All About Revivology And Franchising With Amy & Steve Neary
16th January 2020 • Business Leaders Podcast • Bob Roark
00:00:00
00:41:14
Shownotes
Do you want your skin to glow or need to be revived from over-indulgence? Revivology has exactly what you need. In today’s episode, Amy Neary the Founder of Revivology and Steve Neary the COO of Revivology talk about their venture in creating this wonderful company, and how it helps people who suffer from fatigue and dehydration and makes people feel much better. They dive deeper into discussing the franchises of Revivology and how to become part of it. Amy and Steve also share advice to entrepreneurs on how to bring excellence to the process of your business processes all the time.
Revivology: If you ever got to the point where it made sense to franchise the business, you must set up to be prepared.[/caption]
There was demand.
When you have people asking if they could please build one, we let them. We realized we had something and Steve had a connection to someone who was in the franchise world that made it make sense even more.
I have a friend from town here who we've done some business with investing. When we had done that investing, I said, “RevIVology is taking off. We may franchise in the future. If you know anybody, let me know.” He goes, “I don't just know somebody, I know the guy.” Fast forward a year later, I called him up and said, “We're ready to franchise. Who's the guy?” He mentioned a guy named Dan Olsen, who was a big part of Massage Envy, The Joint, Fantastic Sams, one of the preeminent franchise guys in the country. He also had a partnership with a gentleman named Kevin Harrington, who was the original shark from Shark Tank.
We invited those guys out to our home. They saw our store at the time, pre-franchise. At the time they were working with a company out of Texas that had somewhere around 10 to 15 locations. They’re an IV drug company. They were pretty close to pulling the trigger with that company. After spending one day with us they said, “We're not going to work with them. We want to partner with you guys and franchise RevIVology.” From there it's a whirlwind and a blur and drinking from a fire hose. These are guys that know their stuff and they're pushing us hard to take it to the next level every day. It's nice to be partners with that level of a team.
For the people who perhaps they have an interest in learning more about the RevIVology franchise opportunity. What is your ideal franchisee look like?
There's a movie that is about the guy who created McDonald's. It’s called The Founder. There's a part of it that sticks out to me so much when I think of this question. It's how he failed while trying to take people that just had a lot of money and were throwing money at investment opportunities. McDonald's failed with that in mind, just taking opportunity to people who just wanted to throw money at an investment. What we want is people who want to help their community. People who want to work in this business, work to make the success, have employees that they care about and are a part of that local business, not someone who's looking at it as just something to throw money at. Those are the people we found thus far, and we're getting ready to open our very first in Florida and in Utah.
You got the country almost surrounded.
They're trying to get open and they're perfect examples of that. They're two businesswomen who have owned other businesses before. They are super invested in this idea and they're going to make a huge success in their market.
It’s definitely owner-operators. Not somebody that thinks that they can be an absentee owner as you can't. You can be partially absentee ownership, which is great about this business. It is fairly simple, but you stopped working your business. That's the other people we're looking for.
There are not too many passive income opportunities where you can take your hand off the steering wheel. I wanted to dig through your journey. Because I think about from one, go to med school and going into real estate. The market event changes and you go out of real estate, looking for an opportunity that's different than the real estate place and then using everything you learned after a decade. The clients are beating you up to solve a problem and you solve the problem and the speaking opportunity where more people say, “We would like to be able to solve other people's problems by your skillsets.” I think that's important for people reading, going it's not a straight path and you're still in the business of real estate and building homes.
I’m not smart enough to get out.
I just think of and perspective of creation. You have a tangible outcome every time you take and deliver a home. There's some creation event happens there. Creativity clearly runs with you guys and courage. That's a plus. If you were to take and talk to other entrepreneurs out there, what piece of advice might you offer that you've gleaned from these opportunities?
