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Second in Command: The Chief Behind the Chief with Cameron Herold
Ep. 566 - Virta Health COO Amit Shah - Exclusive Lessons from Scaling a Mission-Obsessed Team
00:44:17
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- [00:00]
A
People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And I think that especially in this role, you know, I, I have the good fortune of leading a large team. There are a lot of people that, that I have a tremendous amount of respect and care and, and love for actually that I get to work with. You know, I spent a lot of my days thinking about how we can impact more people, how we can do a good job and when. And therefore that requires providing people with real feedback and having tough conversations at times and all. And I've always found that balancing those two things, making sure people understand that I, yes, I care about Virta. Yes, I care about, you know, winning and all. I also really care about you. And I really care about how we work together and what that means and how and how we pull that together.
- [00:58]
B
Welcome to the Second in Command podcast produced by the COO alliance and brought to you by its founder Cameron Herold. In the second in command podcast we talk to top COOs who share the insights, strategies and tactics that made them the chief behind the Chief. And now here's your co host, former COO of a multi eight figure remote company and alumni member of the COO Alliance. Savannah Brewer Foreign. The Chief operating officer at Virta Health, a company on a mission to reverse type 2 diabetes through personalized evidence based care. Amit joined virta back in 2016 and now leads both the product development and patient care delivery teams, helping scale a model that's changing how healthcare is delivered across the US Before Virta, he was an early team member at Paladina Health, a direct primary care subsidiary of DaVita and helped to grow its footprint as VP of Operations. His background also includes time at McKinsey, Amazon and even co founding a renewable energy startup focused on serving people living in poverty. In this episode we dive into how Amit and his team developed long term talent and build a culture that lasts, what it means to stay grounded in mission while scaling fast, and how he personally plans his week to lead with clarity and focus. If you're a leader looking to grow your people, protect your culture and run a purpose driven company at scale, this conversation is packed with gold. Let's dive in. We are live with Amit. Welcome to the show.
- [02:40]
A
Thank you so much Saman. I'm so excited to be here.
- [02:43]
B
Of course. Let's talk about Virta Health. That's the company that you're working with. Tell us a little bit about what you do and who you serve.
- [02:51]
A
Of course, maybe I'll start with myself. I'M as you said, Amit. Amit Shah. I'm the chief operating officer at Virta Health. I lead our growth, product development and patient care teams, which means I spend every day working to get more people to improve their health using Virta. And let me take a minute and tell people what Virta is. So Virta is on a mission to reverse metabolic disease in 1 billion people. And I know that's a lofty mission, so let me take a moment and talk a little bit more about what that means. We take a fundamentally different approach to metabolic disease. By using personal biology to optimize nutrition and heal people's metabolism. We really address the root cause of the problem when it comes to metabolic disease. We guide patients in making sustainable lifestyle changes that lead to metabolic health improvement. That like, you know, these are the key improvements that we have. We, we show weight loss of about 10% of body weight sustained through two years. We have proven a 56% reduction in stroke, heart attack and death. And we significantly lower the risk of diabetes, chronic kidney disease, fatty liver disease among a variety of other ones. And most importantly, this results in really happy patients. I always say we add years to the life of our patients and we put more life in those years. Internally we joke about having like a partnership with Levi's, given the hundreds of thousands of pairs of jeans that people have replaced, or hear from grandparents about how they can now play with their grandkids and take them to Disneyland. So that's a little bit about Virta and a little bit about me. And I'm super excited to share more with you today.
- [04:31]
B
Who is an ideal client.
- [04:33]
A
Yeah, unfortunately for us, not for Virta, but for our society, 93% of people in America are somewhat metabolically unhealthy. And so for me to answer that question, it's truly like we can really be helpful to everybody, I think at the root cause of the problem that we see today in healthcare around metabolic disease and the incredible prevalence of metabolic disease is actually food choices. And you don't solve a food problem with drugs. So just as we have many new drugs that people are excited about that they think will solve this problem, we actually, because we solve the root cause of the problem, it could be impactful to anyone. Now that being said, healthcare is an interesting space and our go to market is B2B2C. And the reason for that is we like to be value based on we partner with risk bearing entities. So self insured employer groups such as United Airlines or US Foods, et cetera and other health plans. So Blue Shield of California is a large partner of a partner of ours, for example. And so we partner with organizations like that and then we serve their members. And so we have a variety of members across all 50 states, hundreds of thousands of people, but generally through a covered plan.
