dr. Nicole:

Yeah. I love it. Well, this was awesome. I really, really appreciate your time. I think this is going to be super helpful and super motivational to a lot of our listeners, and it’s really amazing what you’ve done and what you’ve created, and I’m super excited to see what you continue to create, because you are like, all right, let’s do this now.

Dr. Anthony:

[crosstalk 00:52:01]. We’ll see.

Dr. Nicole:

Awesome. Well, thank you everyone for listening and being here with us. I will definitely give you access to what he mentioned about his awesome series that he did. If you have the link, if you could find it anywhere, we’ll definitely share that with the audience.

Dr. Anthony:

[crosstalk 00:52:18] healthfit.biz is the website, and then Health Fit Business podcast.

Dr. Nicole:

Awesome. Awesome. All right. Anthony, thank you so much for being with us. This was awesome.

Dr. Nick:

You’ve reached the end of another episode of the Integrative Entrepreneur podcast. Connect with us at integrativegrowthinstitute.com. Don’t forget to sign up to our newsletter to receive our free materials. See you at the next episode.

Dr. Nicole:

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