[bctt tweet="Great idea people make sure that their business is replicable. " username=""]
I think there are quite a few, this is important and it goes a little bit against common wisdom. As our success with RevIVology, Amy sweated the small stuff. Don't sweat the small stuff. I totally disagree. Every detail, she sweated. She made sure it was perfect and there was nothing that happened by chance in this business, which is why it's such an incredible opportunity for us. The thing that we're doing and we love the fact that it's helping the community. We also love that about this business more than anything else we've ever done. This is helping people. Remain steadfast in your belief. Don't let people talk you out of a good idea because they don't believe in it. Care deeply about your employees, your brand, your company, your community. Those things are things that if we're going to tell somebody, believe in yourself. Believe in every detail and make it matter. Nothing happens by chance. Just do it.
This girl here with the scientific method from Biology. “I'm going to do the math. I'm going to check the trends. I'm going to look.” I think that has a lot of merits.
She's a researcher. Nothing that happened in that business was accidental. We'd be sitting there at 11:00, 12:00 at night. She's on her computer researching formulations or directs. What glutathione does for somebody and high dose vitamin C treatment, what those are all about? Even at Any Lab Test Now, she'll go on to speak to doctors and know more about what is happening more than the doctors do.
How many lab tests you've seen years and trends? We all know this is not that. Nothing like seeing a lot of them. Pattern recognition is a big deal.
What I love about RevIVology is that it's not just reactive, it's also proactive. It's also about being healthy going forward, not just responding to the migraines, the hangovers and lupus. If someone wants to be proactive about their health, you've got options for that as well and well-being. A spot like atmosphere, it’s very comfortable, very calm, very serene. Massage chairs and a very inviting sacred space to take care of yourself in. Looking back over the years with Any Lab Test Now and thinking about the experience, what advice would you have about running a franchise like this, encourage someone to go into this space?
A lot of people have great ideas and they have good business ideas and good business acumen. Deciding to franchise, that's a big step. If your business is something that speaks to the masses like ours does, you just stick to it, put your head down and you can get it done. That's how this was all born. Deciding that there's a need in the community and there wasn't a place to fill that. I had to start from scratch and make it happen.
Necessity is the mother of invention. It touched your heart. This comes from your passion in your heart, not from where am I going to make a lot of money, but how can I help people and improve their lives, health, and wellbeing.
That is the majority of who comes to see us, people who are trying to take care of themselves on a daily basis. Not just chronic illness. Generalized health and wellness. That's where healthcare is moving, towards preventative care and not reactive. Not taking a pill for something, but preventing that by caring for your body.
It cost their companies less money too in healthcare insurance. If somebody was thinking about just franchising in general, what advice would you do?
You can do it. I will say that we were blessed to be joined with an amazing team. A team that we have behind us backing us up is absolutely incredible. That takes some of the fears away.
One of the things that great idea people have is you have to make sure your business is replicable if you're going to franchise it. A lot of smart entrepreneurs or businesses are super successful because they're super successful. They work hard and that's what makes that business successful. You have to make sure it's a business that you can replicate. You don't need the founder there every day with you to make it successful and that's what we have created. Any Lab Test Now has 8,000 tests, 30 files, 12 labs. It's a very difficult business to be successful on and run because there are so many opportunities for mistakes.
With RevIVology, we're giving IVs to people with ingredients in it with highly trained and skilled medical professionals administrating. It's a simple business, it’s simple to replicate. Fortunately, highly profitable. You go and hoping, but it turns out that it was like Amy had mentioned. In one year, we were making more money than we had made in years at Any Lab Test Now. All of those things said we should take this out into the market. It's going to be amazing. We're focusing a little bit on a charity that we're going to be involved with...