- [05:54]
B
And how does that work? So if I'm someone that I'm working at United Airlines, what, what do I get or how is this going to. Yeah, what's the protocol?
- [06:05]
A
Yeah, you would hear about us through your, through your benefits. We would send a, an email or a direct mail or something to you to educate you that you have access to something like Virta and then you would elect to sign up. So, so you'd come to our website and you'd give us your information. Virtahealth.com, join. Now, once we have your information, starting from your first interaction with us, we start to learn more about you and personalize our approach, personalize our both what you need to do for enrollment and what you need to do in order to improve your health. And so as you go through that process, you meet clinicians from Virta, doctors, health coaches and nurses. And they are really responsible for putting together that personal plan, what you what your food intake and macronutrient balance should be to optimize your health. Then we send you a kit that includes the ability to track biomarkers like weight glucose, blood pressure, ketones, just a variety of biomarkers that give us and you an objective feedback loop as to how your body is responding to the changes we're making. And then we deliver all of our care via our app. And in our app, there's personalized content. We're educating you on how your body is reacting to the changes. While we're educating you, we're giving you a variety of different interventions. Hey, try eating this versus that. Try doing this versus that. Our doctor is for the most part deprescribing medications. Again, we're a net depreciber. We tend to take people off of Drugs like insulin, GLP1s, like Ozempic, Mounjaro, wegovy, zepbound, et cetera. We take people off of SGLT2s, et cetera, et cetera. So we tend to take people off of drugs, manage their statin intake. And then there's a community in our app of other patients that are doing the same thing that you can interact with. And that often helps. You know, often we see questions like, well, I'm going to such and such restaurant in this town. What can I eat? And you know, we have a, we have a patient community of hundreds of thousands of people. So oftentimes people have experienced that and will. Will lay in. Or if you're just struggling with something, you can again, talk to your health coach, talk to your doctor, look at our content, or you can talk to someone in the community. So that's kind of what you get. That's kind of the process. And over the course of the first few days, weeks and months, we see pretty significant health improvement that helps people continue to stick with the plan for a very long time.
- [08:32]
B
That sounds super impactful. Amazing. And how did this start? What's kind of the beginnings of the company?
- [08:39]
A
Yeah, virta started in 2015, and the first thing that we did, I was not on the founding team, so I joined in 2016, about a year after we got started. There is a wonderful origin story of the founding team. I won't do it full justice, but I'll give the abbreviated version here. Our co founder and CEO, his name is Sami. Sami had founded a company called Trulia, which is a real estate marketplace company. He had built it from the ground up. They went through an IPO and eventually they got bought by Zillow, which is another real estate marketplace in the space. Towards the end of his tenure at Trulia and Zillow, Sami was a performance athlete, including winning the Ironman for his age group. You know, I think in 2012, don't quote me on the year, but in that time frame. And soon after he did that, he went to the doctor, got labs, as folks do, and found out he was, he had pre diabetes. And that was, that was a turning point for him. He looked, he thought, wow, that's. How can I have prediabetes? You know, I, I literally just won an endurance race, you know, for my, my age. And so as he did a lot more exploration, he learned that the driver of his metabolic disorder was actually his nutrition, the way he was fueling his workouts, et cetera, et cetera. And that led him to our other co founders, Dr. Steve Finney and Dr. Jeff Volek, who had done decades of research on this, on this metabolic disease and metabolic health improvement. And Sami just had a light bulb go off. He said, man, I could help so many people if I can get this science in their hands. And what's the best way to get this science in their hands? Well, it's to, it's to do it via technology. And so the first thing that we did this. And back to 2015, where I started this story is between Dr. Phinney Dr. Wolick, Sami and Dr. Hallberg, who was a physician in the obesity group at Indiana University, we launched a clinical trial. And so from 2015 to really 2020, I would say we were in R and D mode. We did all we did. We have a clinical trial. All the results that I'm talking about have been peer reviewed and published in our clinical trial. In terms of our ability to help people drive weight loss, drive a 1C improvement, get people off of medications, drive cardiovascular risk improvement, all of that has been studied. Then took that trial and we began to commercialize. And over the last five years, we've got literally hundreds of clients across the country. And like I said, we've served hundreds of thousands of patients across every single state in the U.S. wow, that's amazing.
