Lawyer Life SUCKING the Life Out of You? This Rockstar Lawyer Ditched Law & BUILT A THRIVING FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE EMPIRE (Seriously!) ⚖️
Tired of trading your soul for billable hours? Picture this: a lawyer by day, rockstar wedding singer by night, throws away the LSAT scores and says F you to the legal grind to build a BOOMING medical business with his wife.
This ain't your grandpa's law podcast. This episode is pure CAREER REBELLION. Meet Dave Van Der Laan, the ex-lawyer who traded chasing ambulances for biohacking his health and building a thriving empire with his wife, Joya.
Intrigued? Here's what you WON'T get: A snoozefest about dusty legalese.
Here's what you WILL get:
Ready to ditch the legal drama and build a life you LOVE? Tune in for actionable advice and a healthy dose of inspiration from Dave and Joya.
Bonus! Want to learn more from Dave and unlock the full potential of your legal career (and maybe your health!)? Connect with him on:
Ditch the boring lawyer stereotype and hit play!
____________________________________
Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
Want to connect with Brian?
Follow Brian on Instagram: @thebrianglass
Connect on LinkedIn
Lawyer Life SUCKING the Life Out of You? This Rockstar Lawyer Ditched Law & BUILT A THRIVING FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE EMPIRE (Seriously!) ⚖️
Tired of trading your soul for billable hours? Picture this: a lawyer by day, rockstar wedding singer by night, throws away the LSAT scores and says F you to the legal grind to build a BOOMING medical business with his wife.
This ain't your grandpa's law podcast. This episode is pure CAREER REBELLION. Meet Dave Van Der Laan, the ex-lawyer who traded chasing ambulances for biohacking his health and building a thriving empire with his wife, Joya.
Intrigued? Here's what you WON'T get: A snoozefest about dusty legalese.
Here's what you WILL get:
Ready to ditch the legal drama and build a life you LOVE? Tune in for actionable advice and a healthy dose of inspiration from Dave and Joya.
Bonus! Want to learn more from Dave and unlock the full potential of your legal career (and maybe your health!)? Connect with him on:
Ditch the boring lawyer stereotype and hit play!
____________________________________
Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
Want to connect with Brian?
Follow Brian on Instagram: @thebrianglass
Connect on LinkedIn
In a lot of ways it's made both of us feel more seen for the lives we had before, because I went from primary breadwinner bringer home of bacon and gone all the time While Joya had what was essentially a part-time business and primary childcare responsibility to now I'm the flex parent and if somebody forgot their lunch I'm the one to bring it to school. I'm not complaining about it, but I'm I'm just around the kids a lot more and it's hard. You have kids. Being around them is is a has great joy and great Not that sometimes all in a single hour, free from the legal chain, brian and a team of pros Talking about the hustle and the real life woes.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to the show. Today my guest is Dave Vanderlaan. Dave is another one of these former big law exitees and I do seem to have a whole lot of these guys on lately. But Dave has an interesting story of his own. He's left the law entirely and he is now, with his wife, building a company called Nourish House Calls, which is a functional medicine company based out of Chicago, illinois, where he lives. So, dave, welcome to the show. Brian, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me on. I immediately had a moment of panic, wondering whether you were in Chicago or some other city. To panic wondering whether you were in Chicago or some other city.
Speaker 1:We're Chicago adjacent, so we live in Westmont, which is about 20 miles or so west of the city. We do have some patients in the city, but mostly it's about a 10 mile radius of where we live, which is also our office. That's where Joy is willing to drive to do house calls and other than that, we do telemedicine services to some folks in Chicago. She's also licensed in a handful of other states. We can talk about that later if you like. But yeah, chicago is close enough for podcast purposes.
Speaker 2:So Dave and I met in Tahoe at a GoBundance event. He's one of my GoBundance brothers and Dave introduced himself to me as a recovering lawyer. And as I've gotten to know more and more of Dave's story about his experience in big law leaving the law, you know kind of the decisions that he made about what else could I go and do and now building an entrepreneurial company with his wife I thought man Dave would be a great podcast guest and you and I were riding up the ski lift in Vermont in January talking with your wife about building the new company and the challenges and the opportunities that you guys have faced. So, dave, let's start with this man. You're somebody that went to law school a little bit later in life, so you got out of college, got a master's degree in arts and then spent a bunch of time singing right.
Speaker 1:Yes, and that's only part of the story. So I'm a musician by training and temperament. I got a bachelor's degree in vocal performance and realized I was not going to set the world of opera on fire. I'm just not blessed with that giant booming voice. Now that I'm done with college and pivoted quickly to a master's degree in arts administration, I went to Indiana for that, which was a very fun time and ultimately a functionally useless degree for me, although not my law degree feels that way too a little bit. We'll get into that a little bit later. So I spent a couple of years there, made some lifelong friends and got a crippling addiction to Indiana college basketball. Got out and did work for some artistic companies for a couple of years. There's Ravinia Festival, which is in the northern suburbs of Chicago. Worked there a couple summers, did a few other things but could never really catch on to something full time. I don't necessarily recommend getting a master's degree with no experience. I don't necessarily recommend getting a master's degree with no experience. Law degree is a little bit different, but I came out overqualified educationally but underqualified with experience and it was really hard to find someone who wanted to give me an entry-level job. So I ended up just getting some sales jobs and other office jobs for a few years. And then see, I graduated from Indiana in 2003.