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All About Revivology And Franchising With Amy & Steve Neary
I have co-host with Catherine Wicklund with me. She is the Vistage Chair of Southern Colorado. Our guests, Amy Neary, she is the founder of Revivology, and Steve Neary and he is the COO. They are also the owners of Any Lab Tests Now. Welcome guys. Amy, tell me some of what you do, what your business is about with RevIVology. RevIVology is a company where you can come and get IV therapy. It's a fairly new trend, but it's been around for a long time. Dr. John Myers started it probably in the ‘60s with what's called the Myers Cocktail and it's branched out from there over the years to treat things from migraine, fibromyalgia, lupus and Lyme disease. What we're using it for is for general health and wellness. People come and see us and we're able to give you 1,000 ccs of fluid, vitamin therapy, very high doses. You don't absorb vitamins the same way through your supplements as you do through an IV. It makes people feel much better when other things haven’t helped. IV therapy, intravenous. There's that part that goes on. When we talk about this company, this just barely starts to scratch the surface of your story and journey to getting here. We talked a lot about how you got here. Let's rewind a little bit and go a little bit through your journey to get here because you also have another franchise and you're also offering franchises with RevIVology as well. Let's go back to your post-college years with your Biology degree, like me. You started out and you had your Biology major, you took part-time work in the real estate world. I was in real estate, had the entrepreneurial spirit from the beginning. I bought a house when I was 24-years-old it was a 100-year-old home, Victorian, that I jacked up in the air and put a full foundation underneath. There was no outside help, this is all me. I got a grant from this local historical district. Where was this? It was in Great Falls, Montana. I learned how to do everything you could ever want to do as far as flipping a house. That was the start of my real estate career. I had a full summer job that grew into me being offered a job and new home sales. I did that for quite some time until 2008. That seemed to be rather a common pivot point for many people in the real estate arena. It started around 2006, but by 2008 I decided that I was going to get out of the real estate and do something different. I wanted to go back to my roots, which was my college education and doing something in the medical field. I started looking to purchase a franchise because the SBA and all the research that I had done had said that that was the way to go. If you're going to do new business and you didn't have experience doing business from scratch, look into franchising, so that's what I did. The thing that I found fascinating is you were talking about the success ratio from the SBA when you did your research, the scientific method. You'd looked at a number of franchise opportunities and then you did more homework. What brought you to Any Lab Test Now? I started with SBA and realized that having that support of a home office, all of the marketing materials created for you, all of the marketing plan, business plan done for you is the way to go. There is a lot of opportunity with franchising. When you look into buying a franchise, you would be surprised how many are out there that you didn't even know are franchises. Tons of business are franchises. It doesn't have to just be McDonald's or Chick-fil-A. When I decided I wanted to do it after going through a lot of research and realizing that business is like Subway and that thing were not for me and that I did want to go back to my roots, I found Any Lab Test Now. It was the very first direct access laboratory. I thought it was very unique in its space, the first of its kind. That's what I decided to pursue. You've been doing Any Lab Test Now for some time. You have two locations. You are comparing looking at Subway and its growth curve. In Any Lab Test Now, can you describe what that is? It's the first direct access laboratory in the country, which means you can come to us and we will provide the doctor's order for you free of charge. That is very unique to us. If you went to the LabCorp or Quest Diagnostics, if you went to any of their patient service centers, you have to have a doctor's order. A doctor has to have said, “You're allowed to go get a cholesterol test. Here's my blessing and you can go get that test.” We have a doctor that provides the doctor's order free of charge for people. [bctt tweet="Your body doesn't absorb vitamins the same way through your supplements as you do through an IV. " username=""] I could get my cholesterol checked anytime I want at Any Lab Test Now. I walk in and I don't need to have the doctors send me there? Correct. Also, another benefit is because we have so many nationwide, our pricing is about half of what it would be if you had gone to LabCorp or Quest. Anyone who has high deductible insurance, anyone who's uninsured, it's definitely the place you want to go. You were rocking along at Any Lab Test Now and when did RevIVology come into the mindset? Interestingly, it was completely our customers' idea. It started because we do B12 shots at Any Lab Test Now. Many of our clients were coming in and asking us if we did IVs that were loyal B12 shot customers. “When are you going to start doing IV therapy?” I had heard of it before, but not from a business standpoint. I started researching it a little bit and then I kept hearing it from our clientele and they were telling me, “Please open an IV therapy business because we're driving to Denver to get the service.” As an entrepreneur, there's a demand, there's a need in our community for this. I started looking into it. I liked everything that I saw just from how it can help people, all the different things that it can do. I had heard of it, and you may have heard of this before too. In Vegas, it's very big for hangovers. It's been around for years where people go. You're in the military. You may have heard of that for hangovers. A hangover is