- [11:10]
B
How did you get involved? So you came in a year later?
- [11:12]
A
Yeah, I came in a year later. I would say it's better to be lucky than good. Sami reached out to me relatively cold. He knew of me through the broader network of folks that work in health care and folks that had kind of gone to the same schooling through the same schooling that we had. And he reached out to me. When he reached out to me cold. I honestly wasn't looking for something new at the time. I was in a value based care company that was based in Denver, which is where I live, and. But I got curious and when he first told me what Virta did, I honestly was quite skeptical at that time, especially because I'd worked in healthcare for a little bit of time, this concept of disease reversal did not exist. And so it was very surprising to me that he was talking about disease reversal. And it took me a couple of meetings with him before I even started to accept the premise, so to speak. You know, then what happened was he introduced me to and shared some of our early clinical trial results as well as allowed me to talk to some of those patients and some of the clinicians and my mind was blown. I'll never forget hearing about one of our first clinical trial patients who she came off of. When she started, she had elevated A1C so her blood sugar was out of control. She was overweight, she's on multiple medications, et cetera. She had diabetic retinopathy in a way where she, she struggled to. Her eyesight was, was poor and over the course of nine months at Virta, she had lost so much weight that her knee and hip pain had reduced. She, her A1C was now in a normal, at a normal level. So her blood sugar was controlled. She had come off of all of her diabetes medications. Insulin, GLP1, SGLT2, sulphonya, et cetera. And her diabetic retinopathy has improved so much that she was able to start driving again, which. Which meant she was able to go get a job. And without going deep into my background, I have always tried to work in spaces where I felt like we could improve the quality of life for people. So I remember after that feeling like I might be skeptical about this, but, gosh, I can't think of a better place to spend my time. And so I joined and, you know, I was an early employee at the time. And it has been an incredible nine years of getting to work on this mission with this team.
- [13:35]
B
What did that first year look like when you came in Savannah?
- [13:39]
A
You're really asking the hard questions here. You're asking me to remember something nine years ago, prior to my two young toddlers. It's hard for me to do it that first year. I remember focusing on a few big things. The key business thing we were trying to focus on again, this was in our clinical trial phase, was to deliver great results for a clinical trial. So I would spend a lot of time with our coaching team and our medical team and honestly, just looking at the data that we had about our patients and trying to learn more, figure out how we can help them be successful in our. In our Virta method. So that, that was. That's where we spent. I spent a good chunk of my time and a lot of it was education for me. I wanted to understand what we were doing, you know, when I started at Virta. I have a deep belief that great companies are built when you really understand the customer or the end user very well. Until I said, hey, I'm going to try the Virta method. By the way, I thought I was pretty healthy when I started at Virta. I, you know, ran all the time and all these other things. Not so indifferent than the story I shared earlier about our CEO. I ended up losing about 20 pounds in those first two months or maybe a little bit longer than maybe it's about three months. But I ended up losing fair amount of weight, and I felt so much healthier that now, nine years later, I've stayed on the virta treatment. I've been doing it for. For the entire time that I've been here. And so there was a lot of that. There's a lot of just me getting in there and understanding both for myself, but also for our patients from our clinicians, et cetera. The second big area of Focus was around culture. In that early period, in that first year, I spent a lot of time with our first coaches, and at the time, we're talking 10 people, 10 to 12 people, 10 to 12 teammates, thinking about what we want this team to be, what is our ethos, what is our approach? Because in those early days, as you might well know, Savannah, from all the folks you've spoken to and your experience, there isn't a lot of process or product. You're building that as you go. But you need a way to make sure that folks can make in the moment decisions and make in the moment decisions that align with where you want the company to be going. And so to me, that was creating a culture around putting patients first, ownership and accountability being data and evidence based. Again, we're running a clinical trial. That's something that we had to be driving impact. Impact over busy work, those types of things. And so we, we spent a lot of time there. And then the third area was building process and product. You know, when you, when, when you had enough data on something that worked that you wanted to do more broadly, how do you actually create an operating system to enable people to do that at scale? And so that was a lot of the first year. And, you know, when you, When I talk about it that way, it, it feels like I take some of the heart out of it. It was also just, man, it was so cool to be in a room with 20, 25, 30 people in that first year who were just here for the mission, just here to impact as many lives as possible and putting the, literally the seed in the ground and watering it and taking care of it so that it could flourish as it has, as it has now.