Speaker 1:Around 2006, I was dating and then nearly engaged to my wife, joya, and really wanted to give music one last try. So I answered a Craigslist ad male vocalist wanted, figured it would be good for a gig or two, and ended up with a wedding band empire. They had been going around. They'd been in business since the mid eighties. I believe it's called the Ken Arlen orchestra. Ken runs a handful of different bands and his flagship had had the white male singer leave, and so I became his white male singer, doing 75 to 90 gigs a year. For for about four years I was singing everything from Sinatra to Justin Timberlake and I did some rapping for the group too, which was unusual for someone with my relative lack of hip hop skills.
Speaker 2:Wow, I had questions about how we went from music major to MA in arts to number nine law school in the country and you've filled the gap with the wedding singer career.
Speaker 1:A little bit, a little bit, and just to continue that, because this does lead a little bit to the law school I was privileged to attend. I've always loved music. As I said, and as I was thinking about what could I do for a family-sustaining living because I was a few years into singing, I was married. At this point we were thinking about starting a family. That ended up happening. A little bit later I realized that I part-time professional wedding singer, part-time volunteer manager which is what I was doing with the rest of my time at a nonprofit in the city wasn't going to give me the income that I wanted to raise a family, excuse me. The other part of it is I have a pet theory called singer shelf life. I was already in my getting toward my late 20s and you can bring sexy back at that age, but once you're in your 40s, like I am now, you're a little less credible as a rock and roll singer.
Speaker 1:At a wedding it was. There was not a lot of intellectual challenge to what I was doing. I was singing the same tunes, largely over and over, weekend after weekend. Managing volunteers, while it's a noble profession, wasn't really stretching me intellectually, and so I wanted to find something that combined all of those things, and I've always been an argumentative sort ever since I was a child. So I thought maybe law school's for me and I took the LSAT, did well and applied to law schools in Chicago, and then everybody else who would send me a fee waiver and ended up getting into Northwestern and they gave me some financial aid, which was lovely. I ended up matriculating there. That was sort of there in the fall of 2008, which was ended up being a scary time to start law school. But before we get into that, I do want to tell my Harvard Law story, because the only school I applied to.
Speaker 2:I would love to tell my Harvard Law story too, but I don't have one, so go ahead with your.
Speaker 1:Harvard Law story. In fairness, mine is brief. Okay, go ahead with your Harvard law story. In fairness, mine is brief, okay. The only school outside Chicago that didn't offer me a fee waiver that I applied to was Harvard, because I thought, well, either I'll get into Harvard and that'd be awesome, and then I've got a decision to make, or I'll get rejected by Harvard and I can frame that rejection letter and hang it in my office and won't that be a great joke. I was rejected by Harvard by email. I got a two-line email from Harvard saying thanks but no thanks, and I was unwilling to print that out and frame it. So the plan didn't work out that well. I guess is my point.
Speaker 2:So, wow, I mean you must have just destroyed the LSAT right? Because 2008, while it was a hard time to go to law school, it was the worst time to graduate from college, and so law schools got flooded with applications. So that's amazing that you not only got into the number nine school, but were offered some money to go to the number nine school, and that, of course, lessens the burden and gives you some more options when you're coming out of school. But you still ended up in big law, so how did that happen?
Speaker 1:But you still ended up in big law. So how did that happen? Well, you've got to remember that the LSAT would have been fall 07, spring 08, when I was coming to the application process. So the world wasn't quite broken yet, or at least the cracks were such that not everybody had realized them, and I can't imagine that the college students thinking about next steps had realized it yet.
Speaker 1:So, that was part of it. I did do well on the LSAT. I think I got a 173. Yeah, that's pretty good. I aced one of the practice tests so I ended up feeling a little bit like I left a few points on the table, but I mean I was very pleased with that score, obviously.
Speaker 1:And yeah, northwestern is a great school, man, and not just because of its academic reputation, which I think is well-earned, or was a decade and a half ago when I was there. Law school has a well-earned reputation of being cutthroat. Of being cutthroat you read Scott Turow or you hear people's stories of tearing pages out of books in the library or people withholding information. One of the things I really loved about my Northwestern experience was a really low jerk factor. You're never going to go anywhere in life where nobody's unpleasant.
