CEO of Serotonin Centers - Eric Casaburi

CEO of Serotonin Centers - Eric Casaburi

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So I was born in Staten Island, New York, around
age ten, though we moved to New Jersey. We lived
in a small town called Marlborough, which was Mammouth County,
which is in central New Jersey. By the way, some
people didn't believe central New Jersey exists. They only know
North Jersey and South Jersey. There is a central Jersey.
It's Mammouth County. If you're from there, we know it exists.
And I did most of my formative years there, so,
you know, junior high school, high school made some of

(00:23):
my best friend my greatest relationships, a lot of our family.
That was where we planted our roots, and growing up there,
it was great I had. We lived in a upper
middle class area at the time. There was a step
up my you know, my father was a blue collar worker,
was a police officer, became an entrepreneur himself, got into
the back then it was the coin and gold business.

(00:45):
It was a coin shop. Now those are jewelry stores today,
but back then when he started there was they were
coin shops and he just worked there on the weekends,
and then the owner of that shop had asked him
to work there a little more frequently, you know, my
dad had that charismatic personality about him and started his
entrepreneurial journey, which actually was the entrance and for me
was the kind of the first experience of seeing it firsthand,

(01:08):
was witnessing what he was doing there a youngster, but
I didn't understand it at the time. So I went
off to college and played some football in college, wound
up getting my shoulder injury that stopped that endeavor. It
was a great experience. I was always into working out
and exercising, so being an athlete, I was very young
into weightlifting and working out in gym's. My career in

(01:31):
the fitness space actually started when I was a teenager.
I wanted to work out in a fitness center, and
my mother was like, well, we're not We're not have
the money to pay for a gym membership. We're not
going to do that. She says, you can go get
a job there and then you can work out there
for free, And that's exactly what wounds up happening, and
that was my first career move into the fitness space.
Was cleaning urinal cakes and cleaning up locker rooms and

(01:52):
dusting the machines, picking up plates off the floor, all
the glorious jobs in a fitness center and in the
gym space. But it was really incredible because I loved
being in the gyms I did. I really was something
I actually was passionate about, and so much so that
when I was I think I was fifteen turning sixteen,
I lied about my age on a personal training certificate

(02:12):
just so I could take the course, not because I
wanted to be a trainer, because I wanted the knowledge
for me so I can continue to get bigger and stronger,
because I wanted to play football at the next level
of college. And I wound up being really good at
communicating that knowledge to other people. So the owner of
the gym at the time, you know, he allowed me
to do some of the intro exercise. When you joined
the gym back then, they give you like a free

(02:33):
intro session, and I was you know, they loved how
I was doing the clients because I would really get
into it, like I would go beyond an intro session
like I would if you know, if Missus Jones came
in and she was just going to learn how to,
like you know, get started on the little circuit, I
would really dive in and explain to her why this
muscle group did this, and how how the muscles attached
point of origin, point of insertion. Like, I got a
little science team, but I loved it because I loved

(02:54):
biomechanics and I understood it. That being said, I went
off to college and while I was playing sports, I
had a major exercise science again, just to gain more
knowledge about fitness and exercise. I wound up dropping out
of college. So I'm one of those stories where I'm
from the school of hard knocks. In my career, I
had an opportunity to get into the fitness business. Now.
All through my college years I worked as a trainer

(03:15):
in the gyms. That was kind of how I made
my side money while I was going through school. The
career path happened rather serendipitously. A friend of mine had
asked another friend that said, Hey, we know that Eric
works in all these gyms. You know, would he be
interested in getting involved in this in this project, we're
going to open a fitness center. It was in brick,

(03:35):
New Jersey, Southern New Jersey now, and it wound up
being an incredible opportunity. The stories is a great one.
It's probably we should make a TV movie. Out of it.
It's because we didn't have two nickels to rub together.
The deal was we had to get an SBA loan
and we needed a down payment of sixty thousand dollars
for this particular SBA loan, and I had to come

(03:57):
up with thirty. And my partner of that particular they
had come with thirty. He went to his father, and
then I went to my father and said, hey, here's
this opportunity. And he said. My dad said to me, well,
I'll tell you what. I'll give you half of the thirty,
but you got to go to your two uncles to
get the other half. So I'll give you fifteen. Go
get seventy five from Uncle Buddy and Uncle Frank. And
the best part of that story is how it really

(04:18):
wound up ending. So I was able to convince Uncle
Buddy and Uncle Frank, told them what we were going
to do. How are we going to do it? My
father said, one other condition for me is you've got
to go work in this gym. I drive pasted it
every day. The parking lots packed in the morning when
I passed it, the parking lots packed at night when
I passed it. They're definitely doing something right. Go work
in this place. I don't care Ticka and I dine.
I think it was minimum wage, was like six bucks
six twenty five an hour job. And I did, and

(04:41):
I learned a tremendous amount. I stayed in the mornings early.
I came in and I would I would walk around
while they were setting up the facility. I would stay
after the gym close and I would follow the gentleman
around who cleaned the place. Asked him, you know what,
why do you use that solution on the rubber mattin?
Why do you use this on the upholstery. I'd spent
my lunches with the billing woman and asked about understanding

