This is Mary Ann. She’s a patient of mine, and don’t tell my other patients that she’s one of my favorites. She, for fifteen years, was my patient. She really wanted to get healthy and was plus or minus ten pounds in that picture on the left, you can see [inaudible] concierge practice that she joined when I moved over to this practice. I, like most physicians, I didn’t have the tools or the know how to help them create health. So Mary Ann, when I first implemented this program into my practice, she raised her hand like Arnold [inaudible] from Welcome Back [inaudible], and said, “Yes, yes, yes, I will do it. I want to get healthy.” And in the course of eleven months, the seventy-four year old woman successfully lost 110 pounds. This picture on the right was in the late spring, I believe it was, and so she’s been that way for the last four or five months.
And now I will humble myself. This is me. The one on the left was my wakeup call back in 2007 that my life had gotten out of control, so I did the first twenty-five pounds on my own by practicing what I’ve been trying to preach, and then my first a-ha with Take Shape for Life was I thought that I was doing pretty well, and that last fifteen pounds just melted off of me, and I was able to get to my health weight, and I am, my seventy, eighty year old age range is going to be much happier, I’m sure.
Danny: Is that Mark Nelson, by any chance?
Chip: Yes, that guy on the left there, this is Mark Nelson. He is the cardiologist who introduced this program to me, and he’s a full time health coach. He actually decided to quit cardiology because he was having so much fun in his practice, and I will tell you that as a physician, if I wasn’t enjoying being a physician as much as I am now, I would have punched out and I’d be doing this full time too, because the opportunity’s there, but I just like what I’m doing as a doctor too much to do it full time, but it certainly made it a part of my business plan. Mark, on the other hand, he was burning out, and his story is kind of fun in how it saved his marriage, basically, by getting out of the rat race of cardiology and being a full time health coach.
So if your patient wants optimal health, how are they going to get it? Well, the unfortunate reality is that they’re mostly likely, eighty percent chance that they’re not going to get it from their physician, so who’s going to do it? Well, why don’t you let it be you?
Danny: Thanks for the prompt.
Chip: Do you want to do the other [inaudible] we got here?
Danny: I do. I almost think it would have been interesting had we asked these before the presentation and after, just to see if there was a difference, but I’d like to just ask everyone to give us a frank assessment. And Virginia, if you want to go ahead and present the poll, that would be great. Are you satisfied that yours is a practice offering oral systemic health to its patients, and just take a moment to answer that, and then we’ll have a quick follow up as well. And obviously, we recognize that oral systemic health means different things to different people, and that will obviously have an impact, and it’s a moving target as we learn more and are able to deliver more, but I suspect most of us on the call today have a sense of what it means to them to be in oral systemic practice.
So let’s go ahead and close that poll and see what y’all had to say. Okay. Twenty five percent yes, twenty five percent don’t know, and half believe that they are not currently. And again, a fairly – well, it’s interesting. I think I’m encouraged by those who feel that they are. Let’s go and follow up with the next question, Virginia. And especially if you answered no or I don’t know to this one – you’ve got to close the poll, Virginia. Let’s see the next one. So, you know, whether you answered no, I don’t know, maybe even yes, and you’re not fully satisfied, what is holding you back from implementing a true – and branding yourself as a true oral systemic practice? This question, by the way, is multi answer, because I don’t feel that any of these are mutually exclusive, so just take a moment and consider this.
And again, I think it would have been interesting to see before and after, because I know that what we’re presenting is an answer to a lot of these concerns. Okay. Let’s close the poll and see the results. So that’s very good. Everyone on here understands that it’s important, so nobody stated that as a reason. Twenty-seven percent receive lack of public appreciation of its importance. Fortunately, I believe that that is changing. And the time commitment necessary also at twenty-seven percent, and seventy-three percent want to know how to structure it, and seventy-three percent want to understand how to better monetize it. And again, because these are multiple answers, the total does not add up to one hundred percent, but thank you all for sharing that.
Chip: And it’s not surprising.
Danny: Yeah. I would hope we’re providing some answers to those concerns.
Chip: Bear with me, it’s not wanting to –
Danny: It just needs a little cajoling.
Chip: There we are. Alright, so along the lines of the survey we just asked, that well, how can a dentist implement a third era dental practice focused on creating total body healthy, not just dental health, just like I’ve implemented a third era medical practice, I’ve had, there’s physical therapists implementing a third era physical therapy practice. We’re all health professionals, we all want to help our [inaudible] want to help people create health.
So what Take Shape for Life offers is a solution not just for your patients to get health, but also offers you that can offer a tool to implement it and one that can actually not be done out of the goodness of your own heart, but you can actually get paid for what you do. That’s what we all [inaudible] get paid for what we do.
