Season 2, Episode 1: The Sales Side of Supplements: Building Better Businesses and Bodies with Laura Frontiero

Evelyne: I’m so excited. Today we’ll be talking about mitochondrial health, top causes of low energy, but we’re also going to talk about business. So a little bit of clinical and a little bit of business. And we’re actually going to start with the business part. I’m so excited. Laura Frontiero has served thousands of patients as a nurse practitioner over the last 22 years. Her work in the health industry marrying both traditional and functional medicine has been applauded by celebrities, world-renowned physicians, and most importantly, her patients and clients. As a highly sought after expert in her field, she lectures at medical conferences, is invited to speak on international platforms. Her unique belief is that we all have the ability to fast track our health and optimize our wellbeing. It’s our lack of understanding of the critical areas that we need to improve that holds us back from living our best health.

As a Master Leadership trainer who has mentored hundreds of students on shifting mindset, Laura is passionate about educating her clients. Her mission is to help them eliminate the myths in modern health and learn how to eliminate toxins in their environment, toxic limiting beliefs and toxins from the gut. Now I’ve seen Laura’s business grow like crazy. We’re both in San Diego. I love that you are so open about this, Laura, and that you want to share this with us today. I’m absolutely so inspired every time I talk to you. And you haven’t just sold widely successful group programs this year that are really helping people, you’re also selling a lot of supplements. So I want to talk about that. First of all, what did your journey look like from nurse practitioner working at Kaiser to where you are now?

Laura Frontiero: Oh, this was quite a journey. So we’re starting with business building and definitely a business isn’t built overnight. It’s a long-term commitment and it’s about putting that vision of what you want to create in the world ahead of everything. So for the first several years, the build of my functional medicine business, because I worked for a total of 21 years for Kaiser Permanente. By the time I retired last year, it was 21 years. I started building my functional medicine business about 15 years into my career. And it was on the side. I was working for Kaiser part-time and I was doing this part-time. And it really took a lot of studying of how to run a business. I didn’t even realize what I was getting into when I did it, I just knew I had a passion to start something different and I knew that my life got to look different into my mid 40s, 50s and beyond.

I wanted to have a different impact in the world. I had already been working on the impact that I made as a nurse practitioner in Western medicine and I did good work there, but it came to the point where it wasn’t enough for me, it wasn’t fulfilling, and I realized that I wasn’t helping people to the capacity that I could. So really it was about getting really crystal clear on the vision and what I wanted to create in the world and then committing to it and then staying singularly focused on that vision, whatever it took. And your vision really has to make you emotional. You have to be committed to something that if you didn’t create this, what would your world look like? What would your life look like? What would your legacy look like if you didn’t create this? So I got super clear on, I am creating this.

Now, it has morphed and shifted as I’ve gone along and as of course, we’re always students. So as I learn more and more and more in the functional medicine space, what I do in my business shifts because I learn something new and I apply it and I learn something new and I apply it. So the general vision though of being able to help people solve chronic inflammatory health conditions, which we really don’t do well in the Western medicine world. I worked in internal medicine, family medicine and knowing that there was more to supporting people’s journey to live a fulfilled and joyful life. And it wasn’t happening on the other end of my prescription pad, I’ll tell you that. So that’s the first step is getting that vision, honing that in, and then being committed to making it happen. So I’m just going to pause there, see if you have any questions. Because I could just go on and on.

Evelyne: I love this. I love the mindset piece, the vision piece. What does your business currently look like? You have programs, do you have private clients? Do you run groups? Tell us a bit more about that.

Laura Frontiero: Yeah, so it’s morphed over the years. So when I very first started, I started only working with private clients. And that’s the way that I would suggest. I mean, if we want to talk about how to successfully build a business, I was highly coachable by my business coaches and I really listened and took to heart what they taught me. And one of the first things I learned was to coach privately and sell high-ticket. And do not mess around with the low-ticket thing because you actually have no business doing that until you have volume of audience, until you have volume in your audience. So once you have 100,000 people following you, then you can sell a $125 thing and actually make money. And I say this, you have to make money to build a business because everything I made got invested into the business in the beginning. And the fastest way to do that is to one-on-one coach and high-ticket coaching. So interestingly, we’re okay to talk numbers on this interview, right?

Evelyne: Yes, I’d love to hear them. I think it’s very inspiring more than anything. Yeah.

Laura Frontiero: So if you want to go slow, sell a low-ticket thing. If you want to go fast and build your business to the point where you can actually impact the world, I want everyone listening right now to shift their mindset. It’s actually coming from a place of generosity when you are selling a high-ticket thing. Because for a couple of reasons. Number one, when somebody pays good money to work with you, they they’re more likely to do the work. When somebody gets something for free or almost nothing, they’re very unlikely to be motivated to actually do the things that are required to solve their health problems. Which in functional medicine, we’re not playing the easy game, we’re not pushing the easy button here. There isn’t a pill to solve your problem. It’s going to take some lifestyle changes, commitment. You’re going to have to take some supplement protocols, you’re going to change the way you eat, you’re going to change the way you sleep, you’re going to change everything about your life.

And this is a huge commitment. So when people pay for that, they actually are more likely to do it. So you are being more generous and loving to your audience when you are actually offering something of great value to them that they pay for because they’re more likely to do it. It also is a generous way for you to be able to get your word out in the world. Because if you can build your business fast, you can impact more people quickly. So I started out one-on-one coaching, the first thing I ever sold was $7,000. And what my clients got from me was two calls a month for six months. Two calls a month for six months. So right off the bat, if you do the math there, I was making over $500 an hour. And in my nurse practitioner job, I was making under $100 an hour at the time.