(05:01):
electronic funds, transfers and credit card machines and how they
Why when we write up a membership agreement do we do?
I just was. I was a student there, more of
a student than I ever was when I was in
college or when I was in high school. And I
learned so much on the job training. And that was
a prerequisite from my followed to say okay, and I
had to come by the way. I had to come
back and report to them what I had learned, you know,

(05:22):
and we did. Hear like a weekly meeting was crazy.
But now in the back and I'm like, it was
the greatest thing that we ever did. And it was
a good process because it actually brought us really closer
and I think he respected me more through my journey
as an entrepreneur because we did that. We opened up
that gym. It was very geographically successful. And I say
geographically successful we were in the right place at the
right time because we made a ton of mistakes, but

(05:43):
we still crushed it as a business. That led to
my first endeavor of expansion and scale. I had opened
up a second gym at that time. I went to
my father and said, Hey, we're going to do this
second part. So when you back up and you go
to the first one, you look at, well, how did
you guys know afford all this? And you know we
had this SBO. Now think about the bank in the

(06:04):
names I'm going to use, right, So back then it
was First Union Bank, which was the predecessor to Wacoba,
which was the predecessor I think today's Wells Fargo through acquisition.
So it was First Union was the bank. And we
had the joke in the office that we would write
the checks to my father, my uncle, my partner's father
first on the first of the month before we would
write the check to the bank. And the reason was was,

(06:25):
and I joked about the several interviews, was because my
uncle was my father and my partner's father would show
up at the front door to baseball that the bank
was never going to do that. So we made sure
those guys always got paid first. They got first dollar
in and first dollar out, and it worked incredibly well.
Opened up a second gym. My father and I worked
together on that project early on. He came in as

(06:46):
mind already investor on that that particular facility. Then subsequently
opened up a third third facility, fitness center, and then
I decided I was going to scale this as a
franchise business model, and I had created the brand Retrofitness,
and that was my my It's into the franchising space,
which you know they call it trial by fire like
that was, you know, I learned a lot during that
whole process, especially the early process, because we really knew

(07:09):
how to operate gyms really really well, and we know
how to build them out and scale them and run
multiple centers. And I loved the help and wellness space,
and we had a very good niche at the time
when we launched that brand. And I look back now
and I my career as I built that brand, and
you know, we grew that as I was the CEO

(07:29):
of that company for a while to you one hundred
and fifty three locations, you know, when I was there,
and you know, we did an incredible amount of revenue
system wide, and I didn't even realize it really because
I was just heads down and building this thing. You know,
you know, had a great team around me, wonderful, wonderful
people over the many years we were in that business,
building that brand. That brand, you know, it's still growing today.

(07:50):
It's it's I still love the fitness space. I think
it's an incredible opportunity not only for business, but for
the human races just to stay healthy. But during that time,
I had started to realize that there was the health
space was iterating, and it was iterating in such a
manner that it was you know, in the fitness industry

(08:10):
and a lot of businesses talk about attrition and retention,
and in our space, it was hyper hyper sensitive because
if someone joined the gym, there was a statistic and
you may have heard this, or some of your listeners
may have heard this that in the first six weeks
of a gym membership, sixty percent of people cancel or quit.
And if you think about it, right, they're sweating, they're
in a little bit of pain, they're sore. It's not

(08:32):
the most fun thing to do for some people, such
when you're getting started, if you've never done this before,
and if they don't get the results, and it takes adaptation,
takes a period of time, right physical adaptation, whether strength
or or appearance to happen. So unfortunately it doesn't have
a quick enough of some people they leave. You know,
if you take me to a tennis court and I
get sore and my arm hurts, I can't hit the

(08:52):
ball over the net, I'm crapped. I don't want to
come back to this. I'm not going to do that.
So the goal is you're always fighting against that to
get people to stay long enough to see the initial result.
And then they're bit by the bug. And then people
that are just you know, they become they become disciples
of fitness. They love it, they talk about it, they
tell everyone about they love it. And that's kind of
like when you get bitten and they say, bitten by

(09:12):
that bug, You really do, and it never stops for
most people. So in that business, we were very had
to focus on looking at a chrition and retention. When
I started that brand, I targeted a very specific audience.
It was Generation of Acts because it was my generation.
I'm currently today fifty eight years old. I'm going to
be fifty one in a few months as we sit here.
And that group then was in their twenties and early thirties,

(09:34):
and they were a great target because the baby boomer
who was who the industry wanted to chase. But if
you look at someone like my father, they grew up
thinking the Marlborough man on a horse with a cigarette
was a hero. That's not a good fitness target in
my opinion. So I didn't look that direction. I looked
in a completely different direction for the customer base I
wanted to attract. And they were great because the generation
next grew up with physical education in school, they understood performance,

(09:56):
they were starting to make money in the workforce. They
could afford your memberships, and that's who I targeted, and
that's who we went after. In marketing and then design
and in services. It was a very good market for us.
But that group, twenty years later is now in a
very very large group that we talk about it our
current brand at Serotonin our anti aging centers because we

(10:20):
have a hyper focus on hormone replacement therapy or hormone
optimization therapy HOT or HRT. There's two different acronyms there.
So I started to notice this attention and attrition issue
and people would talk about, you know, change out the
TVs on the treadmill, you know, make clean up the
locker rooms, make them, you know, do some certain things
in there, or make make a different type of waiting area.

