Jeremy Weisz 16:42
So I’ll kind of break this up a little bit, Sam into some of the services and what you do, Liquivida, and then kind of how the franchise works. So if people can understand a little bit more how it works, to get involved if they want, from the services side. Talk about some of the testing, because I think one of the unique pieces of Liquivida, you don’t just necessarily go in, I mean, you probably can and get an IV drip or something of vitamins, but you have a really comprehensive way of testing and really getting to the root cause. So talk about some of the testing that you utilize with the offices.
Sam Tejada 17:23
So it’s very important for us to be data driven when it comes to a patient’s health. So one of the things that we put a lot of emphasis on is making sure that people are going through these different type of diagnostic testing so we get a good bird’s eye view of what’s happening with the patient’s health. So we want to get as much data points from the patient to really see what’s going on and try to figure out the root cause of why they’re feeling fatigue, why they’re increasing in weight or unable to lose weight. So, when it comes to the testing that we do, the first step that we take is we do a lifestyle assessment in questionnaire. We want to know exactly how this person is living their life, day to day, what they’re eating, are they exercising? Are they putting certain toxic things into their body? Are they smoking? Are they drinking frequently? What is their lifestyle like?
What’s their environment that they’re in? What’s the job that they have? Is it a job that’s causing severe sleep deprivation? Are they firefighter, paramedic or a police officer? Is it a police officer that’s going to the shooting range and getting exposed and inhaling lead consistently, or they potentially might have heavy metals that causes all kinds of neurological issues? So for us is, starting off with the lifestyle assessment. From there, we start doing some of our diagnostics. So we want to know what their body is made up of. So we do what’s called a body composition analysis, right? We utilize a DEXA scan to do the body composition analysis, which historically has been known to be utilized for bone density, which, yes, we do that as well, but we want to know exactly what your body’s made up of, how much lean mass you have, how much adipose fat you have, which is more of that fluffy fat, and then, most importantly, how much visceral fat you have that’s lining your organs, right? So for us, is really understanding what your body’s made up of. And then we have other tests that we run, like we do a VO2 Max, looking at lung function, cardiovascular function and cellular health.
We work with a lot of athletes to increase and enhance their endurance with the VO2 Max. Then we also do what’s called an RMR. So the RMR is the resting metabolic rate where we have the ability to see how many calories you’re burning at a rested state. So what does that information give me? So that information will allow me to know exactly how many macros and micros you need to intake on a daily basis throughout your meals throughout the day for us to accomplish those goals, it’ll also tell me if you’re working out enough, or if you’re working out too much, or if you’re not working out enough, right? So those data points are critical when we’re actually trying to customize a precision health plan for the patient. Now one of the other tests that we do is our blood work. Now when I say blood work, this is not your typical blood work when you go to your general practitioner’s office, we do a very, very comprehensive blood analysis. We’re testing everything from micronutrients deficiencies, which include vitamins, minerals, amino acids, different antioxidants that your body actually needs for it to function. It’s part of your body’s biochemistry.
So that’s part of the blood work. We’re checking all your different hormones. We’re looking at inflammation markers, we’re looking at food sensitivity. We’re looking at environmental toxins you can potentially get exposed to. I mean, we’re looking at over 1000 biomarkers that we go through to really see how your health is performing. Most medical practitioners will only test for about 80% of what we do if you’re symptomatic, right? A lot of the times, if you’re symptomatic, sometimes it’s too late. I mean, how many times have we heard of a family member or friend come back and says, hey, I just got diagnosed with cancer, and it’s stage four cancer. Anytime that happens to me, first question. I said, well, what happened to stage one? Stage two and stage three, right?
So, sometimes you got to keep in mind that You don’t wait until you’re symptomatic, because disease hides very well in your body. So these are some of the tests we do. You know, we have other specialized labs for other testing, depending on what comes back on your initial diagnostics that we do, but for the most part, this has given us a good bird’s eye view of what’s happening with the patient’s health.
Jeremy Weisz 22:07
Yeah. So, yeah, thanks for going over that. And from there now you figure out, Okay, what’s going on, and then you customize the treatment accordingly.
Sam Tejada 22:18
Right, right? So, so there’s, there’s a lot of customization. No patient is the same. Everyone has certain goals they’re trying to accomplish, and then everyone has different deficiencies. So from there, we customize the plan specific to the patient’s data that we retrieve through the different diagnostics.
Jeremy Weisz 22:40
Originally, I’m curious of the evolution of services a little bit, right, because it sounds like so it started with IV therapy. And like you can see here, we’re looking at the website. People do it for aging, things for hangover, things for mental focus, for fighting sickness and this. One of the things that was interesting from one of your videos was, you know, you have this proprietary product, actually, and you’re not the only clinics to use it. Other clinics use it. Can you talk about that? Because that’s interesting from a clinical standpoint, from also from a business model standpoint as well.