And so this was a huge transition. It took a lot of mindset work. I mean, you mentioned in my bio that I studied transformational leadership and I’ve coached people through it, but it took a huge mindset shift for me. So if you want to own a business, run a business and be successful, you got to do the internal work as well. So that’s how I started, private coaching, and this was health coaching. And then as I grew my business, I started adding. There was no lab evaluation at this point, nothing. It was just strictly one-on-one coaching with me for mindset and tips on how to change their lifestyle. And then I added laboratory testing to my programs.

And it’s like I mentioned when I started this conversation with you that as I learn things, I apply them in my business. I was a newbie in the functional medicine world. Remember I’d spent all this time in Western medicine and I was learning functional medicine. So as I learned it, I applied it. And in the beginning I didn’t know how to interpret labs or anything about them. And as I studied how to utilize functional labs, I started bringing them into my programs and offering them. And so that’s how it grew from there. And then eventually years into this, I went into the group model and we can talk more about that and just ask me some more questions and you’ll guide me where you want to go here.

Evelyne: Yeah. Well, I’d love to know how you made that transition to group. Because I know that is more recent that you started doing that. Tell us what that looks like.

Laura Frontiero: So my big groups have been more recent, but small groups were several years ago. So what happened was, remember I was working part-time for Kaiser and I’m working part-time in my business. And so by now, so let’s call it, I’m working with 30 to 40 private clients at a time at this point and I’m running functional labs and I’m doing private consultations with them several times a month. And at one point my time became packed. I had no more time to take on more clients because I’ve got this job over here and this job over here, and I hit the ceiling of what I could achieve with the time that I had. So in order to scale the business, I had to look at a different model.

So I reluctantly, and I say reluctantly, I didn’t think that I could get people as good of results in a group as I did privately. So I really had this conversation about, will this really work? Can I make this happen? Can people get results in a group setting where they’re not getting private coaching with me? And so I did a beta test and I started with a group of about 20 people and we ran gut testing labs and then I coached them and taught them in a group setting how to solve their health problems. And in that first model, I also had at least one one-on-one with them. So I was still doing a one-on-one component and then group for the rest of it. And what happened was they got extraordinary results. So the one-on-one component was to actually review their lab tests. So they’d get one call with me to review a lab test and the rest of the teaching occurred in a group format. I’m trying to remember how this happened because it was several years ago.

And what happened was people got great results. So now I had figured out how to do a hybrid one to many and I still hadn’t gone to the full group model where they don’t have one-on-ones with me anymore. But I was proving to myself that it would work. So a couple of years into doing this, I was still really time strapped because I still had this small one-on-one component where they’d get at least one call with me. And in the amount of people that wanted this, I was running out of time again. I couldn’t fit that all on my schedule, I’m still working for Kaiser. The business is growing, it’s this side hustle that I have is making a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year at this point. Literally, it’s bringing in more money than I’m making in my Kaiser job, but I’m taking that money and I’m investing it back in the business.

So at this point, I’m hiring tech people, copywriters, I’m hiring people who can build websites for me, I’m hiring a sales person, I’m hiring additional health coaches. So I’m still investing in the business and I’m not paying myself all that money. I’m still growing because I still have this vision. So then this last year I decided, okay, we’re going to completely stop the one-on-one model and I’m going to figure out how to execute a group and not have a single one-on-one discussion with a client. Can we do it? So this is a beta test. So what happened was we ended up putting 500 people. Who does that?

Evelyne: Amazing.

Laura Frontiero: I know. We went from 30 to 50 people in my groups to 500 overnight. So we put 500 people in this group. And what I did was I did a gut test, the Diagnostic Solutions GI-MAP test, which I love because it’s so simple and easy and just straightforward information. It’s literally my favorite gut test. And I wrote a gut interpretation guide and I taught them in the group how to interpret the test. And I created protocols like an if this, then that, choose your own adventure scenario where if your test shows this, then add this.

So I wrote a baseline protocol. Here’s the baseline things everyone should do to heal their gut. And then here’s the things you can add on. So for example, if you had a low pancreatic elastase, add these enzymes. If you have low immune function, then add immunoglobulins. If you had a high stay out of credit level, then let’s add some digestive support there. If you had parasites, then let’s do this. So it was one of those scenarios where we were just testing it and see what would happen and people had extraordinary results, Evelyne. They loved it.

They had such good results, 500 people, this was a six-week course. So at the end of six weeks, we’re like, “Oh my gosh, we have to do something for else for them. We need to take them to the next level.” So at the end of six weeks, I made another offer and half of them, 250 of them, went with me to the next group. Which in the business world, to have a cohort of 50% conversion into the next thing that costs double the price from what they paid for the first six weeks is amazing.

Evelyne: It’s insane.

Laura Frontiero: Those are amazing statistics. So basically the group model works, people get extraordinary results, you are now one to many. And you go back to that vision that you had when you first started this business and see that, wow, I’m really impacting huge amounts of people at this point. I’m actually creating legacy. I am helping people get the tools they need to live their best lives. And the ripple effect is huge. So their families, their friends, their coworkers, their communities, they’re watching what this person is doing to heal their body.

And then guess what happens? Their friends, family, coworkers, community, they want what they’re having. And so they want to know, “What are you doing to get better? Your energy’s up, your brain seems less foggy, you’re not anxious anymore. It seems like you can eat the foods that were giving you so much trouble. What are you doing? I want to do that. Do you think this could help me? Do you think this could help my headaches? Do you think this could help my joint pain? Do you think this could help my memory?” And the ripple effect happens and now you’re making a huge impact in the world. And I’ll say that I have made a much larger impact in the world being a business owner than I ever did working for somebody else.