(10:42):
I was saying they were at a machine gun fight
with a rock in their hand for attention nutrition issues.
That was not the answer if you look at it
from more deeper science, if you looked at blood work,
this group is the cohort of people that were losing
one to two percent of their hormone, their testostero master
hormone per year in a decline the natural aging process
and has this all of us, but nobody understood that.

(11:03):
But what happens there from a health standpoint is you
wind up with lower muscle mass, lower libido, higher blood pressure,
terrible a one ceeds what they call metabolic syndrome. All
of these things create an environment for metabolic syndrome and
become very unhealthy. And you also don't look and feel
the same way you did when you were doing the
same exact routine maybe a decade before, maybe two or

(11:24):
three years before. And most people think, oh, I did
stall off a cliff. My health just fought No. It
was happening very slowly, a death by a thousand cuts,
but they no one know it. Many were not aware
of how to face this challenge, any having the tools
to base the challenge. So I myself also fell into
that category. But my wife was a true inspiration for

(11:45):
the Saratonin brand because she went into perimenopause and early
menopause very very early, because we had she had a
series of miscarriages that along the way. We have four
wonderful healthy children who were very blessed with today. But
it wasn't an easy path to get to where we
went and it wound up being you know, traumatic on

(12:06):
her endocrine system. Now, this happens to a lot of
when we see women in thirty five to forty years
old in our centers at are in PERRYMANNOPAUSA, and they
don't know. They like Kim, they didn't even know what
was happening. She's like, she thought she was having a
nervous breadtwn. She's like, my skin's on fire. I don't
know what's wrong. These are hot flash symptoms, by the way,
and she's like, I feel like I'm losing my mind.
And I she couldn't sleep at night, and all these
things were, you know, for a forty year old with

(12:28):
a then our fourth child was one, so she was like,
she didn't she was. It scared her. So we started
through research and then we had realized that after going
to three different OBG. Ryan type doctors, the third one
actually said, let's test her hormones because the first two
didn't give the greatest answers and responses to this challenge
for her that certainly weren't solutions. And I looked at

(12:50):
the doctor like test he harmon literally know, because I'm
thinking testosterones it for her, guy? And what are we tested?
Hormones were written but not realizing that, you know, testosterone
is a master hormones is very important for men and women.
Estrogen especially especially it is very important for women and
Kim's levels of both were very very low. Factor estrogen
was almost on Tracy Moll. The stosterone was a single digit,
which is really really bad. So we then looked into

(13:14):
Harmer placement therapy for and it was like boom, the
lights went on and then we saw how no and
physically did she change and feel better, but emotionally and
like and there's it was just such an incredible and
I was very into with that experience because I was
part of it, so I got to really see it,
hands on it. And then I realized, oh my gosh,
there are so many people that are suffering from this,
so many people. And then I'm like thinking about men.

(13:34):
I started thinking about data, like members that were canceling.
Why would they cancel? They would get frustrated there. These
are clients that were with us for years and all
of a sudden they would just stop working out, like
you know what what because there was diminishing returns for them, right,
but why am I putting the time? And they think
not even wasn't the money. It was just like, why
am I wasting my time doing this? It's not working
anymore for me. Let me go try the South Beach diet.
The Atkins diet, that this diet of that, let me
go try this new, new, new, you know, type of workout,

(13:58):
searching for you know, the next pot of goal. But
really they had to just look inside. And I spent
a lot of time since and then paying attention to
the medical side. I started to go into different types
of conferences. Where I used to go to all the
fitness conferences, I started to add on these other conferences
on my own time. I was going where medical doctors were,
I was going to the anti aging conferences. I started
learning about biohappy before it was a cool word, you

(14:19):
know when when when it was Now it's almost like
like a meme on the internet, but it was I
was doing some things back then that today I was.
I was like, wow, I'm so happy this is generally
accept because back then I was like, what are you crazy?
Why are you doing that? What are you doing in ASNA?
You know, you know, taking ice bats colpy Why why
would anyone do all of that crazy stuff unless you're
injured as an athlete, And come to find out, there's

(14:40):
all these incredible modalities that really help assist our health
and also our hormone health. So that was the reason
the budding of the inspiration behind the brand for serotonin
and which is your happy harmon and your feel good hormone. Like,
that's what we want to do, is people want people
to leave there and they feel happy. That's why we
Chill was the brand and the name for serotonin. And

(15:04):
that journey really starts at the pain of what was
going on with my own life and it kind of
ends with an incredible brand and you know, and now
helping you know, thousands of and hopefully will be hundreds
of thousands of women as we go forward.