Sam Tejada 23:17
Right, right? So, obviously, with my background, being a fireman, one of the things that you know, joking around in the fire department, we would always say everything has to be fireman proof, right? So fancy word for idiot proof. So in the back of the truck and the rescue truck, everything is typically pre measured, pre dose. So we’re not in the back of a bouncing truck trying to do drug calculations and everything else, right? We just give the different anti discrithmics depending, whatever the medical emergency is. Now, when I first got into the field with IV vitamin therapy, the way that IV vitamin therapy was created is you are playing the role of, like a mad scientist, right? You had about 20 to 30 different multi dose vials. You were creating the osmolarity of these IV bags.
Jeremy Weisz 24:09
I see people do it, like you’re drawing out a different, you know, they’re basically taking individual syringes, drawing it out of, oh, we need the B12 squirted right there. We need the vitamin C. We scored in there.
Sam Tejada 24:21
So, even though we’re talking about vitamins, minerals and amino acids, things that are water soluble, when you’re going directly into the vein, it can become toxic. If you give the wrong dosage, right? You give a patient too much zinc, it can cause irreversible hearing loss. I don’t want that on my watch, right? So as I’m going through it and thinking like scalability, where you have hundreds of locations, or you have 1000s of people doing these IV drips, medical providers doing these IV drips, I said, well, how do we reduce the potential for risk with these IV drips? Because all it takes is. One nurse who’s not thinking and puts the wrong thing in the bag that’s like, well, things have to be fireman proof, right? Pre measured, pre dose. Let’s create different formulas. And let’s take a lot of the data from the years that we’ve been in business and see what fits most of the different personas best.
So that’s where I teamed up with a group of chemists and pharmacists out of a 503 B compounding facility, which is a FDA registered facility, and we created what’s called the IV infusion kits and packets where, basically we have these packets where everything’s pre measured, pre dose, they’re not multi dose vial, so they don’t have any preservatives, which obviously preservatives, typically, the preservative they put in the multi dose vials is benzo alcohol. But when you go directly into the bloodstream with that, it’s a toxin, right? It causes oxidative stress. What happens when you have oxidative stress from the toxin increases inflammation in the body.
So what we’re trying to do with the IV drips is the complete opposite. So what I ended up doing with the team is we created the cleanest, the most potent IV vitamin therapy product out in the market. It’s the highest quality product in the market, here in the United States. And since I launched that a handful of years ago, we have well over 4000 doctors nationwide that purchase a product and offer it to their patients.
Jeremy Weisz 24:52
How’d they find out about it? Just the IV part.
Sam Tejada 26:32
You got to get the content out there. You got to get in front of them. So that’s where my passion is, speaking publicly, you know, publishing a lot of different articles. I run my own podcast. I’m big into content creation. I have a whole video production team full time that follows me around. It’s getting in front of them.
Jeremy Weisz 26:55
Let’s talk about the business side for a little bit. So obviously, you and good people can check out Liquivida from the patient side. They have locations all over the US, actually. So we’re still missing one in Chicago. So we’re gonna have to get that going so I can go to one of them. But from Florida to Arizona to Texas to New Jersey to Connecticut, all over the place and expanding. Talk about, how does it work, who’s a fit for becoming saying, this is great. I know a medical practitioner. I love this. I know a lot in Chicago. I need to convince one to basically start with Liquivida so I can get the treatment. How does it work? Who’s a fit?
Sam Tejada 27:39
So on the business side, the best fit is a medical provider who’s trying to get out of the allopathic world of medicine. As medical providers, medical providers are great medical providers, and one of the areas that they usually lack in the ability to scale in is the business side. So when you talk about franchising, the purpose of franchising is so you don’t have to figure out all of the business stuff yourself, which comes with a lot of failure, trying to figure it out comes with burning a lot of money, you know, trying to figure things out. So what we’ve done in over 10 years is figure out what works and what doesn’t work and create those systems and processes for medical providers that want to get into the industry, where we can make it easy for them and help them on the business side, right, give them all the tools and ammunition for them to be successful.
So, medical providers from nurse practitioners, physician assistants, DOs, MDS, chiropractic physicians, or even in some states, naturopathic doctors. This is a great opportunity, also for the business individual, someone who wants to diversify their investments and get more into the health and wellness space, more on the preventative medicine side, this is a good avenue as well, too. Now, as a business person, you would have to hire all of your medical professionals the same way I did personally. I’m not a doctor, so I had to hire people myself as well, too.