- [17:00]
B
What did you guys do that you would attribute to the flourishing now? Like, what were those early key decisions or focuses that you're like, man, if we wouldn't have done that, this may have looked very different.
- [17:13]
A
There was an incredible focus on the mission, and there is today, too. I've been here for nine years, and so I can't speak to the, to the time before that, but every single Monday for the last nine years, we have a company, all hands. And we kick off the company all hands with one of our patients talking about their experience every single week. And that is we have them join the virtual call, the Zoom call, or the Google Meet call and talk about what worked for them, how it worked, what the impact has been on their life, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's so centering for us. That is what we exist to do. We exist to reverse metabolic disease in a billion people. And we get one of those people every single week to tell us if we're doing our job. Basically, I'm working towards that. Has been a key thing that again, and that's been around since I've been here, so I don't take credit for putting that in place. That's Sami, our CEO and our initial leadership team. But that has been around since day one. I think a second thing is, along with that, what I shared that we focused on in those early years, which is that culture of impact over busy work, of ownership, of decisions, of putting patients first. You know, one of. One of the big ones that I actually have loved over the years is one of our. One of our values is no ego. And the way that shows up is that one of the things I love about my job is I get to work with people that are here to win as a team. And so it's hard to have people that have zero ego. And, you know, we're not. We're certainly not saying that, you know, people shouldn't have any confidence. And, you know, but it is great that we really come together to try to do what's best for the business, because that is not just how we talk about what we do. It is the type of people that we try to attract and bring. And so I think those cultural points early on, so first of all, being very mission driven, second of all, being establishing the norms of the culture, establishing the. This is how we want to approach problems as a team, was. Was very. Was very important. And I would also say those early hires that represented that, you know, our tenure at Virta, we've got some folks with. With incredible tenure, people who've been here longer than me, nine, ten years. And for a growth company, you know, that's not something that is that common. You know, often there's a. There's a lot of turnover along that path. And so for us to have people that have been able to be representatives of that culture over that time and continue to grow, but that also means. Is that we have teammates that had to grow into different roles. I mean, when you grow the way that we have, your job is different. Every kind of 12 to 18 months, it's a totally different job. So people that are able to grow with the mission grow and understand what their new roles are. So that was another. Another thing that we focused on and made sure we. We tried to get right. I mean, nothing. Nothing was done at 100%. Please don't interpret that but everything was an effort that we put towards foreign. Herald your high energy leadership guru here to pump you up on the Second Command podcast. If you get frustrated because your managers aren't leading like you want them to be, check out my game changing leadership course@investinyourleaders.com that's investinyourleaders.com for just 347 per leader you get 30 years. My proven experience straight from taking 1-800-got junk from 2 million to 106 million as CEO and it's packed with 12 easy modules. Learn situational leadership coaching, delegation, conflict management and more all in under six hours@investinyourleaders.com with straight to the point videos, worksheets and real life scenarios. Your team will master time management, be able to hire a players and get aligned with your vision. It's all backed by a 30 day money back guarantee and raved about by hundreds of CEOs and thousands of managers already learning from the content. Grab this now and watch your business soar.
- [21:22]
B
Great recap. I love the idea of bringing on a client live. I have done my team meetings with people bringing every single one of my like recruiting meetings that I used to lead. As an example for my recruiting team. We were a sales recruiting company. They would come with a sales rep that we had placed or a client that had placed, gotten one of our reps and done really well and they would say hey shout out. Like we want to shout out this client. We would like rapid fire. Everyone would give a client win. Everyone had to bring one and that was awesome. But I love this idea of having someone actually live. It just. It always feels different when you see their face and you know that they're sitting there right there and you can ask them questions. That's really powerful. So I just want to double click on I will be stealing that in the future. And then I wanted to ask for these employees that have been able to uplevel and up level and up level time and time again. To be able to be with a company for a decade is very, very rare. What did you guys do? What was the support blocks for those people? What allowed them to be able to do that while you guys were scaling so quickly?
