In this episode, Sachin interviews Dr. Jessica Drummond on a variety of topics around her journey from being a nurse practitioner in a clinical facility to being an integrative women's health practitioner, serving clients around the world. She speaks of her experience with long-haul COVID, and how her practice had prepared for her to be absent for two months while she recovered with hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Dr. Jessica shares her business insights and how going digital in time for the pandemic was a great shift for her business. Listen to learn more about how Dr. Jessica navigates health and illness, hard times and good times, with the support of family, friends, and mentors.

Key Takeaways:

[1:03] Sachin introduces today's guest, Dr. Jessica Drummond, who will talk about her health challenges and her business. Sachin welcomes Dr. Jessica to Perfect Practice.

[2:16] Dr. Jessica is a physical therapist and a certified clinical nutritionist with a doctorate in clinical nutrition. She graduated as a physical therapist in 1999, planning on sports medicine. She enjoys sports and exercise so she started her career in outpatient orthopedics.

[3:19] She grew interested in women's health. Within the first decade of her career, Dr. Jessica realized that physical therapy was not the complete answer to some of the more complex conditions affecting women.

[4:06] That's when Dr. Jessica dove in to learn more about health coaching, clinical nutrition, functional nutrition, and taking a more integrative perspective. Dr. Jessica mostly educates professionals but she has a small practice of clients with complex chronic illness.

[4:52] When you come at a complex condition with a holistic mindset, and let the client lead with all the things that they can do, that gets Dr. Jessica excited. We don't have a quick-fix solution for complex chronic illnesses like endometriosis.

[5:25] Dr. Jessica started the Integrative Women's Health Institute as CEO and Founder. Dr. Jessica thinks that having an athlete mindset has supported her in everything, not just her work. In terms of successfully navigating entrepreneurship, it absolutely helps her.

[6:26] From 2006 to 2010, Dr. Jessica's husband moved the family often as a consultant, so Dr. Jessica had to keep restarting in new clinical positions. She started her practice not to be an entrepreneur but to create something she could do anywhere.

[7:12] At the time Dr. Jessica didn't even have an iPhone, so she didn't have a lot of tools to do digital telehealth but it was possible. She had a beautiful office in her home to meet clients in, but all of them chose to work with her by telehealth, instead.

[8:10] Dr. Jessica's athlete mindset is flexible, curious, and persistent. She says if you just keep doing it, you overcome the obstacles. If you give up, you don't overcome the obstacles.

[8:39] Sachin is reading Areté, by Brian Johnson. He recommends it. It has 451 lessons on 1,000 pages. One lesson is about making 50 pounds of pottery to get the best final product in an art class, which is another way of putting in the reps.

[9:54] No one mentored Dr. Jessica in entrepreneurship, but she had a teacher who inspired her in digital marketing. She has a cousin entrepreneur who helped her a lot. All during her schooling, she expected to have a straightforward clinical career.

[11:58] Dr. Jessica's parents supported her education and paid for most of her schooling. She had a safety net. It's easier to be entrepreneurial when you have some financial cushion. She also still had her clinical skillset if she needed to fall back on a job, that helped her to take risks.

[14:00] In the beginning of her business, Dr. Jessica's challenge was technology and she never did a tone of it. As quickly as she could, she hired people to help her with technology. The way she learned is when she didn't know how to do something, she would do it and get feedback.

[14:46] Dr. Jessica thinks what gets people stuck is thinking through how to do something, and learning about how to do it, instead of doing it. The most valuable thing for her to do was to try something and then see if it worked.

[15:09] Dr. Jessica was building the first large-scale digital version of her women's health coach certification when she met JJ Virgin, who encouraged her to sell it first and then build it, so she did.

[16:45] For the first five years when Dr. Jessica was launching larger-scale global programs, she would go talk about them anywhere in the world that invited her to speak, if there were more than 20 people. She went all over the place.

[17:08] Dr. Jessica overcame obstacles by taking action. That required doing a lot of things, like being on the news, filming YouTube videos, and speaking in front of audiences who heckled her. She knew that what she was talking about was helpful for patients because she had seen it.

[20:19] Sachin had a conversation with an investment banker who told him the three things investors look for when buying a business: EBITDA, How much the Founder is involved in operations, and SOP.

[20:52] Many entrepreneurs were challenged by the pandemic. It affected Dr. Jessica with long-haul symptoms.

[21:39] Dr. Jessica thanks Sachin for the help he provided to her with breathwork, while she was ill. The year 2020 was great for the Integrative Women's Health Institute because they were ahead of the curve. Her colleagues at in-person practices were shut down.

[22:36] Dr. Jessica and her team were able to quickly pivot and educate people through telehealth with a decade of telehealth experience by that point. If you're creative and constantly looking for opportunities, sometimes you're a little bit ahead of the curve and can take advantage of shifts.

[23:02] Her colleagues who run small private practices were willing to adapt. Some of them grew new lines of service but in the short term, it was hard. For Dr. Jessica, the short-term was great.

[23:21] Then, in December 2020, Dr. Jessica got COVID-19. She thought with Vitamin D, she would be strong. She was shocked to become super sick. She was weak for months and had more long-haul issues. Almost four years later, it's still something she manages.

[24:03] Being so sick cost Dr. Jessica a lot of money. She was grateful to have some cushion from earlier in 2020. Dr. Jessica had a team of 20 running the company. They stepped up. Dr. Jessica was grateful to have work, to tether her to reality as she recovered.

[24:59] Dr. Jessica says part of the healing is staying contributory, even if in small ways. There's a sense of purpose in the work.

[25:41] The systems and structure of Dr. Jessica's company had to be ironclad. At that point, they were not, so she brought in a fractional COO. They reorganized the team a bit and the COO is still with the company today.

[26:12] In 2023, as a part of her long-haul COVID recovery, Dr. Jessica went to the hospital at Yale for hyperbaric oxygen therapy which was key to her complete recovery. It required hours of therapy every day for 40 sessions, so she took two months off work.

[27:03] At that point, the Integrative Women's Health Institute had built all the structure and systems to have everything running without Dr. Jessica's participation. They were able to maintain their revenue generation, and profitability, and support their students and clients.

[27:26] This year, they are working on how to scale their strongest programs. Dr. Jessica has hand-picked the strongest programs that they want to keep doing. They have a clear path to the goals to hit to get to the ideal EBITDA for profitability, and for the company to be stronger.

[28:03] When you go from being at the peak of health to the week later, almost dying, you think about your business as a resource for your family, if they were to need it and you weren't there.

[28:19] Dr. Jessica doubled down on creating and optimizing SOPs, so her skilled team can continue to scale the mission of women's integrative healthcare. Dr. Jessica has worked very hard on this asset for 15 years. If anything happens to her, her family will recoup something.

[29:18] Hopefully, Dr. Jessica won't die suddenly, and she and her husband will have something out of the intense work of the past 15 years.

[30:35] Dr. Jessica says if someone has long-haul, the key is figuring out what kind of long-haul. There are different underlying causes. The most common symptom is fatigue. Dr. Jessica supported her mitochondria from Day 1, so she never had fatigue. Support your mitochondria.

[31:11] The second thing is thinking of oxygen as a nutrient. For Dr. Jessica, hyperbaric oxygen therapy was key. You may have capillary microclotting. You may be dealing with organ damage or irritation to the immune system that triggers mast cell activation syndrome.

[34:31] Because you create a business out of thin air, you can create it in any way that you want. It's valuable from the beginning to think about the pieces of it that could run without you needing to be fully present even for a little bit at a time. You ca...