Speaker 1:But they really did a very good job, I think, of trying to find collegial people and that was really my experience there. I found a good group of friends, people I'm still close with to this day, about a half dozen of them and others you know I've warm sort of acquaintances with and that's what I was looking for as I came out. I was fortunate to summer with a firm called Wildman Herald, which doesn't exist anymore because it merged several times since, but it had the same sort of culture where you're really really trying to find people who enjoy working together, and that was really important to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, william and Mary was the same way. I and you know, and I hadn't really thought about it until you just said that, but trying to think of, you know how many jerks did I go to law school with? There's not. There's not many that come to mind. What is that guy's name?
Speaker 1:Oh, I was going to say I won't ask you to name them, but I'm sure you could.
Speaker 2:I you found your argumentative spot and you were there for 10 years. So it's not as though, okay, you got in and a couple of years later you're miserable and you're looking to get out. But I do know. One of the things that I know about you is you spent some of the time while you were a lawyer and a litigator working on outside income streams so buying real estate properties, investing in syndications so when did that financial education really start for you?
Speaker 1:I think it started a few years in. It's probably fourth year or so, and what's interesting about this, too, is that was one of the first cases that started my exit from the law, emotionally as well as financially. So I will scrub identities to protect the non-liable, but also because of our ethical obligations that last past, even the end of our legal career, I was representing someone who had bought an apartment building in Chicago in the 1980s and this was probably 2015 or so and so I saw what he had bought it for. He was a general partner, he'd syndicated this thing, and I saw what the partnership was selling it for and, as you might imagine, the Delta on a 30-year hold was pretty significant and I thought, oh boy, am I in the wrong profession.
Speaker 2:This is incredible. Once every five days, I say something like that, yeah sure.
Speaker 1:So how can I build up passive income? The other piece of this was this was a man going through a divorce. He had been in these sorts of negotiations with his soon to be ex-wife for years, on and off, and part of the part of the dispute now was in a previous settlement. What of this deal had he given to her? Was it just distributions of profits or was it equity? And, as you might imagine, on the exit that was going to be a huge difference in her payout. Alongside this, he had paid himself some distributions that a fair reading of the contract would be hard pressed to justify.
Speaker 1:So it was my job as a junior to now mid-level associate to go into court and say of course that was justified and here's why. And so I was being paid to take a side of an argument, whether I thought it was the right one or not. And I want to go back to something you said earlier, because part of the conscience pricking for me had less to do with the moral justification of the cause behind what someone was doing. It was more about did I really think this was the right legal outcome? And so I wanted to be impartial and decide the right outcome and then argue for that.
Speaker 1:And, as you well know and your listeners well know, in our adversary system that's just an untenable way to approach litigation. You are, you're very much paid to be a zealous advocate and that's that's the right thing to do within the confines of the system. It just wasn't the right thing for for me to do. That led me to the thought of well, maybe I'll become a judge. A judge can be impartial. That's a great outcome for me. And then I looked at what a state court judge in DuPage County, where I live, makes and I looked at my salary and I thought how can I cover this 50% pay cut? And that got me back to the place I'm getting, back to the financial education question. I will answer the question you asked. Eventually I'm getting there. This is what I had in mind.
Speaker 1:So go ahead. Yeah, we're getting there. How can I build up passive income? How can I replace the income I'm losing if I end up making this switch? And that got me back to real estate. I did a whole bunch of like Googling. I was looking at vending machines and other sorts of general passive income, whatever I could find by Googling. How do you make passive income? Back in the mid-teens it was all 10 years ago, yeah but that led me to bigger pockets, which led me to Rich Dad, poor Dad, which led me to buying some apartment buildings with a couple partners that I still have. I still own some of those buildings and that's been very beneficial. Not exactly in the way I thought, because I never end up putting on the black robe and sitting on the bench, but that was the beginning of the financial education which then got me to masterminds and got me to GoBundance, which got me here.
Speaker 2:I'm curious and we can edit this out if we need to, but as you think back to 2015, got me here. I'm curious and we can edit this out if we need to, but as you think back to 2015,. I mean, you're talking about taking a 50% pay cut. Had your spending swollen as your salaries had swollen to the point where you would have needed to take the 50% pay cut to either sustain or to at least not dramatically reduce your lifestyle, had you gone into government service?
Speaker 1:It's a good question. The answer is yes, not necessarily because of some dramatic lifestyle creep and more. I will blame the three people I brought into my family over the years between graduating from law school and when I was thinking about taking that pay cut. They just keep eating, man. They're expensive people. I love them dearly and then got pregnant with twins unexpectedly. That was late 2012. They were born in 2013 and we had a two-bedroom condo. So we bought a house in the suburbs. But we had bought that condo in 2006 when we got married and the market had crashed in the meantime and we couldn't sell it for what we had paid for it. So we were carrying two mortgages for a while. So the answer to your question is yes, but not because I was buying so many cars.