Speaker 2 (15:17):
Well, listen, I appreciate you sharing all that, and I
think it's you know, it makes a lot of sense
that you were in the fitness industry for a long
time and the correlation about what you did then and
what you're doing now with Serotonin. So let's do this.
I think you were kind of hinting at it. We're
going to talk about all the programs and all the
cool things that you do. By the way, the website's gorgeous.
We'll give that a couple times during our interview to everybody.

(15:38):
But let's talk about mission and vision. What are they
for the company?

Speaker 1 (15:42):
So I would say one of the missions I think
we have for the company is because mission has a
has a has an ending point. Like you know, you
talk about vision and mission and all these things, and
we talk about all of it, but the mission is
very specific. I think we want it. We would like
to change healthcare into self care because we think that
needs to be that that significant way it's named and

(16:03):
thought about these industry is. Our goal is to give
the power of the information to each of the individual clients.
And we don't even call the patients because patients are sick.
People are our members or clients. We would like to
get the population that is looking to get help to
be able to understand how to do that, how to

(16:24):
read their own blood labs, what tests are important? What
should my A one CV, what should my cardiolympic profile
look like? What should my hormone pineal profile look like?
So one of our missions is to really educate as
many people as we possibly can on self care, asking
good questions. When you're sitting with your general practitioner. These
are very smart people. As doctors and nurses that are out,

(16:44):
they're incredibly smart people. You have to offer them the
information you need for your goal. And I think what
we'd like to also do is be the flag holder
and the leader in the space of anti aging and
longevity because we understand to what it takes. It's it's
there's it's a it's a very patient type business. It's

(17:04):
you know, you go to a general practitioner's office or
your your usual you know, dock in the box places.
Those those services have to happen very quickly. You have
to come in, get diagnosed, you've got to be out
of there, and usually less than seven minutes. And that's
actually a real number for some of these places because
otherwise the business model doesn't work, you know, for them
to run that facility. Our is a much different like
we we know that it's it's intimate, it's concierge type

(17:28):
style because it needs to be that way because there
it's a deeper level and we're talking about deeper things,
and there's and and and it's constantly iterating, it's constantly changing.
So our goal with that and our vision is to
make our services and what we do more accessible to
everyone and anyone, but right now, to at least put

(17:48):
the information out there to everyone of what they should
be paying attention to, what they need to be because
as you may or may not know, the last decade
of most people's lives in our country is miserable. So
that's the optimizing portion of help span. Help right, You
want to talk about the healthy part of the life,
and then you know the longevity point. The life span

(18:10):
is the length of it. But if you look at
the last portion of it, it's generally pretty miserable for
most people. They get very very ill. There. You're managing
death at that point, let's call it what it is.
You're taking tons of medications. You're not living a happy,
vibrant life. You're not doing the things you were doing
just a decade prior to that, let alone twenty years
prior to that. I would love to see people living

(18:31):
into their eighties, nineties, and one hundred living a vibrant
life like they were, even if they were when they
were fifty or sixties. I was saying, when they're twenty five,
don't have to go riding thirty miles on a bicycle
or dead lifting two hundred and fifty or three hundred pounds.
But let's let's just make it a vibrant way to
live where they can they can enjoy life, you know,
play and can be vibrant and happy.

Speaker 2 (18:50):
Let's do this, Eric before we get into all the
different kind of programs and cool things that you offer
your clients out there, and already the thousands of people
that you're helping, and and I'm with you, hopefully it's
hundreds of thousands of people in the coming months and years.
If you were to give everybody who is new to
serotonin anti Aging centers about what you do, that thirty

(19:10):
thousand foot view, what would you tell them that you
exactly do.

Speaker 1 (19:13):
It with Serotonin Anti Aging Center that SPA operates t
really in four buckets. The primary bucket is the hormone
optimization therapy. We do a lot of medical weight loss
or what I call weight management, and we could talk
a little bit about each of these. Of course, we
do a lot of aesthetics, so things from facial aesthetics,
micro needle ank PRP fillers and neurotoxins. And we also

(19:34):
do a lot of things in their space of recovery,
so hyperbatter chambers and ivs and red light therapy photo
biomodulation is the other term for that. So those four buckets,
you know, kind of complete the human right if you
pay attention to each of those, and we service all
of them via advice, sometimes prescription medications, sometimes by them

(19:57):
in nutraceutical supplementation. Other times it's just program programmatic workouts exercise, eating, nutrition, etc.

Speaker 2 (20:05):
So on the website you talked about four buckets, but
as we go through this and maybe you can delve
in each one just a little bit and kind of
give us a hint of what people would be up
against and what you're looking at.

Speaker 1 (20:14):
And by the way, there's so.

Speaker 2 (20:15):
Much information which is really cool on your website, but
you do have weight control, and of course there's a
lot of sub menus in that. There are hormones which
you've addressed a little bit, aesthetics, and then immunity. Can
you talk about all four for our listeners.