- [22:31]
A
Savannah, that's a really good question. The things that come to mind are first helping our managers provide clear feedback to help people understand what the next job was. The way I think about this is because the job does change so rapidly. One of the things that needs to be done, one of the things that we have to do is Share with an individual what their. And I'm now air quoting, I don't go to someone and say your new job is, but share with someone what their new job is. And so one example is as we scaled our health coaching team, you know, the job in the early days was to set up some processes and product and operating system, how coaches will work. The job after that, as we started in early days of scale, was to hire the right next set of people to continue the culture, to continue to grow the team, et cetera. The job after that was to figure out how to hire a manager layer. You know, now, now we have like, now we need managers that are aligned and understand the job after that might was around management infrastructure. Okay, now, now you have this manager layer, you have the right people. How do you actually create a management infrastructure that then, you know, allows managers and ICs to be on the same page and, and managers and directors be on the same page and directors and VPs be on the, you know, and so being able to articulate that and share that and share those updated views as to what is most important for the business looking forward for the next 12 to 18 months is super important. And so I think that is one thing that we, our CEO Sami said this a lot, says this a lot because we had the blessing of having him experienced high growth, a high growth company. So yeah, the job does change every 12 to 18 months. And he said that, he said that early and often. And so I think that prepped us to say to be looking forward and saying, okay, how's the job going to be different in the next 12 to 18 months? I think along with that, the second point I'll make is to be able to look backwards and have, you know, an accounting of the impact and ownership and what's good and what's not. You got to pair those two things. If you know what you need for the next 12 to 18 months, you have to be able to look at the leader and say, do you have that intrinsic skill set? Is that something you can be successful at? And if so, let's push towards that, let's track it, let's see how it works. And if not, is there a role that you could be successful at? I'm not saying everybody is in the same role. A decade later, people aren't doing the exact same thing. Many people are here and have had two or three careers, you know, have had. We have a health coach, then a health coach, manager, and now she does a lot of marketing work for us because it turns out educating the market on what we do. She's got this depth of experience in. In our treatment and our approach and our method that she could. But she's very good in front of crowds of people and. And sharing what we do. And so that's her career, and so there's also that. And again, she's one of these people who's been here for 10 years. And so she's had a couple of careers with us because what was needed, looking forward, didn't align what was with what she was awesome at looking backwards. And then we were able to find a great.
- [25:48]
B
But speaking of the job change, how has your job changed? You said you didn't start off as a CEO role, correct? They didn't hire you originally for that?
- [25:56]
A
No.
- [25:57]
B
No. Okay. So how did you find yourself in the COO position?
- [26:01]
A
Good fortune and the blessing of having a great boss that I've loved to work with for the last. For the last almost decade. So my original role was to lead the care delivery team, specifically the health coaching team. And again, at the time I joined, that was. I think it was eight teammates. And soon it was 10 and 12. It's kind of in that range. And over time, gosh, how did we get here? Over time, it's that exact process. Saw what I was good at, looking back, looked forward, and decided what we needed. And that meant adding, you know, the enrollment and support team at some point and the supply. Our supply chain approach at some point, and, you know, things just slowly got added. One of the through lines, the big through line was care delivery. It's like how we deliver care. A big change in that was in 2021 or so, we decided to integrate the product development and the care teams because at the end of the day, we deliver all of our care via, you know, via app. And so we don't. We're like kind of a virtual clinic in that sense. And so the app experience and the care delivery experience being more integrated, that's where a lot of magic happens. A lot of us being able to proactively intervene with a patient comes from. We have intense machine learning models that we have built over a decade with hundreds of thousands of patients. You know, we've got literally hundreds of millions of data points that we are helping personalize our approach. So knowing what Savannah needs at a given time and then having the right intervention, whether that's from a human or from our content or from that was a lot of the magic that we were able to create to be able to scale our intervention. So bringing Those two things together made a lot of sense. And so luckily, Sami, our CEO, looked forward and said, hey, if we bring these two things together, that would be really valuable moving forward. And Amit, I think you can help us do that. And so that was a big piece of it. And then a couple years later, we were looking to, as an extension of that, we realized that, hey, what you do up funnel, how you bring someone in is really important. So then I kind of took on that role. But at each step of the way, as I reflect on it, it was the process that I shared. It's like looking backwards, what was I good at? Could that be leveraged, independent, different way and looking forwards, what do we need? And then making that market. And look, there are times where I stepped in a role for a period of time and then stepped out of it. That's another thing that happens in growth companies where for a while I joke about this, I led our legal team on an interim basis, you know, between leaders. And even at the time, it was very clear that that wasn't like the best thing for me to be, to be doing. But it was something that needed to be done for a period of time. And I took advantage of the opportunity to learn. I mean, just had to learn really fast. So, yeah, that's how that came about.