Speaker 2:Yeah Right, I mean, kids are so expensive, especially in the beginning, and I don't know whether Joya was working or not, but putting three kids in through daycare at the same time is really, really expensive. So we just kind of cycled out of that. I have a kindergartner, so got a little bit lighter this year and I think next year we're going to do away with after-school care, so that's a little bit lighter Again. Everybody can walk home, they can kind of take care of themselves until mom. You know, mom or dad can get home an hour and a half later. But yeah, kids are expensive.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they are indeed, and Joya was working, so she actually graduated with her master's in nursing the day after I graduated from law school. She took her boards while very, very pregnant, stayed home for a few months after Sophie was born that was August of 2011. Yeah, and then went to work at a pain management clinic out in the suburbs, actually not far from where we live now. It's one of the reasons why we moved to where we did, but that was while we were still living in the city, so she was working there a few days a week, certainly prescribing pain medication, which is a lot of what those practices did, especially back then but was also working in functional medicine in their practice. She was really the main functional medicine provider for them and she'd always been interested in that, and that's what led her eventually to starting her own practice a few years later.
Speaker 1:But, yes, she has always worked. For us, though, one of the big kid expenses other than grocery bill and just the extra bedrooms. We're people of Christian faith and all three of our kids go to go to Christian school, and so tuition is just another line of line item in the budget. It's one I'm happy to pay, mind you, but it certainly is there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we can come back, um, in a minute, cause I I'm sure that the pain management career is what's led down the functional medicine path, just knowing what the business model inside of many of those pain management facilities. But so, as you started to get this early financial education and started to look for how do I now supplement, supplement, at least for now, and then ultimately replace the legal expenses, did you find that you were creating a second job for yourself or maybe a third job for your family, or was any of the things that you were investing in truly passive?
Speaker 1:Certainly, real estate ownership is more passive than active legal practice, but it's never truly passive unless you're an LP in somebody else's deal, and even then you ought to be reading the reports and there's work to do, vetting the deal before you ever get into it, if you're wise about it. But we didn't do that. We had bought these and we hired third party management. But I'll tell the same story that most people do when they have third party management they don't take care of the building as well as you would do if you did it yourself. But my main partner is an attorney as well. He's in-house and has a job that keeps him quite busy, so neither of us had the time to pay the sort of attention that we might otherwise. So, no, not truly passive, even with third-party management, probably not an entirely second job, so kind of in that liminal space where nobody feels totally comfortable with it. One of the things.
Speaker 2:Through my own journey through this financial independence, education has been that passive income is just a lie. The only truly passive income is dividends from stocks. Only truly passive income is dividends from stocks. I consider LP investments to be predominantly passive, although, to do it, everybody was a great LP investor four years ago.
Speaker 1:Right, because you just threw money at a deal. Everybody had a great TP four years ago, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, and the money just came back to you. And now I'm afraid now to invest in anything else because I'm not a subject matter expert and really, like I'm afraid now to invest in anything else because I'm not a subject matter expert and really you're only betting on the operator and the operator, like every operator, is a good operator until they hit the deal that makes them not a good operator, right. So having been inside GoBundance and in a couple of those circles is like I'm back now to Dave, like the best investment in my career is me and so those dollars belong inside my firm and inside my businesses and not out somewhere else, because I, you know, I find that passive income really is, is buzzworthy, but it's predominantly a lie. I mean, do you, do you feel the same way or no?
Speaker 1:I wouldn't necessarily put it as strongly as that. I absolutely see where you're coming from and I agree with you that being an LP in someone's deal predominantly passive is a really good way to put that, I think, because you should be vetting the operator. The operator is far, far, far more important than the deal. Where I think we part company a little bit is. I'm still happy to build up an investment bolus if you will, and when I have 50 or 100,000, I'll find somebody that I already know like and trust deeply and I'll say do you have a deal for me? Can I put my money to work with you? But I'm not looking to actively purchase real estate for myself right now. I'm happy to let other people do that work for me and I'm not putting aside as much money for investment as I might otherwise, because where I'm absolutely with you is a great, great, great return on my dollar right now is building up the business I'm working on with Joya.
Speaker 2:So let's talk about that. So the business is Nourish House Calls and run by functional medicine NP Joya Vanderlaan. And what are you all doing? What is the primary service driver?