Evelyne: Yeah. I love that, Laura. And I want to back up a little bit because I know that you enrolled 500 people into this program just a few months ago. And I want to back up, where did those people come from? Because a lot of practitioners I work with and speak with, they have a program they’ve created or they’re thinking about creating a program. And I think that since we’ve been in this world for a little while, I think that say 10 years ago, you could put a program out there, maybe host one webinar and you could get a bunch of people who wanted to do the program. I think it’s a lot harder now because there are so many voices out there, which is great. There are so many people to help. But I know for you, it took a lot of work. You did a lot of webinars, you did the summits to actually get 500 people into that program. Can you walk us through what that looks like?

Laura Frontiero: Yeah. So I mean, this again is the evolution of becoming a business person. So not only am I a health expert, but I’m a business expert too. And I had to become a marketing expert and a sales expert and all the things that we think are ick because we’re healers. You mean I have to make offers? You mean I have to sell to do this? Yes, you need to hone that craft. And remember, selling comes from a place of love. If you’re not selling, if you’re not making offers, you are not going to be able to help people. You can’t help people for free. They won’t do it. So you’ve got to make offers. So just remember that.

But how did I build an audience is really what you’re asking. And an audience is a buyer’s list. So the last thing you want to do is create a program and then try to find buyers. That’s actually the backwards, inverse way of doing things. So if you’ve ever heard the concept of building the plane while it flies, every program I’ve ever created, I’ve only been one module ahead of my audience. And I’ve done this over and over again. But you have to ask your audience what they want and then build them that. Because you could spend all this time building something and it’s not actually what they want. But the way that I built my audience, there’s a lot of ways to build a buyer’s list. There’s some people that just crush it in social media. They’re on Instagram, they’re on Facebook, they’ve built a following of multi tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people and they’re marketing right there to people to get them into some kind of experience to build trust, like a webinar, a masterclass, a live event, something. And then they make an offer at that event.

Now, the offer could be an actual purchase or it could be to book a call. And then you get on a call with somebody and you sell them into whatever you’re offering from there. The way that I built my buyer’s list, my email list, is through online health summits. So I did my first summit in 2018. Produced it myself, just me and a VA. We built an email list of 6,000 and from there, everything launched. So on that list of 6,000 people with just me and a VA, I think that first list we made somewhere between $100,000 and $200,000 in sales off of 6,000 people.

Evelyne: Amazing.

Laura Frontiero: You don’t need 100,000 people to build a business. You don’t. And then I did three more. So I did three total summits by myself and a VA and eventually I hired a copywriter. And then I got into the big summit world, which is there are summit production companies out there that do health summits, and I’ve produced several in that space. I’m working on one right now. And with those summits, I’ll usually average around 45,000 people viewing. And so then from there, we email market to that audience and we invite them to a series of webinars. So on that particular launch last summer when we put 500 people, I did a total of seven webinars. And we wrote an email campaign where we invited them to the webinars, I taught several different topics, but the call to action on each webinar, the thing that we offered was the same. It was that six week gut test program that I mentioned earlier. And so we sold the same thing, but we taught different topics. And then we just kept going and going and going until we hit our numbers.

And when we had a number in mind, we had a good, better, best kind of goal, and we crushed it. We hit our best. I mean, everyone was stunned. But what it took from me and my team was pivoting, pivoting, pivoting. So every single webinar we look at, okay, where did people drop off? How many did we sell? What did I say that landed with people? What did I say that did not? We just really studied the execution of every webinar. And then every webinar, I rewrote it just a little bit and pivoted and pivoted and pivoted until I finally got it.

And that’s literally how I’ve built everything, is just execute something, look at it, critique it, see what’s working, see what’s not working, and pivot from what’s not working. And never be in breakdown about the things that don’t work. We just learn from the things that don’t work. I mean, we could be in breakdown about it, but that wouldn’t serve anyone. So I mean, there’s been many times I flopped and failed in my journey here, we could talk about some flops and failures. But ultimately it’s just about pivoting, pivoting, pivoting.

Evelyne: I love that. And I’ve heard you say in other places, and you’ve probably told me, you are a perfectionist and you work very hard. But I love that too. Like JJ always says, “Success leaves clues.” And that’s what you’re doing with that fine-tuning each time, right?

Laura Frontiero: I want to talk a little bit about perfectionism. I’m glad you brought that up. Because perfectionism is paralyzing. So you will never be successful if you stay in a perfectionist. So nowadays, I strive for excellence, not perfectionism. So everything I put out there, can I say it was excellent? I can. Can I say I gave it my all? Did my team give it our all? Are we human? Did we make mistakes? Sometimes do we have typos? Sometimes do we blunder? Absolutely. And so perfectionism will prevent you from actually executing. Perfectionism is not possible. It’s actually an unattainable goal. So I mean, I’m a recovering perfectionist, I would say. But I can definitely say I am in excellence and everything I put out there, I am in excellence with what I knew how to do in that moment.

Evelyne: I love that. I meant to ask you this earlier, but who is your typical client who signs up for one of your programs? Who’s your ideal person you’re speaking to?

Laura Frontiero: This is really important just from a business perspective that you do figure out who your avatar is. So we would call that our avatar, the person that we’re speaking to. And you really want to make sure that your messaging lands with that person or you will call in a bunch of people that maybe you’re not good at helping or that you don’t want to help. So we have been very careful with our execution of how we write our copy in our emails, our sales pages, social media, anything that we’re doing. And the person who you have to think about, think about your most favorite client that you’ve ever worked with and what are they like? Literally write down everything. The person I like to work with is the high performing woman.