Now, don’t read this. Don’t read this; I’m going to read it to you. I can imagine and I’ve been told by a couple dentists saying how on earth – I know how you physicians can do it, you can talk to people – how on earth can dentists talk to people about their weight? And it’s a very reasonable question, so what I would like people to do is to close their eyes, and I’m going to read to you something that I put together that these dentists that I know really like and said, “You know, I can do that.” So basically, you’re talking about the program, and say, “You know, Mr. Jones, there’s a topic I’d really like to broach with you if you don’t mind. It’s really well established that it’s very difficult to eradicate a person’s gum inflammation if they have high blood sugar levels, even just pre-diabetes. Gum inflammation, we now know, can increase risk of many systemic diseases like heart attacks and strokes. Well, I have a physician friend who’s implemented a program that’s been very successful. I’ve decided to implement it in my practice because I’ve been really kind of frustrated with the medical community because they haven’t been better able to help people lose weight when I send my patients to ask them to do so, and then they really can’t help them maintain that weight loss. So those results would really make my job much easier, so I’ve tried the program. It’s surprisingly easy. Everybody gets a personal health care to guide them through the program, and if you’re interested in creating optimal health in your life, we’d really be honored to be your coach.”
So that’s just kind of a structure with which you can kind of open up a conversation and you can even do things like talk to them about, you know, I’m doing this program. Do you know anybody who would want to do it? [Inaudible] to talk about as we walk you through the program.
So let’s look at this model for a moment. So one of the things I was most impressed with is that this is not just a great program, but there’s a man named Dan Bell who built the business model who did a fabulous job. It’s a very unique business model. I’m in a concierge practice. I was not willing to sell product out of my practice and cheapen what I do, and we don’t sell product. There’s no direct financial transaction between my patients and me. Basically, I’m paid by the company to coach my clients to help, and then you would be too. We don’t carry products.
There’s really no significant financial outlay to get started. One hundred and ninety-nine bucks to get started. Health [inaudible], I’ll explain that in a few minutes. And the coaching revenue is not controlled by managed care. It doesn’t have to go through the insurance. You’re basically paid by the company to coach clients to help.
The business industry is saying how successful it is. In 2010, Forbes magazine rated medifast as the number one small company in the country. In 2012, it got in the top ten, and the reason being is that it takes, medifast ten years ago was a floundering company on the verge of bankruptcy, and now Take Shape for Life drives it back up seventy percent of the revenue for medifast, which is why you’re seeing so much medifast out there. So the business model has been proven to work.
A quick note is that one of the beauties of this is that there’s a new CEO, even never, in April of this year who has just done a fabulous job on helping out new health coaches and is really going to be setting this up to take off more in the future. She’d be partnering with [inaudible].
So as far as health coaching, there are two levels of the business. The most important one I’m going to focus on tonight is plan A, where basically you’re focused on introducing the program to your patients and coaching your patients, and basically creating revenue for your practice. As I said before, if your practice is coaching a hundred clients, it’s going to be a monthly revenue of approximately seven thousand dollars a month, and just like the being a client is easy and you’re fully supported by the company to be a client with the bionetwork I discussed before, the same goes true for coaching, and we’re basically you’re the health coach in the middle. [Inaudible] and I are business coaches who help you duplicate our success in your practice, and you’re given lots of tools to be successful, and this is where this new management team, this new CEO, and in the last eight months, the number of tools available to us is just amazingly good in that it’s so much easier now than a year, year and a half ago to get started as a health coach with the tools that they’ve developed. It’s all professionally done and looks terrific.
So here’s kind of the financial structure of it, and just as an example, if you’re coaching thirty clients a month, each person’s paying Take Shape for Life about three hundred dollars a month to get the food. You’re going to earn a revenue of about forty thousand dollars a year, and you can see that it’s not difficult. This is not a time consuming endeavor. It takes about thirty to sixty minutes a day to coach all thirty clients.
Danny: Right. Not each client.
Chip: Right, not each client. It is all thirty clients. The reason is is that they’re learning from the company. They’re learning from Dr. A’s habits of health. They’re losing weight through the medifast plan. The health coach is simply walking them through the programs, being their accountability partner and being their encourager. What you’re doing is you’re simply going to, usually the first week until they can get into that fat burning state, you’re talking to them each day, but once they wake up out of bed on day three or four feeling terrific with lots of energy and sleeping better than they were before, even that early on, then you don’t have to talk to them as much. It’s about, typically at that point, we’re connecting with them about once a week, either through email, texting or phone call, whatever they want to do. Busy people typically like to email or text; others like to talk, especially if they’re having any problems, and then basically it’s about a three to five minute phone conversation if you do, so it’s really not that bad.