Speaker 1:There really are kind of three pillars of what we do. The majority of it right now is what I will call down the fairway functional medicine. So someone comes to Nourish and they're just not feeling like themselves for any number of a host of reasons. Maybe they're dealing with chronic fatigue or there's some sort of chronic illness there. It can be men, or even more often women, who are in the 40s 50s range and going through hormonal changes and dealing with symptoms of menopause, which obviously men don't go through. We go through our own changes around that age and lots of times your typical Western primary care provider will say yeah, that's just your age. For you, that's just menopause. For you, here's an antidepressant, a sleeping pill or some other pharmaceutical prescription and never really getting to the root cause of why someone's feeling that way, much less doing something to help resolve it. So functional medicine and what Joya does. There's a whole host of specialized testing, ranging from hormone levels and metabolism to gut health, to different biomarkers, to how nutrients are being absorbed or not in the body, to how well your mitochondria are functioning, and then, based on the results of those tests, joya can prescribe things like bioidentical hormone replacement therapy or peptides or make a supplement protocol. And then there's and she can prescribe traditional pharmaceuticals as well, and does sometimes, but more as a bridge to getting to a place where the body's healing itself. And there's a whole other piece of it where there is lifestyle tweaks. Recommendations, changes having to do with sleep and stress management and exercise and nutrition are kind of the primary force. There are big changes that can be made, even based on small adjustments there. So that's the first thing and that has helped a great great deal of people really start to feel like themselves again, increase their energy, increase libido is a huge one, all that sort of good stuff. The second piece is regenerative medicine and that is more for, I would say, chronic joint pain and chronic joint injury. That can be helpful for acute joint injury as well. And so there are injections that Joya can give, ultrasound-guided injections of either Wharton's jelly from the umbilical cord or purified amniotic fluid that don't necessarily contain stem cells themselves depending on how you define stem cells Wharton's jelly comes close but really can activate the body's healing factors and bring healing to the joints. We're getting a little bit out over my scientific skis right here. She'd be able to explain this a lot more thoroughly and precisely than I could. But she's gotten great results even in her own body from some injections. She got in her shoulder where she did not respond to physical therapy when she had a rotator cuff tear and that's done well for our patients too. So that's the second vertical.
Speaker 1:The third, and this is really quite new, is more longevity focused. This is our higher ticket program, designed for data-driven, really busy, high-achieving professionals, lawyers, executives, that sort of thing who want to live longer and live healthier. Kind of optimize your health span is a buzzword in the field and this is more of an all-encompassing program where a great deal of the testing I talked about is included in the program. Program where a great deal of the testing I talked about is included in the program. We also have devices and supplements that we include six visits with Joya throughout the years, a dozen nutritional IVs, six IVs of NAD+, which is great for anti-aging and mitochondrial function, and for people who live out of market we can send oral supplements and for NAD there's a nasal spray. So it's not just limited to people living around Chicago. So those are the three pieces.
Speaker 1:I'm very excited about the growth in the second two, which are a little bit newer, but really our bread and butter still has been the. What I said, that was the down the fairway functional medicine, and that's where, yeah, that's where a lot of the business is right now.
Speaker 2:So I won't press you on the medicine, but as somebody who's not an expert in the field, how do you think about separating the signal from the noise? Because I do hear a lot about stem cells and NAD plus and you can go online. It works, it doesn't work. There don't seem to me to be a whole lot of great white papers out there about it that are from any kind of objective body. How do you think about, as a consumer, how much of this is, I don't know, hand-wavy witchcraft and I don't mean to be insulting, but that's one end of the spectrum how much of it works. And the reason that I ask that is because you know Western medicine MDs all say this stuff is hand-wavy witchcraft, right. And functional medicine doctors say, well, they say that because it's the Western industrial medicine complex, right. Of course they would say that it's attacking everything that they're built on. So how would an independent consumer go about figuring out who is closer to the truth?
Speaker 1:Now, fully acknowledging that my thumb is on one end of this scale, I will. I will answer your question. So I I am not a scientist by training. I am not a healthcare professional by training. For me, I lean toward the functional medicine side for three reasons, all of which are persuasive to me, some of which may be less so to the audience, but let's throw them out there and then we can discuss. The first is I have immense trust in my wife. I think she is an absolute genius. I think she is very careful and very well-researched about what she chooses to include in the practice and what she does not. There are things in the functional medicine space and the quote unquote wellness space that she does not do, that she does not believe in, and so that's not part of our practice. So I, whatever she chooses to offer, I believe, based on my trust in her as a person and a practitioner, that that is worthwhile and worth putting in my body and worth advocating to our patients and potential patients. So that's the first thing. The second is my own personal experience.
Speaker 1:I have, for the better part of two decades, outsourced my health to my wife. I take the pills she tells me to take. I do not question what's in my pillbox. If she says I need an IV, I let her open up a vein. I eat what she tells me to eat. I do a lot of what she recommends. I could probably stand to do even more of what she recommends, and I am a far, far healthier person for having done that. When I'm doing more of what she recommends, I feel better than when I don't do it.
Speaker 1:So my subjective, anecdotal experience is this stuff works and I've seen my test results get better too. And the third is I see the results that she's given to her patients. Now we are men of logic and we can talk about survivorship bias right, and so I'm looking at the results of her long-term patients that have gotten better, and probably some people that have gone and found someone else maybe didn't have quite such good results, but I also know our retention rate, which is quite strong too. So, among all of those things, when you combine all of that, for me I am persuaded that the functional medicine approach, as practiced by nourish house calls, is not snake oil. It is something that really does help people get healthier in a way that traditional medicine doesn't and in some ways can't, because you can't have an hour long visit. When insurance is paying the bill, you can have a seven minute visit and that's just long enough to say what are your symptoms. Let me figure out the pill that's going to mask those symptoms.