So this is someone who generally is career-driven, is focused, is interested in leaving legacy behind in her world. She is active in her family, she is a pillar in her family. She is a pillar in her community. She probably manages other people. She probably has a job where people rely on her and look up to her. Or if not that, she’s got an important role in philanthropy or in volunteerism or somewhere where she’s really driven and her body and her health is not keeping up with her drive, her ambition. She is noticing that her health is holding her back. She doesn’t have the energy she used to. She doesn’t have the brain capacity that she used to. She can’t trust it or rely on it. She’s got so much digestive stuff going on that it’s a struggle for her to eat out, to entertain, to visit families’ homes because she’s so particular about what she eats. Her health is slowing her down.

The avatar we are not calling in in my company is the person with chronic fatigue syndrome. This is not my avatar. So it’s a fine difference between the productive person whose energy is giving out and the person who has chronic fatigue syndrome. I’m very clear on who I like to work with because of how my personality is and how I’m a go, go, high energy, let’s get it done. Let’s figure it out. Let’s not stay in breakdown. Let’s not be defined by our illness. We are not our illness, we are not our symptoms. That is not who we are. And so that I am clear on who I work with.

And it took me a long time to figure that out. I mean, I was all over the place. “I’ll work with anybody.” And that didn’t work. And so now I’m also very careful about when I’m doing projects and who I bring in to collaborate with, I need to make sure that their audience is in align with my audience and who I want to work with. So for example, if I was doing a summit, I would not interview or bring in a person who specializes in addiction or chronic pain because those are not the people that I can help the most. So I will focus on bringing in and collaborating with people that actually have the same similar messaging to me. That’s a critical thing in business is the relationships you make and the people you collaborate with, make sure you’re in alignment together.

Evelyne: Yeah, great point. I want to talk about the supplement piece of it a little bit and more on the sales side of it. Which is something we haven’t really talked about on this podcast, but as we’re in this new year, I think it’s very exciting, very inspiring to think about the possibilities. And I often use your business as an example when I speak to people, like, “This is possible. You can do this.”

And like you said actually, wrote this exact question. I think sometimes sales can be icky for practitioners and we’re in the business of helping people. And yet if you asked a lawyer a question, they wouldn’t hesitate to bill you a couple of hundred or $1,000 for five minutes or 10 minutes. And so I don’t follow any lawyers, I don’t think, on Instagram. But I think there’s something unique in the health field, but also I think self-development and business where we just freely give out so much advice and we just want to help people. I mean, you said you changed your mindset about it, but how did you do that? And specifically around when you’re already selling a program that costs a lot of money and then recommending supplements on top of that.

Laura Frontiero: So something I want to say is something I learned in the business space is do give away your knowledge. So give away your best stuff in your emails, in your social media, on your free webinars. Give a lot of stuff away. Teach people, give them something that they can execute and support them. People will pay for access to you. So they want a leader, they want a guide, they want a system, they want to work with your system. So you’re not giving away your system, you’re not giving away your time, but you can give away all the concepts of how we help people heal their bodies in the functional medicine space.

So be generous and give a ton away, just don’t give your proprietary formula away. They get to pay for that. And they get to pay for one-on-one access or group, one to many, access. So people will pay for your time. They want accountability, they want ability to ask you questions. So you just have to figure out what that line is for you. And then I think your question is how do we sell supplements or how do we have such high conversion in supplements?

Evelyne: All of it. I’d love to hear the answer to both. And also how you adopted your mindset to be able to offer that. Because that was not obviously what you were doing at Kaiser, right?

Laura Frontiero: Right. I don’t write prescriptions anymore. I mean, I haven’t written a prescription in over a year since I retired from Kaiser a year ago, just over a year at the time that we filmed this interview. But now it’s just the supplement world. So I think part of it is building trust. So part of it is my own personal journey. So my own personal journey from my health was here and now I’m here and how did I do it? And then not only that, my family’s journey. So my parents’ journey, my husband’s journey, my daughter’s journey, where they were then and where they are now. So that’s one of the easiest things you can do to start building trust and intimacy with your audience. So part of the success of selling supplements, devices, whatever it is you’re into, I’m talking like biohacking devices, whatever it is, part of the success there is building trust. And your personal story and intimacy with your own life and telling the truth and showing them the good, bad and the ugly, and making people laugh.

I mean, in my groups, real life is funny and I don’t hold back and we talk about funny stuff. And when people have this experience of this with you, they will literally do anything you tell them to do. I am to the point now in my groups where I say, “Hey guys, this is the thing you should be doing right now. I studied this and I learned this recently and I talked to this person and I took it myself and this is what happened and I think you should be doing it too.” And then boom, they just do it. So the key to getting people to do the protocols is to build trust. Underlying everything is trust and intimacy. And in my emails, it’s funny, when I first started out with this, I was in this space of I need to be respected and I need to be the smartest person in the room and I need to build all this.

And so when I very first started my email marketing was stuffy and scientific. And we’ve gotten to the point where we send funny stuff in our emails all the time. And if people don’t like it and they unsubscribe from me, I’m okay with that because they aren’t my people. They aren’t my tribe if they can’t laugh at Gen X, funny pop culture stuff. And I mean, we send emails with funny GIFs, GIFs, I never know how to say it, but funny stuff from my generation. I’m a Gen X and there’s all kinds of funny stuff in our generation that I share and link my email concepts and I teach concepts in really easy ways to understand and I’ll link it to real life scenarios. So it’s about being joyful, funny and connected. People will follow you and do what you tell them to do when they trust you. Honestly. I mean, I think this isn’t a strategy of the right wording on a sales page or the perfect email sales funnel. I mean, all that matters, but at the end of the day, you have to be trustworthy. Really.