Jeremy Weisz 29:19
So talk about having an existing location versus opening a new location, like, can a doctor implement this? Because when I picture a franchise, I guess I picture we’re erecting something from scratch that looks exactly like every other you know, clinic or restaurant or whatever it is. So I don’t know, is there an opportunity for an existing doctor to put like, kind of like, what you did in a room, or does it have to be kind of a new facility? How does it work, as far as what’s a fit of when they implement it?
Sam Tejada 29:55
Yeah. So we have two franchise models. So the two franchise model is, the first one that you mentioned is the brick and mortar model. Basically it encompasses all of the different services and modalities that we offer as a company. And then the second franchise model is our integrated Liquivida lounge, where, basically what we do is we put all of the different, sorry, we put a IV lounge in one of your rooms, and basically it becomes a Liquivida lounge at so and so’s practice, Dr Smith’s practice. And then from there, we put you on the website. Help you with the marketing. We train all of your team members. So yeah, there is an opportunity to put a Liquivida IV lounge franchise within your existing practice.
It’s a great way to add an additional revenue stream to your practice. It’s turnkey, the way that we set it up. And then for the doctors that don’t want to do the franchise model, they can just purchase the product. And we have an online portal system that has tons of marketing tools, has a lot of educational tools, that what we do is we support the physicians that buy the product with all of the tools and ammunition that they need to be successful.
Jeremy Weisz 31:20
That makes sense. Sam, so someone can put a lounge, they could erect a full facility, which is like the full brick and mortar. Or they could say, listen, I just want to buy your product and implement certain types of your products. And people can do that as well.
Sam Tejada 31:36
Right in the full brick and mortar. It’s more than just IV therapy, you know, has all the different diagnostic tools that we use. How we mentioned the DEXA scan, VO two, Max embody, has other biohacking technologies, like the pulse, electromagnetic field therapy chairs. We use a company that’s called Pulse, for that, we do all of the medical esthetic procedures, the Botox, the fillers, body contouring, we do hormone optimization, we do medical weight loss. We use a lot of the GLP one drugs that have become very popular. And then it has the IV lounge in it as well too. So it’s significantly different, but if you want to just offer IVs, there is the integrated IV lounge franchise model, and then also getting the product.
Jeremy Weisz 32:21
Talk about, I know it seems to me one of your passions is marketing. And from your videos and the content, and obviously that helps these doctors in or locations get patients. So talk about what works from a marketing standpoint for some of these offices to gain visibility and to get more patients in the door.
Sam Tejada 32:50
So I always tell people to focus on three things, right, visibility, notability and becoming the authority in your space, at minimum, becoming the authority in your territory. So how do you do that? First step is education. You have to be able to educate people on what you do. So you have to utilize every possible outlet to be able to educate the potential end consumer. So, part of that is we live in a digital world. So in the digital world, you have all the different social media platforms. They’re all different. YouTube is significantly different than Instagram, right? You have long form, short form content. So it’s about getting the information out there. You don’t have to get crazy and have this wonderful setup. When I first started, I didn’t have all of this, right? I didn’t have a whole video production crew. It all just really started off with the iPhone, right, getting in front of the iPhone and just talking and just posting. And then from there, as I started, following other people and their content and seeing what they’re doing. Then the creative started, enhancing where.
Then eventually I developed the whole team in Pakistan that works for me full time. I got about 10 people out there doing a lot of the behind the scenes stuff. Got another five in Colombia. And then I have a monster of a team here that follows us around with cameras and does a lot of patient testimonials, record the procedures. So, content is very important. I think most people have heard of SEO search engine optimization. You need a significant amount of content to be able to rank. You need a lot of backlinking. So getting your message published and high domain authority publications that will link back to your website is important. It’ll help you rank for SEO. And then have active writing, I have three full time writers that are just consistently writing blog articles or writing for the doctors or writing for myself, and just getting that message out there, the more content that you can get out online, the better you’re going to do when it comes to notability, visibility and becoming the authority.
Jeremy Weisz 35:06
Yeah. And obviously, one of the benefits of a franchise or Liquivida is you’re basically putting out all this content information. So when they go and they check out the different locations, like I am now, I check out the one closest to me, and they’re getting visibility and new patients from that, that sense as well, right? I do want to talk about the American IV Association and talk about your involvement there.
Sam Tejada 35:37
So, yeah, the American IV association that was founded by Jeff Cohen. He’s a leading healthcare attorney in the alternative medicine space. And so Jeff Cohen and his associates, they started it about a year and a half ago, almost two years and about give or take, about almost a year ago, maybe about nine months ago, myself and a few other CEOs in the industry, we noticed that the industry had a need for us to really create that one strong voice. And the American IV Association was struggling a bit to really penetrate the industry because it wasn’t getting the buy in from the industry. So, what we ended up doing is myself and a few other CEOs in the industry, we said, we proposed this to Jeff Cohen, and we said, hey, why don’t you put a leadership advisory board together and let’s go ahead and collectively get together and create that one strong voice, where, basically you have three big competitors on a global level that came together and said, hey, this is not about Liquivida, this is not about trip bar. This is not about revive this is about the industry.