Speaker 1 (20:26):
So the primary one we look at right away, and
let me back up. It all starts out with that
first interview that we have with our new client, because
we get some blood work. We first want to understand
what are your challenges, why are you here, and what
can we help solve for? And then we want to
widen that funnel as wide as possible to include things
that you may and or may not even be thinking

(20:47):
about that you probably should be so we start off
with a seventy plus point to get seventy six point labs,
and then we also do another another set of readings.
Who we do a scan of your body where we
get your visceral fat, your lean body mass, you're boned dnsy,
so we want to see what you're comprised of right
to make sure. If you've got a high level of

(21:08):
visual fat, we need to talk to you about that.
So we start off with data and information and then
we go into each of the categories of help. So
someone might come in and for a challenge of weight loss,
of what they would call weight loss. They feel like
they're weight maybe their BMI is very high, they don't
feel good, they don't like how they look in the
bathing street, they don't like how they look in the
mirror with their partner, et cetera. That client, when we

(21:29):
run labs on them, Yes, we have tons of solutions,
several of tools to solve for weight loss or or
body composition management. I like to call a body composition
manager because it's not just about how much you weigh
on a scale. In fact, scale weight is one of
the worst identifiers of health and or what you should
be it's actually lean body mass and body composition that

(21:50):
we care most about. So we're going to say, okay,
because if somebody's twohuge of pounds but they're you know,
they've got their lean body mask and prizes of eighty
percent of that and they're only nineteen or twenty percent
body fat, that you look pretty good. But if somebody
is you know, sixty percent body fat and you know
forty percent leading body massling density, bone and muscle, then
that's a problem you got. You're a very unhealthy person,

(22:12):
and we've probably got to help fix that. So we
look at those That's why we do those other tests
and exams. But I will say the blood work does
tell a lot. It's very telling because generally, you know,
certain things go hand in hand, especially inflammation as part
of that. So once we see that picture, if you
come in for you know, what you think is a
weight issue, and we run your labs, and yet you
may have a higher A one C, which is maybe

(22:32):
you're pre diabetic, and that certainly you should probably address
that and we'll talk to you about nutrition and activity, exercise,
et cetera. But we also might notice that you're you know,
you have a very low testosterol leveel. You know, the
medical practitioner might have a conversation that might say, hey,
you know, we can solve this by going after just
the medical weight loss ason. As you know, there's there's
you know, a tremendous amount of tools for that. You

(22:54):
see them on TV as a matter of fact, now
they're everywhere. But we we like to do that. We
make it very very personalized. We don't believe in ourlind scripting.
I think that's a very dangerous place to play, by
the way. That's why we do it in person and
we have our people come in because it's we see
our clients weekly when they're on this journey. It's very
very important because we are managing the lean body mask component.
We don't want you just to lose weight. So we

(23:14):
could address just that challenge. But we would say, you
know what, you're probably feeling this, this and this as well,
and let's have this conversation missus Smith or mister Smith.
And it could be that they have a very low testosterone,
they might have a very high cortosol level, or some
other things that we'll notice and there might be a
high level of information. Maybe there's CRP or their sea

(23:35):
reactive protein is very elevated. So we'll address all of
those because if we can, you know, it's like playing whackable.
If we can knock down as many as we can,
you'll get your end result what you want regardless, you'll
get it much faster, it'll be a much safer way
of getting it, but you'll also be able to manage
and maintain those results. So we start maybe in one
bucket that you came in for a chief complaint of X,

(23:56):
but it might be Y and Z also that we
wind up addressing just through due diligence you and your body,
and then we put together a really strong program to
put you on a path to get you to that
positive outcome you're looking for safely, efficiently, and with a coach,
because we also assign a health coach to all of
our clients that come into our memberships, because we know
you're going to need some assistance with choosing your macro nutrients,

(24:18):
your protein, your carbohydrates, and your fat, how many of each,
how much of each? What should I eat? There's a
lot of good questions, and there's a lot of information
on the internet that could be very misleading and confusing,
so we take a lot of the confusion out and
then we also will teach you what supplements you're going
to need based on your blood work. You're probably deficient
in maybe vitamin D or D three. We want to
make sure we match that with a good nutraceutical that

(24:39):
would help you to get that and absorb that properly,
and then make sure you're having the right methilation nutrients
in your body so you can get the right absorption.
There are so many wonderful things once you have the
plan in front of you that you're like, as, wow,
you don't know what you don't know, right, So yeah,
we try to get you past that. Well.

Speaker 2 (24:55):
You know, it's a good point and my early takeaway
from hearing you talk about what you offer. Knowledge is power, right,
and there's so many people that don't know what their
blood work is like. You know, for me, I've had
an autoimmune disease, and my listeners know this. I've had
RA since I was twenty one. And you know, this
is pre internet, pre social media. I knew nothing. I
thought it was an island by myself. But as the

(25:16):
Internet came on, the education came on. What medication I'm
taking what's good for my body, my decisions I want
to make. I kind of correlated to somebody being introduced
to you and your team, Eric and all this knowledge
they did know about. And while I might be a
little depressing about whether they're overweight, or their home rooms
out of whack, or aesthetics, whatever is not working in
the party and the body, they have an opportunity with

(25:38):
your team members to start to fix those things in
a very positive way and to not only have a
better quality of life, but elongate their life.