Evelyne: Absolutely. Yeah. I want to back up a little bit. So you retired from Kaiser about a year ago. And you said you started building this, was it only five years ago?

Laura Frontiero: It was 2018. Yeah, ’19, ’20… So it’s six. Yeah.

Evelyne: Six years, okay.

Laura Frontiero: It’s going on six years.

Evelyne: That’s incredible.

Laura Frontiero: Yeah, April 2018 is when I earned my first dollar in this business.

Evelyne: Wow. Because I think it is inspiring. I mean, you can look at it like, “Oh, five years, six years, that’s a long time.” But really it’s not. To grow to where you have grown in such a short amount of time I think is absolutely incredible. I want to talk a little bit about your team. You mentioned copywriters, tech people, website builders and a VA. Which roles did you start with and how do you determine where you’re adding? And also you said that you reinvested, in the beginning, everything back into the business. I think that can be really challenging. So you needed your Kaiser job to fund your life?

Laura Frontiero: Oh, yeah.

Evelyne: But how do you determine how much you reinvest back into the business every year?

Laura Frontiero: Yeah. A lot of people have opinions about this and there’ll be business coaches that’ll… All I know is what worked for me. So when I share this, this was my story. This is my journey. This is what worked for me. And I’m sure there’s some magical percentage that you’re supposed to be paying yourself right off the bat. I’m sure that there’s people in the finance world if they listen to this, they might cringe at what I’m about to tell you. But this was my journey and what happened. So my very first hire… So first off, my Kaiser income was already supporting my life and my life was just going to continue cruising the same. No matter if I was building a side gig or not, I was going to have the same mortgage, I was going to have the same car payment, I was going to have the same expenses. And so my salary covered that.

Now in the business build, you’ve got to hire business coaches. I mean, I highly recommend it. You’ve got to hire some people to help you. And so investing in the business is critical. So my first hire was a VA. Where she could just help me with a whole bunch of things like building simple web pages, helping me with emails, sending emails to people, just helping me with that, build my first summit, that kind of stuff. And after I hired her and we’d worked together for about a year and things were growing and working, the next hire, my second hire was a copywriter. Because that is the thing that will stop most people is the amount of copy that you need to create for email marketing, for blogs, for social media, for whatever you’re doing. You will get bogged down in that unless you love writing and you’re a prolific writer and it’s your favorite thing to do.

I will tell you that those two people are critical. And when I hired my copywriter, I remember she told me, she said, “Laura, I will write you a sales email funnel and you will see that your investment in me will pay itself back immediately when you start enrolling more people into your program.” She was 100% right. It seemed like a lot of money to hire her to have her write those things, but it paid for itself immediately. So about that point, here I am with this business that’s growing and working and I’m realizing I need to invest in even more things. I need more software. I need more programs, I need specialized things, I need more business coaching. At that point, I took out an $80,000 loan on my house. Literally. It was like, I need this money to be able to just not worry and I will make that back and I will pay it back to myself.

And so my husband and I sat down and I said, “I really want to do this.” And he was like, “Okay, do it. You’re already successful at this. Let’s see what you can do.” So I took that, a HELOC loan on my house. And at this point I still think I wasn’t paying myself. And a couple of years into this, as the business is growing, I had an S corp and you really have to put yourself on payroll at some point or this is like a red flag to the IRS. It’s not good. So then I started paying myself a little bit. I started paying myself maybe $2,000 a month. And then just grew from there. I talked to my CPA and my accountant and then I just kept growing my salary from there and looking at my income every year as we did my taxes and making sure that I’m doing things right. So really that’s how it worked. Now, fast-forward to today and I have 13 people work for me.

Evelyne: Amazing.

Laura Frontiero: Yeah, I mean, it’s grown a lot. As we hit a milestone in the business, I hire the next important person. So one of the biggest hires that I did last year, which has really helped scale my business was I hired another person in the C-suite. I’m the CEO, I hired a fractional COO. So the fractional means they work for multiple people. To hire a COO exclusively for just me, that was beyond my scope of what I could pay, but I could hire a fractional COO. So that made a huge difference in my business growth because of the strategy, this person can hire for me, this person can give me strategy, they can map out the finances and say, “Okay, you need to do this, this and this to achieve this financial goal. And here’s how we’re going to build it.”

And it helps because my zone of genius is not the financials, it’s not the numbers, but being intimate and knowing your numbers is really important. So just building smart from the get-go, I think, and bringing people in to help you. When my COO came in and looked at the structure of my business, her mind was blown. She just went, “Wow, you’ve really built a solid business here. You are ready to scale. Everything you need is in place because of the way you built. We can scale this fast.” And I mean, we 4Xed my business in one year. So I left Kaiser with trust and a prayer like, okay, I trust myself, I trust what I’ve built. I’ve already replaced my income there, now I’ve got to replace the pension that I just left behind. I mean, I left a million dollar pension on the table. I walked away from my pension. It was worth a certain amount, by leaving early, by retiring early, I forfeited a million in my pension. So I had to be able to replace that and we replaced it in a year. I mean, it was insane.

Evelyne: That’s incredible. You had also mentioned to me when we spoke, you have a great customer service team in place and how important and critical that is when you’re running large programs. Tell me more about that.