Speaker 1:I don't blame doctors who don't have time to read the latest studies on what NAD Plus does. They don't have time. They have to see a patient every seven minutes to make a living. They don't have time. They have to see a patient every seven minutes to make a living. But for them to say I haven't read about it, therefore it doesn't exist, which I think is a lot of the Western attitude, the Western medicine attitude toward functional medicine, I think is not entirely fair.
Speaker 2:All right. So that is a perfect segue back into two questions about growing businesses generally, because you know really what you said in there. Here's the three reasons that I believe in it is because I know, like and trust the practitioner, right, number one is your wife. Number two, it's worked on you. Number three, you've seen, anecdotally at least, that it's worked on other patients of hers, and so I'm curious Now, knowing that and that's a tried and true marketing principle as we work with people we know, like and trust how do you expand a brand with a solo practitioner and I know that you guys are working on hiring somebody to come in and help expand the practice what kind of things are you finding work for, acquiring new clientele?
Speaker 2:Because most of the lawyers who listen to this have exactly the same problem. Right, there's a million lawyers out here that say something about you should have an estate plan or I'm the one you should do your divorce with. But you have this issue where, before somebody has called you and before they've sat down for a consultation with you, they don't usually know, like and trust you, unless it's coming from a referral. And maybe that's your answer. But how are you expanding the business in Illinois right now?
Speaker 1:The best answer is referrals. Right, you want someone to vouch for you and I looked at the data recently. I won't remember exactly, but it is still a great majority of our population members, our patients, who have enrolled with us have come either from current patient referrals or from businesses with whom we have a relationship. Who said you should go see Joy? A lot of that's local gyms or physical therapists, that sort of thing. Or provider referrals I guess that's the physical therapist, the chiropractors referrals I guess that's the physical therapist, the chiropractors.
Speaker 1:So having a good referral program in place, I think, is enormously important. We offer to any patient if you refer someone who comes in and buys any one of our services even if they get a one-off IV or something, they get $50 off their next appointment. If you're a member with us and you refer someone who becomes a member one of your your next month is free, which, depending on your membership is can be a few hundred dollars. So it's, it's high value to them, but it's absolutely worth it for us because we know the the lifetime gross profit of someone who comes into our membership and it's it's, it's a win-win all around.
Speaker 2:So what's the other professionals? To the chiropractors and the physical therapists.
Speaker 1:So that's a that's a little bit different in medicine because there are there are anti kickback laws. We can't offer a financial compensation. Those end up being more of a trusting relationship and really opportunities for cross referral too. So if there's someone with whom we have a trusting relationship and really opportunities for cross-referral too, so if there's someone with whom we have a good relationship and we have a patient who needs a chiropractor or who needs a PT or even someone primary or someone who does something we don't do on the more strictly medical side, we have a Rolodex of people that we know like and trust and we're comfortable referring our patients to. And it's not a quid pro quo by any stretch where we're saying, well, we'll start referring to you once you refer to us. That's just relationship-based marketing as far as the providers go.
Speaker 1:So I think for lawyers who have their own business, I think there's absolutely there's gold in your current client base If you are not asking for referrals regularly. Start doing that. There's no perfect system and there will be trial and error involved, but that's as high a leverage marketing play as you can probably make if you're not doing it. I think testimonials can be golden too, make if you're not doing it. I think testimonials can be golden too. There's a that that can be tougher where there's a confidentiality involved, and some of those need to be need to be anonymized. That's true with HIPAA as well. But when you have a client who's willing to give you a testimony and put their name on, I think that's I think that's incredibly valuable. So that's one piece of it.
Speaker 2:Go ahead.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the yeah I I mean the 2024 testimonial is the Google review, and there's entire companies that are built on getting your law firm more Google reviews.
Speaker 2:Now, lawyers have the same problem that you have with medical doctors, like the anti-kickback rule, right, we can't share fees with clients who make referrals, and so you have to do a good job of coming up with what would be meaningful to that client and for most of us.
Speaker 2:You know, my world is a lot of single event people criminal defense case or a personal injury case. It's not the recurring revenue model where I can discount the next month, but there's got to be something you know, that's important to your clients, whether it's a hundred dollar gift card to a nice dinner out, because for a lot of people that's a big, that's a big, uh, a big spend for dinner. So, thinking through for your best referral sources, what, what will get people to go and seeing your praises and then recognizing that there's like if you're in a single event industry, there's not a lot of opportunity, like, I don't know the number of people that I know outside of my legal practice that were in a car crash in the last year. I can probably count them on one hand, right, but you've got to make a big deal out of it when it happens and when somebody makes the referral to you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you know what's even better than asking your best or I'm sorry, I already gave away the answer what's even better than thinking through what your?