So obviously, one of the things that led them to appoint me as the chairman of the association is, you know, all of the strong content that I’ve been creating, right, I’ve created a strong footprint myself, being the face of the industry, speaking publicly or instead of reinventing the wheel, let’s go ahead and take what Sam Tejada has already developed with himself, his personal brand and Liquivida, and let’s leverage that with all of the other people that are sitting on the board. So then from there, what we ended up doing is we created 20 founding member seats, which also those founding member seats include top CEOs and doctors in the industry, which those 20 founding member seats create the different committees that we have that set a lot of the standardization and protocols that we implement into the industry. We’re doing accredited trainings as well.
There’s online platforms that have been developed by revive their sister company called IV pro, so the purpose of the association is really to create that one strong voice, to create a strong cohesion behind the companies that are leading the industry, and be able to put some level of control, be able to respond to some of these incidents that occur with that one bad apple in a bunch, work with the media. Give them truthful, factual information. As you know Doc, the media can twist a lot of things that happen out there when in the medical field when the factual information is not really in front of them. So our goal is to be able to work with them and provide factual information. We have a scientific advisory board made up of all the different chief medical officers globally that are doing some R&D and taking a lot of the data that we have in our systems, which, mind you, some of us have been in business for well over 10 years.
Some people over 15 years, where we’re taking a lot of the data in our different EMR and EHR systems, and we’re taking that quantifiable data and putting research behind it so we can go ahead and publish it as well.
Jeremy Weisz 39:20
Love it, Sam, I have one last question before I ask it. I want to point people to liquivida.com to learn more about what you’re doing in the company. It’s really amazing what you’ve done from firefighter to $500 and beyond, and starting this business and growing it. My last question is, as mentors, I know, again, you’re all about relationships. What are some of the valuable mentors you’ve had, and maybe a piece of advice they gave you.
Sam Tejada 39:46
So one of my biggest mentors that I have, his name is Yadiv Tadla. And this one’s interesting, because when I first started Liquivida, I was a one man show and Yadic, successful entrepreneur in the world of real estate. He was driving about 45 minutes to come get his IV drip. And he actually proposed something to me, he says, Hey, instead of me driving 45 minutes to come here and get this IV drip, and then have to drive 45 minutes back to my house in Fort Lauderdale. How about if I just pay you extra, and you could come to my house so I would leave the fire department and go to his house and give him these IV drips. He was one of my first patients. Till today, he’s one of my patients. And it went from him being a customer, one of our patients, to sitting down and going out to lunch with them frequently, and him being a business mentor, giving me guidance of things to expect, things I should look into when it comes to business, to then him becoming one of my dear Friends.
We’re now, I’m helping him build his personal brand. We’re just finalizing his book, his first book, and I fly around with him on his private jet now, and we’re doing a lot of PR stuff together. We actually fly out next week to Las Vegas, and also LA. We’ll be on a lot of big podcasts out there, and, you know, doing some stuff with big influencers will be on the news. So where I’m going with this is, number one, you never know who can be your business mentor. It could be your customer that’s right in front of you, right? And then number two, when you cultivate those relationships and they become greater relationships, that customer can become a business mentor, who can then become a dear friend of yours, and then it can actually switch the roles, where eventually you become their mentor. And that’s what has happened, and I won’t forget, this was about a year ago. We were out to lunch. Mind you, this is almost nine years of us knowing each other, him being my business mentor, where, I told him about me writing my book, How to Win in Modern Wellness, and I told him, I says, I said, Yeah, like you’ve built such great success.
You’re one of the few single owners of multifamily real estate probably the biggest in the United States. And I tell him, says, people got to know your story. You got to leave legacy behind. So I started telling him everything that I’m doing with content creation and the team that I’ve developed. He got out of his seat during lunch. He says, oh my God. He says, Sam, for the last nine years, I’ve been your business mentor, teaching you. And look at this now you’re teaching me. He says, this is unbelievable. And he invited me to one of these big right then and there. He invited me to one of these big masterminds that he’s a part of. He pays like $150,000 a year to be part of it with all these top CEOs. He says, hey, but in the next two days, get ready. You’re coming on my jet. We’re going to this mastermind. I’m bringing you as a guest, and since then, the relationship has just gotten stronger and stronger and stronger.
Jeremy Weisz 43:09
Love it. Sam, I want to be the first one to thank you. Everyone, check out liquivida.com more episodes of the podcast. We’ll see everyone next time. Sam, thanks so much.
Sam Tejada 43:19
Thank you.