Laura Frontiero: It’s hugely important. So you’ve heard me speak earlier about running small groups, working with 25 to 50 clients at a time. Working with that small amount of people, the customer service for that, they have emails, they have questions, you’re ordering labs. When the lab results come in, you’re making sure they get the labs back. You’re scheduling people on your appointment calendar. I mean, there’s a lot of customer service. You can usually do that with a VA. But once you get into the 500 game, that is a lot of customer service. That is a huge customer service lift. And so I now have a customer service team. So I have somebody who works full-time in customer service and another person who works and we systematized. So that’s the other thing, you must have systems in place. So it’s almost impossible to take 500 labs and manually send those to people, send the kits out, and then once you get the results back to manually upload those for people to see them. You need systemization. And so we systematized between… Is it okay if I tell you the names of the companies that we use?

Evelyne: Sure. Yes, absolutely. Yeah.

Laura Frontiero: Okay. So we use Biocanic, which is a wonderful company for a customer. It’s like a customer service management software. And it’s like electronic medical record, but it’s not for prescribing drugs. So that’s something that it doesn’t do, but you could order supplements through it. So it’ll connect with Fullscript and it’ll connect with several of the labs. So it’s like a whole client management portal and it is fantastic. The owner of the company is personal touch, he’s always available to help us. So what we did was we integrated Biocanic with Keap, which is our email management system and it’s also a customer management platform. Now, Keap is one of the bigger email management. We call them CRMs. And unless you have people who really know how to use Keap, and there are people who do, you’ve got to really have somebody who knows how to use Keap. Let me just put that there and say that.

But what we do is we integrate. So when somebody purchases from us off of a website, the data is collected into Keap, Keap communicates with Biocanic. You can also have people sign contracts, their client agreements and everything through that. And it’s all systematized where when one thing happens, it triggers something else to happen. So the trigger goes like this. They come in and they purchase something, a client agreement is triggered off to them, they sign it, that triggers off. They’re set now to order the lab because they’ve fulfilled all the pieces they needed to do. The lab is automatically ordered at the stroke of a button. So I still want my team to confirm that the client agreement was done correctly. So then they just have to push a button and the lab is ordered.

So Biocanic will integrate with certain labs. And then when the lab comes back, it automatically gets loaded into the person’s record and then an automatic email is sent off to the client saying, “You have test results to view in your Biocanic portal.” So that is how we automated all of this. And then of course, the level of emails and questions like, “I don’t know where my password is. I don’t know the instructions how to collect this test. I’m having a side effect from my settlements. My credit card isn’t working.” The customer service questions are nonstop every day, so you just have to have somebody in place to handle all that stuff.

Evelyne: Yeah, thank you for sharing that. I can’t believe we’ve been talking so long about the business part because I do want to get into the clinical. But this is so fun and inspiring. And something that we haven’t really shared and I don’t know if you want to share the exact numbers, but you shared what you’ve made in your business. Are you able to share or wanting to share how much of that is supplements? For people to see…

Laura Frontiero: Yeah. So we sell easily $100,000 of supplements per month, some months up to $200,000.

Evelyne: That to me is crazy.

Laura Frontiero: Yeah, it’s a big number. And people are getting phenomenal results. And the reason that we sell so many supplements is the trust factor and it’s also that people get results. So they keep coming back because we’ve curated and created supplement protocols that really get people excellent results. And so they come back. And so in the functional space world, the average spend of a customer may be $500 over the life of a program with somebody. Our average spend is closer to $2,000. And it’s because we get such good results the way that we’ve curated. And this is where the perfectionist in me comes in, where I study what works and what doesn’t work. So I’ve taken people through protocols and some things worked and some things didn’t work. And then I get rid of the things that didn’t work and I try new things that work. And I test everything on myself and we’ve got these programs and plans and protocols that get people tremendous results. And then it works. It sells itself.

Evelyne: Yeah. Amazing. Okay. I want to talk about the program piece and how you’re able to get such amazing results for people. So in your functional medicine training, you started with a lot of things we learned like working on hormones, adrenals, thyroid, blood sugar. What was the missing piece for you and what do you focus on now?

Laura Frontiero: Yeah. The missing piece for me and what I do was getting down to the true root cause. So in the beginning, as I was learning, I spent a year at one point… I’ll just use an example. I spent a year at one point studying the Organic Acids Test and studying nutrient deficiencies and the enzyme pathways and how to replace those nutrient deficiencies. And so when I was working with somebody, I would start doing this early on and start helping them support like, “Okay, we did your organic acids and it shows that you need these amino acids and you need these B vitamins and you need this magnesium and you’ve got a lot of oxidative stress here, so you need these antioxidants.” And people weren’t getting great results with that. I mean, I would do that and I would run gut testing and I would work on some gut health.

And then I learned, because I’m always on a quest of learning. So what’s working? What’s working? What am I missing? What am I missing? And I found out that I was missing the true root cause. So what was the true root cause of these nutrient deficiencies to begin with? Now, I still run organic acids and I still work on nutrient deficiencies, I just change the order of operations of when I do things. So now what I do is I solve for chronic hidden infections and toxins. That is the bulk of what we focus on. Oftentimes by focusing there, the clients that I work with, because remember I’m working with the high performer that’s got symptoms, they’re not necessarily in full-blown chronic inflammatory disease process. So that is a different strategy from the bulk of the people I work with.