Speaker 2:best referral sources of value is asking them.
Speaker 1:Just survey everyone who could possibly give you a referral. Survey the people who already have and the most common answer. Come up with a program that works for you and your business and then make sure every single one of your clients and former clients, and even potential clients knows about it.
Speaker 2:What you all are using to keep in touch with people who maybe have contacted you once but then didn't convert Email newsletter, mail newsletter, something like that.
Speaker 1:Yep, we have a MailChimp list, and we've just, in the last few months, started working with a digital marketing agency who specializes in functional and integrative medical practices, and they've been just tremendous. Daphne Cohen Marketing is wonderful. I know that's not exactly your audience, but I will sing their praises up and down. They're really they've done a tremendous job. I will sing their praises up and down. They're really they've done a tremendous job, and so I've been sending emails with some regularity before that, but they've really streamlined the process. They're doing the writing. They're executing it better than I could because they're professionals, and I've been very happy about outsourcing that. And then what else they do is really what else we're doing to get more eyeballs on Joya?
Speaker 1:We're now much more active on Instagram. She's doing three reels and a static post a week. We're just starting to get into stories because we know we need to. We're on Facebook as well. We just launched a new website at the beginning of this year, and so we're doing now more regular blog content to try to drive a little more SEO eyeballs on there, and so we're seeing an uptick now in attention, in traffic to the website and, like any good website, we've got a pop-up on there with a free resource that we use as a lead magnet. Obviously so that's getting more people onto the email list free resource and that we use as a lead magnet. Obviously so that's getting more people onto the email list. And we've not seen a tremendous volume of conversions on there and I'm not looking for that on a percentage basis. I'm realistic about how many people will become patients from that as compared to the percentage of referrals that will become patients. But that's why you go for volume on that.
Speaker 2:That's why we're looking to drive more people to the website, right, and I have this conversation with lawyers all the time, like, oh, all of my clients are referral-based. Okay, yes, maybe, but also, what do you think is happening when they're getting the referral? They're going and checking you out online, they're looking at your Instagram and they're making sure you're not a lunatic, right? And so if you're a law firm and you haven't posted something on your Instagram since 2022 and then it was only Mother's Day and Father's Day and three things to do after a car crash Like, if somebody is given three lawyers names and they go and you're the only one that's not doing that, then it's a trust clue. If they go to your website and they contact you and the email comes back from a Gmail or God forbid an AOL account, it's a trust clue. And so, while these things may not be primary reasons and attractors of new clients, they're all important, you know, and and it's, and it really is, you know to.
Speaker 2:We're talking earlier about creating a second and a third job. Like, the social media is a second job. Um, I, I, I, mine, mine is outsourced. Now I, we have reels done. I have a VA who does um, who's helping me post and he'll, he'll edit this episode and get get the reels up. But, man, it's just a, it's just another, and it can be really frustrating to go. Well, nobody hired me because of my Instagram, but there is all of this dark attribution and where the people are at least looking at it, right, and and you, you, after you've done it for a while, you will start to recognize it when it shows up, cause people will walk into the office and they'll feel like they already know the two of you, right, and you will have already made the sale because you've been in front of them now for three months or six months and they've watched the YouTube video and they downloaded your resource. Right, it just makes it makes the ultimate conversion into a client so much easier, but it is so much front-end work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's all absolutely true, and I think also, when people get to higher attention numbers, higher traffic numbers and that's totally possible as a functional practitioner or a lawyer there are people who get there. You will start seeing people convert directly from just visiting your website, from just seeing something on YouTube or Instagram, and while it's a lower percentage of the overall people who engage there, that's still building up your numbers. And, even more importantly, now you've got someone who has experience with you, that's building up your base of potential referral sources and that's where things can really explode. You had 10 new clients over the year from Instagram, youtube, whatever. That's 10 more people who have networks that you did not have access to. And now you've got someone who, assuming you've done a good job, will vouch for you when they have the need for the service, and that's another way in which this all creates a virtuous circle, even though, as professionals, it may not be our absolute favorite thing to do with our time.
Speaker 2:I don't know, I get a big dopamine kick out of it.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I get a big dopamine kick out of it. Dopamine kick for me comes in when I see something. Do some decent numbers Like oh, some people shared that. Oh yeah, We've gotten over 1,000 views on this reel, which is still a really good number for us at this point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, how do I make four more of those? Yeah, that's fun. You have a couple more minutes here, absolutely Coming up to the top of the hour. I just want to make sure that we're not bumping up against something else for you, because I do want to talk working with your spouse, because a lot of solo small law firm owners have the spouse along for the ride, for better or for worse, and I've seen it break up marriage and I've seen it make marriages stronger, better or for worse, and I've seen it break up marriage and, as I've seen it make marriages stronger. And so what was the conversation like for the two of you? As you were navigating, you know, leaving the law, and I don't know if the timing is exactly lined up, but when? When you said okay, yeah, I'll come and and celebritize you, joya.