Speaker 1 (25:46):
And I imagine that when.

Speaker 2 (25:47):
You talk to your clients, it must be elated that
they have all this knowledge that they didn't have before
and we're going to work on it and we've got
solutions here, right.

Speaker 1 (25:54):
I think that's one of the most amazing secondary outcomes
of this entire business and this entire process and endeavor
is we have clients that come to us and they're
just so grateful and thankful because, like I said, knowledge
is power, and we give is We give a lot
on the hullage. It's like drinking information from a firehole,
but we break it down into into into manageable, digestible bites.

(26:16):
But people come in and they don't realize that red
light therapy or photobiomeodulation now incredible. This for inflammation. A
one of the top athletes have been been on these
these doing these things for years, you know, and for
all of this this stuff. Hyperbioic therapy is incredible for
lots of things, the information, getting the body oxydated properly,
you know, passing the brain blood baltery, all of these

(26:38):
different things that happen. But they don't they don't know
what they don't know, and it's it's understandable. But when
we sit with them, we say, hey, let's try this.
Let's try this. By the way, this you know, you're
you seem to have a high level of stress, physical
and emotional. You know, we're gonna put you on our
serial cortisol support. It's good. We're gonna it's an herbal
supplement to just bring down that cortosol level and naturally
gets you a little bit relaxed, gets gets some information

(26:59):
down on them bodies. And so there's and we put
it in combination, so we might be you wind up on
a hyperbaric chamber, you might wind up at red light
therapy taking a cortosol sports just amountge that one component,
which is then you know, benefits so many other areas
of your body. And we have found very often when
someone's cortosol is really high, we've often seen inverted low
testosterone because those things to work in an inverted fashion

(27:21):
often uh and and so we can simultaneously, you know,
manage both of those, bringing up the efficacy of both
sides of the of the prescription. So we love to
hear clients come to us and say the exact sents. Hey,
I didn't even know that that was happening. We did
a full This is a great story. We had an
executive here in one of our centers in Orlando, and

(27:45):
he came in and he did our thing. He was
coming from Harmer re placement therapy. His his wife was
a client, and he had a very high PSA. But
he had correlated also a very high CRP. Now, normally
when you see a high PSA, yeah, you go and
they'll give you an antibiotics. Maybe you have proseetytis, you've
got something and you're gp might just and rightfully so
just give you that script for a couple of weeks.
But the nurse practitioner said, well, you should probably go

(28:07):
right to a urologist with this one, because this high
inflammation marker here is very high, and this PSA number
is pretty high. Those two together is I don't like
how that looks for you. So he sure didn't go
to a Eurologists referred him out and he had prostate cancer.
Lot of no idea, My goodness. And he came back
and he you know, he he had had the prostate

(28:30):
surgery and KNA GOV he's healthy. Lay is incredible. Everything,
thank God, worked out great. He was so grateful and
thankful because he actually said he was. I probably just
would have kept dealing with it, thinking, oh, I'm going
to wake up and pee a couple of times a night.
That's normal. You know, you're getting older, hear about this,
you know, as you get older as a guy, that happens.
He was I never would have addressed this and until

(28:52):
this probably became a very big problem for me. Yeah,
and you know it was. It was such a great
byproduct of just sitting with someone and spending some additional
time reviewing all of it. And not to say that
it may not have gotten picked up somewhere else, but
the correlation of those you know, because we give you
it's a multi page, you know, print out of your

(29:13):
blood work and we're done. Yeah. And it's a lot
to go through and it takes time. Yeah. So it's
those kinds of things that I'm more proud of than
some of the other outcomes I see.

Speaker 2 (29:23):
Yeah, And I can see and hear your passion Eric
for your company, but also changing lives, which I just
love when it comes to people's health and how they
look and how they perceive themselves. And that's a great story,
by the way, and I'm sure you've got handsfuls of that.
I didn't want to ask you about the industry just
in general because I know things are going well for
you and your team, But are there any current challenges
in the industry right now for you?

Speaker 1 (29:42):
I think the current challenge is adoption, right, it's just
people understanding and it's becoming more and more. I would say,
if you talked about especially for women, like I mean
just a few years ago, let alone ten years ago
or five years ago, like it was very tabood, even
talk about hormo and hormor fasial therapy. It's I think
the adoption now in the knowledge and there's a couple

(30:03):
of great books like doctor Peter A. Tier wrote a
great book called Outlaid where he addresses the who when
they did that study that scared women away from from
harmorwe placement therapy, And it was terrible how they did it,
and the data was skewed, and they and they and
they didn't do a good job. And doctor Tiz does
a wonderful job of explaining this in grave detail in