- [28:50]
B
What does your role look like now? Day to day, when you're Sunday night, you're looking forward to the rest of the week. Do you have a planning process? Is it the same every week? Is it quite versatile? What does that look like?
- [29:05]
A
Yeah, I'm chuckling because most people that know me know that I have some planning process. I'm a relatively structured folks and folk person. And when I think about one of the things I, I always tell people is I live by the. I live the one calendar life. I put everything on my calendar, whether it's something I need to do with the family, with the kids, with. With my wife, or whether it's work. And again, 80%, 90% of what's on my calendar is work stuff. But. But yeah, especially if it's during work hours, like, it's going on my calendar so that I can do that. So, yeah, I have, I have a pretty intense planning process. It's. I guess you. There are two questions in there. It's like, what is the actual job? And then how do you plan for it? So I'll ask, I'll answer though. How do you plan for it? And then we could get into what the actual job is. I do have a process. Sunday Nights I generally spend or Sunday, Sunday, whenever I sit down for the hour to 2 to 3 of work block time, whether that's while the kids are napping, before they're awake in the morning or after they go to bed at night, I generally look at. Basically I have a Google sheet to do list that I prioritize and I try to make sure there are no more than three priority one things. I'm not saying that always happens. There are. There could be more than three priority one things. But I tried to really figure out what is a top priority for now. And then generally that list is pretty long. It is a running list and I kind of resort it every time I add things to it. And oftentimes during the week, by the way, I will be adding things to it and putting a expected priority. But what I spend Sunday night on is really looking at the thing and the priority and trying to make sure that I am not in a position where I won't be impactful. I then look at my calendar and try to figure out when I am going to push those priorities forward. Basically when am I going to actually be able to work on this thing that I said was really important, whether it's IC work or it's teamwork. And most of what I do is on the team side. Most of the time it's some version of okay, we want to push this initiative forward and who are the right people working on it, et cetera, et cetera. And so then I try to make sure there's alignment there and there will be things that move around. When that happens, I will schedule new meetings, take meetings off the calendar, et cetera, et cetera. And then beyond that, then this doesn't happen on Sunday night because it's not helpful for people all the time. But I usually wake up pretty early in the morning and have a little bit of time to work for myself. I'll spend that morning time generally composing thoughts that then I need to share with people to drive alignment on the things that we're working on. So and so that could shows up in the form of emails, that shows up in the form of Google Docs or whatever, whatever I can share. But that's essentially my process. My process is essentially doing, doing something.
- [31:49]
B
Why do you prioritize that as the one thing in the morning? I find that really interesting that in the morning you're working on the communication part and driving along like, yeah, maybe
- [31:59]
A
I framed it as communication. Actually what I'm working on in the morning are those initiatives I find often what that results in is me getting. Collecting my thoughts and sharing them. Yeah, but not always. I mean, sometimes it's just collecting my thoughts and putting them down. I do think I will say this. I find that I need to put things on proverbial paper, you know, electronic paper, Google Slides, for me to feel like I am actually moving the ball forward. You know, like, I think there's something about that that's personal to me. I mean, some people don't. Some people could just think about it and then they have it, then they could. But I find that putting them down is very helpful. And I think as a corollary to that, I think once things are on paper and shared, I think that people then feel they're more real. Does that make sense? Like I, you know, you sit down and say something to someone, but then once it's written down and it's something that can be shared and something that can be digested and all, I think it's, I think it's pretty different.