simply dehydration and getting an IV is you can replenish electrolytes fluid and get rid of the hangover very quickly. What I discovered is that there's usage with the high dose vitamins for so many different problems that you might have like lupus and Lyme disease. Migraine is one, shockingly very common. We have people who have found us and they no longer have to go to the ER. They would have migraines that were so bad, they'd go to the ER for medication and they come to us. They get something completely natural and we can help them feel 100% better. You've got a location with RevIVology. I don't know if it's co-located or what. It’s completely independent. How long were you operating RevIVology before you decided to pursue a franchising operation? Twelve months before we opened, in my mind. I was thinking franchise. Amy was too. Our original setup of the business was if we ever got to the point where it made sense to franchise the business, we wanted to set up to be prepared. Before we even started, all the initial stuff that Amy had done with the company was with that in the back of our mind. This could be a possibility in the distant future, but it happened much quicker than that. For you guys, you already had all the experience with the lab in the franchising operation in world. I think with eleven years of experience, we knew what worked well and what could be improved upon. Our goal was to make sure that in the event that we did franchise the business, it was going to be the best version of a franchise that it could possibly be. With the franchising thought process, was there an event that tipped you over to get busy on the RevIVology space? It was a conference that I was asked to speak for Any Lab Test Now down in San Antonio. I went down there and someone took me aside and said that they had heard that we were doing IV therapy and could we speak to them a little bit more about that. That grew into other people taking me aside. Before I knew it, I realized we may have something here. I went and talked to Steve about it and all the interest that we had. The reality of it was we were making more money in one year with the RevIVology business than we were making with the other franchise. It was a no brainer. [caption id="attachment_4216" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Revivology: If you ever got to the point where it made sense to franchise the business, you must set up to be prepared.[/caption]
There was demand.
When you have people asking if they could please build one, we let them. We realized we had something and Steve had a connection to someone who was in the franchise world that made it make sense even more.
I have a friend from town here who we've done some business with investing. When we had done that investing, I said, “RevIVology is taking off. We may franchise in the future. If you know anybody, let me know.” He goes, “I don't just know somebody, I know the guy.” Fast forward a year later, I called him up and said, “We're ready to franchise. Who's the guy?” He mentioned a guy named Dan Olsen, who was a big part of Massage Envy, The Joint, Fantastic Sams, one of the preeminent franchise guys in the country. He also had a partnership with a gentleman named Kevin Harrington, who was the original shark from Shark Tank.
We invited those guys out to our home. They saw our store at the time, pre-franchise. At the time they were working with a company out of Texas that had somewhere around 10 to 15 locations. They’re an IV drug company. They were pretty close to pulling the trigger with that company. After spending one day with us they said, “We're not going to work with them. We want to partner with you guys and franchise RevIVology.” From there it's a whirlwind and a blur and drinking from a fire hose. These are guys that know their stuff and they're pushing us hard to take it to the next level every day. It's nice to be partners with that level of a team.
For the people who perhaps they have an interest in learning more about the RevIVology franchise opportunity. What is your ideal franchisee look like?
There's a movie that is about the guy who created McDonald's. It’s called The Founder. There's a part of it that sticks out to me so much when I think of this question. It's how he failed while trying to take people that just had a lot of money and were throwing money at investment opportunities. McDonald's failed with that in mind, just taking opportunity to people who just wanted to throw money at an investment. What we want is people who want to help their community. People who want to work in this business, work to make the success, have employees that they care about and are a part of that local business, not someone who's looking at it as just something to throw money at. Those are the people we found thus far, and we're getting ready to open our very first in Florida and in Utah.
You got the country almost surrounded.
They're trying to get open and they're perfect examples of that. They're two businesswomen who have owned other businesses before. They are super invested in this idea and they're going to make a huge success in their market.
It’s definitely owner-operators. Not somebody that thinks that they can be an absentee owner as you can't. You can be partially absentee ownership, which is great about this business. It is fairly simple, but you stopped working your business. That's the other people we're looking for.
There are not too many passive income opportunities where you can take your hand off the steering wheel. I wanted to dig through your journey. Because I think about from one, go to med school and going into real estate. The market event changes and you go out of real estate, looking for an opportunity that's different than the real estate place and then using everything you learned after a decade. The clients are beating you up to solve a problem and you solve the problem and the speaking opportunity where more people say, “We would like to be able to solve other people's problems by your skillsets.” I think that's important for people reading, going it's not a straight path and you're still in the business of real estate and building homes.