Speaker 1:Oh man, my, my dream is to make her a functional medicine celebrity, maybe even more than her dream. So she started the practice in 2018. I didn't join until early 2022. I don't know that we talked a great deal about how it would affect our marriage when she gave me the green light to take a six month sabbatical that is now extended for for more than two years. We've talked about it a lot since. Oh boy, have we talked about it a lot since.
Speaker 1:There are ways in which it's brought in, which it has brought us closer together. We spend a lot of time with each other and we. It has deepened our trust of one another. It has deepened our appreciation for one another In a lot of ways. It's made both of us feel more seen for the lives we had before, because I went from primary breadwinner bringer home of bacon and gone all the time, while Joya had what was essentially a part-time business home of bacon and gone all the time, while joy ahead what was essentially a part-time business and primary childcare responsibility.
Speaker 1:To now I'm the flex parent and if somebody forgot their lunch, I'm the one to bring it to school and I'm the guy driving. I drove my son to Elizabeth town, kentucky, for travel baseball, which was super fun. I'm not complaining about it. But I'm just around the kids a lot more and it's hard. You have kids. Being around them has great joy and great not that sometimes all in a single hour, and so I understand what Joya was going through for the years that I was gone for 12 hours a day on a normal day and Joya understands now the pressure of oh, this is bringing the money is is kind of on me, even though we we share that with the business. She's the one out there selling her time and and she's really, she's really the face of it too.
Speaker 1:So it has deepened our relationship and we are still working on separating being business partners from being spouses, intimate partners, lovers, lovers, and I will say we have skewed too far toward the business side lately, based on a conversation we had this morning where basically she said you need to plan a date for us, like okay, yeah, I'll go do that Because and I've been feeling it too there's just been some marital disconnection there and so I don't have any great wisdom for the audience on how to navigate that perfectly, because I am navigating it imperfectly, but I think where we do well is, our lines of communication are wide open of positive and pleasant communication with one another over the time before our marriage and the early years of our marriage, and during the time we've spent as business partners, where, even if something untoward gets said, or one of us is grouchy or grumpy, or there's some critical conversation about what one of us may or may not have forgotten to do in the business, or we're a little slow in doing whatever, we know that that's not the root of how we feel about each other, and so we were able to make the course correction that we even need to make today without having great pain in it, because we have that foundation.
Speaker 2:Well, you mentioned the difficulty maintaining, maybe, the boundaries between those roles. So we went out for date night Saturday night and said we weren't going to talk about work and it was two thirds of what we talked about. Right, we're not going to talk about work or the kids like, well, what else do we do? We are, we are. We're not around each other 24, seven, but it's close. Yeah, we're not around each other, we're around the kids. And so having, you know, having something, that's like what do we talk about? That's not work or the kids, that's. It's challenging. I don't know. Mine are um six, nine and 11 and and they're always underfoot and like it's hard to it's hard to have any kind of one-on-one conversation. And when you do have one-on-one conversations, it's often eight, 30 at night, after the kids are in bed and after you've worked all day and then spent three hours with the kids and you're burnt out and then the last thing you want to do is you know, have have a frank discussion about anything.
Speaker 1:You need that fluff time. Work is hard, parenting is hard. There's extra pressure because when you're running your own business, you don't know where your next dollar is coming from all the time, and so you may need to. You need to unwind in that way.
Speaker 2:How are you all handling the division of labor within the business? I mean, obviously she's the practitioner and you're not. But outside of that, how are you?
Speaker 1:handling the division of the marketing, the finance, all that stuff. That is the primary division. As you might imagine, I have nothing to say about the clinical side, and anything I say could almost certainly only hurt. She's interested in the business, she certainly wants to see it grow. She's the primary content creator because she's the face, because she's the provider. But from a marketing strategy standpoint, from a vendor relations standpoint, looking at the finances, I'm I'm the guy wearing those hats and we're thinking about, as we grow, how can we bring on team members on the admin side too. We're a little ways off from that, but that's, that's really how it's divided, is she's clinical and content, and I'm I'm the rest of the business.
Speaker 2:Dude, I love it. This has been so much fun. I could go on longer and longer, but we're not putting a 51-minute episode as it is. I'm going to land the plane here, Dave. Where can people find out more about Nourish House Calls and more about you?
Speaker 1:More about me if you're interested. I'm not very active on social media but you can. I think it's DaveVDL72 on Instagram. For the six times a year I might post something. If you want to get in touch with me personally, you can email me at Dave at NourishHouseCallscom. Nourishhousecallscom is the website and then, like I said, joy is very active on Instagram and she's a lot better looking than I am too, so you'll probably want to see her. Look at nourish house calls on Instagram.
Speaker 2:All right, I'll make sure we link to all of that in the show description, dave. Thank you so much. Thanks, brian. It's been a pleasure to be here.