- [33:01]
B
So I heard this on a YouTube video a while back, maybe from one of the Hormozi's videos, which I reference them a lot because I've consumed their content like crazy. But yeah, I think it was Layla. She said, if you tell your team something, you can almost be guaranteed no one's going to remember it, no one's going to do it. It's like it must be written somewhere. There has to be. It has to be in a project board or in the internal team slack pinned. But those things have to be documented because your brain just interprets it differently. It interprets it as, this is written down. This must be important.
- [33:35]
A
I find that to be true. The other thing about writing it down is it leaves less for interpretation. It doesn't mean that there aren't different interpretations. But oftentimes I find when I just say something, people will interpret it differently because of all the things that are involved with speaking. You know, whether it's body language, tone, I don't know, diction, just the word choice. And then when I write it down, it feels like it is more formed and easier to not misinterpret or easier. I would, I would say easier to interpret, but that, you know, debatable, but certainly easier to not misinterpret. And so, and so I think that is a key piece of it. And to your point, it, yeah, it makes it feel more real. I think when we read something, it's like, oh, okay, like I process that.
- [34:24]
B
So I mean, is there a golden nugget or A motto that you kind of live by.
- [34:31]
A
Yeah, one of the ones. There are a handful, but the one that comes to mind that, you know, that I've used pretty much for my entire tenure at Virta is that people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And I think that especially in this role, you know, I. I have the good fortune of leading a large team. There are a lot of people that. That I have a tremendous amount of respect and care and. And love for, actually, that I get to work with, you know, and I want Virta to win. You know, I spent a lot of my days thinking about how we can impact more people, how we can do a good job and win. And therefore, that requires providing people with real feedback and having tough conversations at times and all. And I've always found that balancing those two things, making sure people understand that I. Yes, I care about Virta. Yes, I care about, you know, winning and all. I also really care about you. And I really care about how we work together and what that means and how. And how we pull that together. And so, yeah, these people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. Has really resonated with me, and I try to find ways to show people that I care. And, you know, at the size and scale of team that we have today, that doesn't mean that I have an N equals one individual relationship with hundreds of people that I'm maintaining, you know, that's just not real. But I think people. The way I interpret that at a much larger scale is people need to know what you care about. People need to know what you're all about. You need to authentically be who you are. Like, photos of my family. I care a lot about my family. They need to understand, you know, what it is that drives you so that they can feel connected to that in a way that's different than just the work and the feedback.
- [36:23]
B
There is definitely something about having pictures of your family or things that you care about behind you that just instantly creates this, like, oh, I feel like I connect with this person a little bit easier. This isn't just like, some work robot that I'm showing up and talking to. This is a real person with real people that they love and who are loved by. And being able to bring in that, like, personal touch is so important to the team.
- [36:49]
A
Yeah, I think it's one of the things in remote work that gets a little bit difficult. I actually. I went on a run with a friend yesterday, and she was talking about, you know, job search that, that she was doing. And we, this is the exact conversation we were having where she. She was like, yeah, it's hard because I've had four zoom calls with, you know, this team. She's like, I don't really feel like I get the team. Like, I just want to like, go to their office and like, you know, hang out in the space and like, feel their, you know. And look, there are tons of positives to remote work. There are tons there and there are tons of things that the ink has been spilled on both sides of this and remote work. So this isn't a comment on remote work in and of itself, but I do think that we at Virta are remote first and have a bit of a hybrid model. I'm in an office today and I have found that when I do see people in person and get to connect with them, and that's something we do invest in ever, we bring teams, our team, our entire team together so far that every year that I've been here, we've done that at least once a year during COVID we did it virtually albeit. But other than that, once a year, everybody gets to see everybody in person. Those in person relationships that feel that you get from being around someone just the ability to see them 3D. And honestly, I try really hard not to do virtual backgrounds as much as I can. I mean, sometimes I'm in a place where I'm just like, I need a virtual background, but just to even see the 3D space that they're in I think is just super helpful. And so anyway, no tips or tricks there, no big insights, just this. Getting the vibe in a virtual world is tough. And I think finding ways to invest in that is always helpful.