(30:24):
the book. And it was a shame because about a
decade of women did not get the help they absolutely need,
and now they can't because they're they're aged out in
a group that probably wouldn't start the therapy today if
they're in their seventies. Let's as say, where they could
have if they were in their fifties and sixties. So
I think adoption is the challenge, and I think we're
seeing so much more of it. I laughed, like back

(30:44):
back in the day, was no one ever talked about
who got you know, botox or or a micro dealing.
It was like especially if you're a woman even or
a man like even myself. Now you see people getting
these get these strategies on Instagram and they're showing it.
Like even when I get one done, I put I
put it out there like I wouldn't a million years
have told you I would do skincare stuff and I
do micro needling. I and I wear you know, I
have an incredible product called cerro exocerum. It's a plant,

(31:07):
exoso and vitamin see it all kinds of all the
great things. I put it on daily. But my skin
today looks better than it did in pictures that I
look at. As I look back on my Facebook photos
and other photos, I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm like,
I look younger today than I did, you know, ten
years ago, which is it's wild.

Speaker 2 (31:22):
Yeah, I tell you what I would submit to you though,
and I'm a little bit I'm ten years older than you.
But I will say this, there was a time, especially
from I'm on the cusp of a baby boomer generation X. Okay,
so we just threw dirt on it and moved on rather.
That was the way, right, That was the way to
do it. But I will tell you since I, you know,
maybe turned fifty, you know, with eyesight starting to go

(31:43):
and worried about my weight. I'm a former athlete like you,
so I played at a high level. But I noticed
in my peer group and even people just a little
bit younger than me, and the the late millennials and
the later generation exers too.

Speaker 1 (31:56):
Is that everybody started talking.

Speaker 2 (31:58):
About weight, their skin, their looks. And now I know
you see this, but there as many men's products or
are for skin and hairs that are for women. And
I know and listen, I know gals that we still
pay cheaper than you do for stuff. It's a giant
crime that's going on out there. But that's been going
on for a long time that we could get into.
But my point is is that I think when it

(32:18):
comes to anybody that is say forty and over, skincare,
hair care, their way, how they feel, how they look
is now paramount to just about everybody out there, which
is really great for you.

Speaker 1 (32:29):
It's interesting. I remember one of my first conversations with
doctor Jacombe, one of our hormone mentors. He said to me,
he goes, people should start Harmer place with therapy ten
years before they think they actually need it, right, because
there certain things that happen that you now have to fix,
like skin creepiness and other things that now you've got
to like you're working under, like you're fighting backwards, where
if you started when you should have, and you stood

(32:50):
up to my twenty year old kids both have full
hormone panels, so we know their baseline. And I recommend him,
don't care what age you are and teenager, get find
out where you are today. If you're younger and you think, well,
I'm too young for this, or if you're in your
thirties you think I'm too young for as well, at
least see where you are, because when that declient starts
to happen, you'll have at least a base point of
how did I feel at thirty when I did this test?

(33:13):
And now I how I'm thirty five and I'm tired
at three pm. I'm taking a nap, I'm falling a
sleeping in my desk. I wake up exhausted. I don't see. Okay,
now you're symptomatic. My libidos chained. I'm not getting any
muscle mass anymore. I'm getting a pouch in my belly.
I never had that. What's happened? I never had fat
on my hips? What's happening? Okay, Now let's go get
your labs done. You know I recommend you get your
labs on every year. You know, we do them twice

(33:35):
a year, you know, and sometimes we do them four
times a year for some people that really like to get,
you know, really crazy with it. But it's simple, it's quick,
it's easy. But I will tell you that once you
have that baseline, and that's why I'm so happy I
have it for my children because you know, we saw
some of the markets, like we saw my daughter she
had high home assistance. Okay, well that's an easy fix.
And if that's not fixed, which we figured out with
my wife, which was a very dangerous thing, which was

(33:56):
would cause those problems I spoke about earlier during pregnancy,
she just needed a methylated fully and that will bring that.
We have. We actually have a product that brings down
high homo assistancau is at least all kinds of other
ruckus in your body. But these check things that like
you can manage starting younger, and now you talk about it,
as you said, as you're getting older and you start saying, well,
you know this hurts a little bit. That hurts a
little bit if you start managing these things. You like,

(34:20):
I train and like this morning my workout was that
of my twenty year old workoutstuff. In fact, I work
out with my twenty two year old son and we
just I and I get after it with him, and
a lot most of the time I will finish after
he finishes, if you like, I bury him like and
I do it on purpose. But I can only do
that because I manage my information. I manage all of
my my nutrition very well. I manage all of this

(34:40):
and I do it in multiple buckets. And one of
the most important things you can manage is sleep. And
it's free. And it's free. You know. These are the
things that are so important that we talk about that
we talk about sleep hygiene. I learned that from doctor
Mita Singh, one of the top sleep therapists in the world,
and my Opinionsh is incredible. I've had many conversations with her.
We've talked about her on my own podcast, and she

(35:02):
she talks about sleepage and how important is and these
are just the things you do. It's a curriculum, Dennis.
It's not like you need a medication or you got
to take a metaltone or this and that. There are
supplements that will assist, but there are it's a curriculum
of what you do when you stop with your bright light,
when you switch off your phone, when you stop eating,
when you should stop drinking water and everything and everything matters,

(35:24):
when you should cut off caffeine. All of these things
are important. But all these things are habits, so they're free,
just discipline.