I’m not smart enough to get out.
I just think of and perspective of creation. You have a tangible outcome every time you take and deliver a home. There's some creation event happens there. Creativity clearly runs with you guys and courage. That's a plus. If you were to take and talk to other entrepreneurs out there, what piece of advice might you offer that you've gleaned from these opportunities?
[bctt tweet="Great idea people make sure that their business is replicable. " username=""]
I think there are quite a few, this is important and it goes a little bit against common wisdom. As our success with RevIVology, Amy sweated the small stuff. Don't sweat the small stuff. I totally disagree. Every detail, she sweated. She made sure it was perfect and there was nothing that happened by chance in this business, which is why it's such an incredible opportunity for us. The thing that we're doing and we love the fact that it's helping the community. We also love that about this business more than anything else we've ever done. This is helping people. Remain steadfast in your belief. Don't let people talk you out of a good idea because they don't believe in it. Care deeply about your employees, your brand, your company, your community. Those things are things that if we're going to tell somebody, believe in yourself. Believe in every detail and make it matter. Nothing happens by chance. Just do it.
This girl here with the scientific method from Biology. “I'm going to do the math. I'm going to check the trends. I'm going to look.” I think that has a lot of merits.
She's a researcher. Nothing that happened in that business was accidental. We'd be sitting there at 11:00, 12:00 at night. She's on her computer researching formulations or directs. What glutathione does for somebody and high dose vitamin C treatment, what those are all about? Even at Any Lab Test Now, she'll go on to speak to doctors and know more about what is happening more than the doctors do.
How many lab tests you've seen years and trends? We all know this is not that. Nothing like seeing a lot of them. Pattern recognition is a big deal.
What I love about RevIVology is that it's not just reactive, it's also proactive. It's also about being healthy going forward, not just responding to the migraines, the hangovers and lupus. If someone wants to be proactive about their health, you've got options for that as well and well-being. A spot like atmosphere, it’s very comfortable, very calm, very serene. Massage chairs and a very inviting sacred space to take care of yourself in. Looking back over the years with Any Lab Test Now and thinking about the experience, what advice would you have about running a franchise like this, encourage someone to go into this space?
A lot of people have great ideas and they have good business ideas and good business acumen. Deciding to franchise, that's a big step. If your business is something that speaks to the masses like ours does, you just stick to it, put your head down and you can get it done. That's how this was all born. Deciding that there's a need in the community and there wasn't a place to fill that. I had to start from scratch and make it happen.
Necessity is the mother of invention. It touched your heart. This comes from your passion in your heart, not from where am I going to make a lot of money, but how can I help people and improve their lives, health, and wellbeing.
That is the majority of who comes to see us, people who are trying to take care of themselves on a daily basis. Not just chronic illness. Generalized health and wellness. That's where healthcare is moving, towards preventative care and not reactive. Not taking a pill for something, but preventing that by caring for your body.
It cost their companies less money too in healthcare insurance. If somebody was thinking about just franchising in general, what advice would you do?
You can do it. I will say that we were blessed to be joined with an amazing team. A team that we have behind us backing us up is absolutely incredible. That takes some of the fears away.
One of the things that great idea people have is you have to make sure your business is replicable if you're going to franchise it. A lot of smart entrepreneurs or businesses are super successful because they're super successful. They work hard and that's what makes that business successful. You have to make sure it's a business that you can replicate. You don't need the founder there every day with you to make it successful and that's what we have created. Any Lab Test Now has 8,000 tests, 30 files, 12 labs. It's a very difficult business to be successful on and run because there are so many opportunities for mistakes.
With RevIVology, we're giving IVs to people with ingredients in it with highly trained and skilled medical professionals administrating. It's a simple business, it’s simple to replicate. Fortunately, highly profitable. You go and hoping, but it turns out that it was like Amy had mentioned. In one year, we were making more money than we had made in years at Any Lab Test Now. All of those things said we should take this out into the market. It's going to be amazing. We're focusing a little bit on a charity that we're going to be involved with...