- [38:27]
B
Yeah, being in person, there's definitely like a deeper connection that can be formed. And there are many ways to do that remotely too. I mean, I've pretty much been remote my entire career. But I will say, like, being a COO, one of the common things that CEOs experience is sometimes it feels really isolating. You might not be able to really share too many things with the other founders or your team that you're going through or experiencing. Which is why Cameron put together the COO alliance, so you can really bring together people. He does both remote, like virtual communities, which have been amazing. I've met some great friends in the program that way. But then also hosting live events. And there's something about when you're live at an event, especially like for me, being with other coos where you're like, wow, you experienced this too. What have you done to fix that or solve that problem? And being able to have that just like real close cohesion feels so nice. And then doing that for team events and leadership off sites who are important. And this is kind of we're tailing off of talking about things that we care about. So we have a little bit of a bridge from that. Similarly. Is that a word? Similarly? Similarly, yeah.
- [39:39]
A
Similarly, yeah.
- [39:41]
B
What are you most excited about in the next six months? It could be in business or personal or both.
- [39:47]
A
I'm going to have to go both. So I'll share a little bit about about both. One is I have a four and a two year old and those ages are just so fun. And so I literally like I'm most excited every day basically when I see my 4 year old in the morning and she tells me what she dreamt about or what she's thinking about or experiencing the world through their eyes has been a blast and they're at an age where they can articulate what they're thinking at some level or experiencing and they are excited to share. And so that has been super fun and so that's just like something to look forward to every day professionally. I'm incredibly excited about the impact that we are having and growing. We just as of the recording of this podcast, it was just this week, but you know, by the time it drops it'll definitely be out there. Shared our first metabolic disease reversal report. We are the really the only scaled company that are reversing metabolic diseases and we shared a tremendous amount of data about what that looks like, about the impact that we have had on obesity and diabetes and pre diabetes, but also cardiovascular risk, chronic kidney disease risk, fatty liver disease risk, stroke, heart attack and mortality that we significantly reduce that too. And so being able to share all that and showing the life impact that we have again I said this earlier in the podcast, but the number, the pairs of jeans that we've helped people replace, the seatbelt extenders that people no longer need, the trips to Disney with grandkids that people are able to take and that just continues to grow and for us to have that impact on more and more people, that is, I'm incredibly excited about that and for the world to know. I often think about how Virta and the Virta method is this incredible thing. I mean it's changed my life both again, very personally, I'm much healthier as an individual and we've changed the lives of so many and metabolic disease impacts 93% of Americans. As I shared earlier, it drives over a trillion dollars of cost and we will not fix that problem with drugs. We will fix it by hitting the root cause of all of those issues, which is nutrition. And Virta has that solution. We've proven it at scale. So I'm super excited for more and more people to learn about us, to join us, to try the Virta method and to see their life get better. And so I'm driven by that. And again, every Monday morning, I hear a patient tell me how it's impacted their life, and that is just fuel to the fire.
- [42:19]
B
Beautiful. Well, thank you for sharing that and thank you for coming on and sharing your wisdom and your journey. I'm really excited. I've actually never heard of Virta until I saw that you were booked on the podcast, started looking into it, and it's really amazing. And the root? Yeah, I am such a big believer in getting to the root of things. After my own mold toxicity and Lyme disease journey and being subscribed drugs at the beginning of my journey and then eventually doing deeper research and testing and realizing you gotta fix it in the gut biome and a lot of changes to my diet. Just changing my diet alone, cutting out gluten and dairy for me was like a 60% difference in four months. It's amazing. So I am such a big fan of the work that you're doing and excited to keep seeing it evolve over time. Thanks for being here, Savannah.
- [43:11]
A
Thank you so much. I failed to say this, but I'll just mention it real quick. People are welcome to connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm Amit Shah and I work at Virta Health and please check virta health out virtahealth.com and Savannah, your story about changing your diet to change your life is the same. I think people don't realize that when you change nutrition, you could really change your life. And so excited to have people hear that. Not just from me as a guest, but from you as the host. That's helpful to hear. So thank you.
- [43:37]
B
Absolutely. Thanks Amit. You've been listening to Second in Command, brought to you by COO alliance founder Cameron Herald. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to be sure to like share and subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and our other podcast streaming platforms. For more best practices from industry leading COOs, visit COOAlliance.com.