Speaker 2 (35:29):
Yeah, yeah, it's a really good point. Well, let's do this.
I do want to get some final thoughts from you.
But before we do that, I think it's important to
talk about once again getting involved, and we'll give the
website a couple of times here before we finish up,
about how somebody can reach out to you and then
you know the different things that you offer out there,
which are many folks by the way, But also too,
I do want to talk about franchising, and I did

(35:50):
want to ask you first how many locations do you
have right now?

Speaker 1 (35:53):
We have for more locations opening right now, so we'll
have about twelve or fourteen, depending on locations open. We've
got pipeline of about another seventy in the pipeline of
the units that are opening on Multiunity development. And we're
growing and we've got a great franchise base. But the
franchising business is interesting and unique. I tell people franchising

(36:13):
is a type of business if you were an electrician,
you wouldn't start sweating types as a plumber because you've
been trained as electricians. So you might be great at
running a coffee shop, it doesn't mean you're going to
be great as a franchise or in the coffee business,
because because the franchise business is an education business, a
service business. You're end customer, of course is the person
that is using or buying your widget, but your real

(36:36):
customer is your franchise e and their people. So what
we do in the franchising space really really well, because
I've done it for many many years, is we build
out you know, incredible teaching systems, the great LMS. We
have a wonderful learning module system that really helps. It
allows our franchisees to have access to training methods and

(36:57):
ways to onboard staff, to ways to engage clients, marketing
and all these wonderful things that are in the bucket
of what you should expect. But it's really a business
of servicing and understanding, you know, what you're doing as
opposed to not what the business is doing. You know,
so our business is slightly different than the bins are
running one of those centers. Of course, you understand how

(37:18):
to run that business, but we really focus in on
teaching and training people.

Speaker 2 (37:24):
I like that you've done that, and as all the
things that you offer to through the business, it seems
like you've left no stone unturned. You've really well thought
about this with your team, about all the offerings and
even down to the franchising, and I love that you
do that, so thank you for all that.

Speaker 1 (37:40):
Let's do this.

Speaker 2 (37:41):
I could go on for hours talking to you about
It's so fun because you and I are both in
the fitness and looking good and feeling good. With that said,
I just want to give you some final thoughts and
a recap and kind of put everything together for our listeners,
and then we'll give the website one more time at
the end. But the floor is here, sir.

Speaker 1 (37:56):
I think if anyone of your listeners is hearing this,
you know there's a couple of important takeaways. You know,
the business side of this, the anti aging, the mets
BAB business. You know, it falls into that health and
wellness category, which is an incredible category. It's very warning.
I wake up every day, Dennis, and I'm thankful for
what I get to do because I'm in a space
that I've loved since I was a kid. I love help,

(38:18):
I love wellness, I love taking care of the human body.
I think it's I think we only get one and
you've got to maximize it. And I'm in a place
where we can really make an impact. I still believe
in you must resistance train, you must exercise, you have
to move. Movement is critical for success and for the
human body. So I love the fitness space. I love
that whole industry. But this is just the next level

(38:39):
of what it's going. It's iterating to be, and it's
a necessity because we can now have so much more
knowledge about what can be and what you in the tools,
and the fact that we're able to put this into
a business model that makes it accessible to more people,
scalable through a franchising business model allows us to touch
more people at a higher rate. What a greater impact?

Speaker 2 (38:57):
Eric, what's the website for everybody?

Speaker 1 (38:59):
Www dot seratonincenters dot Com is our home website. There's
tons of information on there. There's links on there for
more franchising information. Anyone wants them to learn more about
the business side. But there's a great amount of information
about the services that we do, and even knowledge that
you might need or questions you can ask it. It's
very intuitive to use that website to learn more about
each bucket we talked about today.

Speaker 2 (39:20):
Eric, if I could lead one thing with you, and
that's a compliment. I talked to so many people in
this series over the last four years. I've done hundreds
and hundreds of people. And one of the things I
appreciate is your passion. It's coming through loud and clear,
but also that you want to help people. And I
really appreciate that because the friggin world's on fire right
now and we could use a little acts of kindness
in helping each other out but also feeling better about ourselves.

(39:41):
So can't tell you how much I appreciate your time.
Your business model is very cool, and I hope people
that are listening at least check it out and see
that there is hope. You don't have to feel the
way that you do, whether it's how you look or
how you're feeling, or your weight or your hormones or anything.
And the education folks, and you know, we said this
a couple of times during our conversation. Knowledge is power,

(40:02):
and once you know what's going on, you can fix
it out there. So I'm so glad that we get
an opportunity to talk to you about this. Eric continued success,
and thank you so much for joining us on CEO,
as you should

Speaker 1 (40:11):
Know, Thank you, Dennis, thanks for having me