But for the bulk of the people I work with, what we need to do is clear parasites. What we need to do is get rid of environmental toxins, glyphosate, heavy metals, mold toxins. We need to work on these things, we need to work on digestive support. So once we solve these root cause problems and things start to get tremendously better, then I run an Organic Acids Test later, no joke, maybe six months down the road. I might not touch it for six months. And then I bring in the, “Okay, we’ve done all this work and all this stuff is cleared up, here’s what’s left over. Here’s what your nutrient needs are after we solved all these problems that were stealing your nutrients to begin with.” So that’s just an example of one of the ways that I’ve pivoted and shifted and I find that people get tremendous results just from focusing on those two buckets of problems, infections and toxins.

Evelyne: So you mentioned you start with the GI-MAP test, which I also love. And then with the toxins, are you testing for that or does that also come later? Or are you assuming? I mean, we’re all exposed to so many things, right?

Laura Frontiero: Yes. So actually I like to give people about a month of working on gut health and working on opening internal drainage pathways. Getting their liver functioning properly, getting bile flowing, getting their lymphatics moving, getting the fascia cleaned up, getting the extracellular spaces, working on mitochondrial energy production. I like to spend a month working on these things and slowly and safely starting to prompt the body to remove and expel toxins on its own. It’s a slow provoking phase that I work people through where we provoke toxins to come out, but not really quick overnight. So not like, I’m going to give you this medication or this supplement to provoke you and then I’m going to do a toxin test. I actually provoke slowly over about a month and then when we do a urine toxin test, we see a lot more at that point.

So the first month I start with gut health and supporting drainage and then I move into toxin testing later. And I really do spend about three months with people working on gut health. So we spend a solid three months working on getting the gut repaired before we get into detox work. And I think one of the biggest mistakes at least that I made early on in my functional medicine, and I have a feeling still many people do this, is they start detoxing before the body’s actually ready to do it. And then people have Herxheimer reactions, they feel terrible and then they don’t want to keep doing. So we get people winning, winning, winning, feeling good, brain’s feeling good, energy’s feeling good, skin is clearing up, symptoms of trying to go away, then we do the deeper toxin work. It’s the process that we go through.

Evelyne: Amazing. And with your gut health, gut rebuilding, what are some of the top supplements that you use in that part of the program?

Laura Frontiero: Yeah. So solving for a leaky gut and solving for gut permeability, all this is really important. So from a gut permeability perspective, I really love using DFH products to support this. And so I love using products with L-glutamine and DGL and Citrus Pectin and Marshmallow and Slippery Elm and DFH has some wonderful products that support this. In terms of the immune function in the gut, a dairy-free bovine immunoglobulin concentrate is really important to the process. I find people get extraordinary results when we add that. And butyrate, this is a big one.

So in terms of supporting microbial balance, early on I used to work on giving people prebiotic fiber and I’ve just found over the years that some people just can’t tolerate that, it’s too much too quick. And so I really like to just skip the prebiotic in the beginning and just go straight to giving a post-biotic and just go with butyrate. Because what’s going to happen with the prebiotic fiber is the bacteria are going to ferment it and make the butyrate anyway. So why not just give butyrate and just give the gut that boost of support so that the good microbes can flourish, so that the enterocytes in the intestinal wall can start to repair. And then the other thing I do, which I think it may be different than what other people do, but I really like to add collagen into my gut repairing right off the get-go.

Evelyne: Yes. Tell me more.

Laura Frontiero: Yeah. And I don’t see this in a lot of gut protocols, but I do it because about 30% of the body’s protein is collagen and collagen is full of really important amino acids for gut health. So glycine and glutamine and proline, they support a healthy bacteria balance and gut barrier and help repair a leaky gut. And also, I’m killing two birds with one stone because I find that most people I interview and talk to are not eating enough protein and collagen is a great way to get a boost of protein into the diet. People undereat protein. And so it’s helping the gut and it’s also helping all the structure in their body. And when people start feeling better on a grand scale, they don’t have as much joint pain, their skin starts to glow, they just look and feel better, then they are motivated to keep going.

So why not throw collagen into your gut repairing protocol because it’s going to help the gut? And your body will rob Peter to pay Paul, by the way. So your body is very intelligent. And your gut lining is full of protein that if you aren’t ingesting enough, you’ll extract it from your gut and move the protein to other parts of the body where the protein is required. And that in itself lends you to developing leaky gut because you’re literally robbing the protein right out of the gut wall to support other functions in the body. So why not just give that right off the bat? I mean, I’m always wanting to get people to eat more protein.

Evelyne: So Laura, when it comes to mitochondrial health, are you supporting with supplementation there also? And is that something that you’re going to start in maybe the second or third month? Are you doing other things to specifically boost mitochondria, for example?

Laura Frontiero: Yeah. Definitely. So I’m a firm proponent, and I didn’t know this in the beginning when I first started, I think is one of the reasons that in the beginning my protocols didn’t work as well, is that mitochondria support from the get-go is important for all healing processes. Because your body requires more ATP energy in order to heal. And if you don’t have that energy on board, the ATP on board, and if you aren’t stimulating mitochondria mitogenesis, if you’re not stimulating the production of new mitochondria, if you’re not stimulating the removal of old mitochondria, then the healing journey is just going to take a lot longer. And so from the moment that somebody steps into my programs, we are putting mitochondrial support and energy support into their protocol. And one of the things that people don’t even realize is that in order to sleep, it requires energy.

So people think when I’m asleep, my body’s not using energy. Not so. For people who have chronic inflammation and they’re collecting chronic health conditions and syndromes and they’re starting to collect medications. And along with that comes the difficulty falling asleep, the difficulty staying asleep. Oftentimes that is related to lack of mitochondrial energy production because it requires ATP for your body to actually go to sleep and stay asleep. And remember, during that sleep cycle, you’re also repairing, regenerating and reviving your body during your sleep. There’s a lot of processes going on where, I call it the silent energy that you’re not aware of that you’re using during that process.

So I think it’s critical to bring mitochondrial support. Now when you think of the traditional mitochondrial support, you want to bring in the co-factors for mitochondrial energy production, so B vitamins and magnesium and CoQ10 and all of that’s really important. I also like to bring in humic and fulvic acids and minerals are really important. So we do a lot of different strategies for mitochondria. There’s a lot out there. You can also use mitochondria biohacking strategies as well. So Red Light and Wim Hof breathing and cold plunging and fasting. And so it’s not just a nutrient game, but there’s a lot of things you can do to support mitochondrial health.

Evelyne: Absolutely. And you and I were chatting about how stress is probably one of the biggest pieces that keeps people stuck. I’m going to tie this into our last questions. Because I know that we could probably keep talking for another hour if I was able to. You’ve already answered the question about what you changed your mind about in practice, but I do want to ask what your three favorite supplements and your favorite health practices are. And tie that into the stress piece, which is really probably the missing link in everything. And I think for me, it’s the hardest to get under control. I think it is for a lot of the clients that you work with, right?

Laura Frontiero: Yeah. My favorite supplements. So what do I not leave home without? I’m going to tell you on a personal level. So when I travel. So I travel with a binder because we’re always going to be exposed to toxins. So I’m a huge proponent of detoxing is a lifestyle. It’s not a one and done. We are constantly exposed to toxins, so we don’t finish detoxing ever. And last I checked, I’m living in a first world country where I’m exposed to thousands of toxins every day. And when you travel, you now are not in control of your environment. So I always have a binder on hand to help get herbicides and pesticides out of my body, to help get volatile organic compounds, when you go to a hotel and all the volatile organic compounds that are there. So I travel with something to support removing toxins.

I travel with immune support. So I really love to travel with, DFH makes a great packet of supplements for immune support that has vitamin C and zinc and herbs that help with supporting your immune system. It’s echinacea and beta-glucan and all these great herbs. So I travel with that. I’ll take a packet of those twice a day. So that’s something I don’t live without. I also really love to have something to help me if I need it for sleep, especially if I’m not in my own environment. And even if I do have a rocky spell of sleep, I like to have some good magnesium on hand, I like to have some melatonin on hand. What else must I have on hand? These are the big things that I always have. Immune support, detox support, sleep support. I think those three things are critical. I’ll just leave it there. I mean, I feel like I could go on and on about what I like to have on hand. I mean, people make fun of me with the amount of things that I always have on hand and what I travel with. It’s a whole thing.

Evelyne: Oh, me too. And then what about favorite health practices that keep you healthy and balanced, but that you also recommend to your clients with the stress piece?

Laura Frontiero: Yeah. So food is huge. It’s the thing that we have a lot of control over because we have to eat every day. I mean, this is just something that we must do. And so controlling and being very conscious about your food. So I really avoid processed food. I really eat food the way it comes from the earth, with a minimal processing and eating organic. This is really one of the things that’s important for me. And yes, it feels sometimes like it can cost more and it can take more time. It’s time and money well spent.

I mean, this is the thing. I don’t get my nails done, I don’t get my eyebrows tattooed, I don’t have my eyelashes. There’s so many things that I could be spending money on, which are also toxic, but I have my priorities. And I mean, obviously we just got done talking about how successful my business is and all that so people think, “Well, yeah Laura, you have money to spend on.” I didn’t always. And I didn’t get to 50, I’ll be 51 years old in a couple of weeks. I didn’t get to look this way at 51 by only doing these things now in this moment, it’s been a long progression of this. So managing what you eat. Also, healthy hacks. I also love my Red Light. I do my Red Light Therapy regularly. Infrared and Red Light. And you want three health hacks?

Evelyne: Sure. One more.

Laura Frontiero: Another one is sleep. I know that I am not my best, my brain does not work, my mood sucks and I have no energy unless I prioritize sleep. And so for me, it’s critical that I get a certain amount, I get seven hours. If I get less than seven hours, I’m waking up with a hangover and Laura is not going to be fun to hang around. And I also know it’s impacting my overall cellular health in a negative way. And so sleep is a huge one to prioritize. I mean, you just have to do it. And so you’ve got to shut the screens off, you’ve got to shut the TV off, you’ve got to have a routine, I’m reading a book or doing something to shut my brain down before bedtime and just prioritize it.

Evelyne: Yeah. I love that. Laura, thank you so very much. I love working with you one-on-one and I love that you were so generous today in sharing everything about your business and how you run it and so transparent. And I’m so proud of you. I love all of your successes and I just know you’re going to continue to grow and crush it. So thank you for sharing with us today.

Laura Frontiero: Thank you so much, Evelyne. It’s been really fun. I appreciate the opportunity. And I think it’s important that people with successful practices and businesses, that they share what they’re doing. Because I think I want to end it with saying there aren’t enough of us to go around to help the world. The world is in a crisis right now. People are having major health problems and people are suffering. And unless we share what works with the general whole community, we don’t want to be stingy and keep it to ourselves, we want to be an open book and share. There are enough sick people to go around for everyone to have a successful business. So I think it’s really important to be in a generous space and share what works.

Evelyne: Laura, you just gave me chills. Thank you. Thank you for tuning into Conversations for Health. Check out the show notes for resources from our conversation today. Please share this podcast with your colleagues. Follow, rate or leave a review wherever you listen or watch. And thank you for designing a well world with us. Voiceover: This is Conversations for Health with Evelyne Lambrecht, dedicated to engaging discussions with industry experts, exploring evidence-based, cutting edge research and practical tips.