It is crazy that I haven’t written a blog post in over a year. Right after The Adventures of Space Girl Red came out.
A lot has happen.
A crazy amount.
Not the least of which is I bought a franchise for Osteostrong and opened a brick and mortar wellness business. Technically a Biohacking business. Osteostrong helps people increase their bone health in 15 minutes once a week.
Yeah, that’s the elevator pitch.
This thing has been all consuming for over a year now. We opened for business the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. Before that there was build out, which involved contractors and therefore was crazy. There was also pre-sales, which involved talking with lots of people on the phone and trying to convince them to buy a membership.
Then we opened.
Running a business like this is totally different from any of the many other businesses I’ve started. You actually have to be there at the business. I have employees and do payroll. There is also actual revenue that has to be looked at and I have to determine if the business is going to run out of money before it is profitable.
Luckily we have grown to a razor’s edge profitability. Took about 6 months, and there have been down months since them, but we’re not going to go broke anytime soon.
Why Osteostrong?
Here’s our Origin Story as I’ve told it lots of times.
It all started with Tony Robbins’ book Life Force, in January 2022. That was the first time I ever heard the word Osteostrong.
Really I guess it all started in October 2020, when my wife Suanna fell and broke her hip. Ambulances, emergency surgery, weeks in rehab during COVID. Not a fun time.
Which is why of all the things in Tony’s book, from stem cell healing, to regrowing hair for bald men like myself, Osteostrong caught my attention. I said to myself:
“If this really works, it needs to be everywhere. Especially Abilene.”
That started our journey, first to find out if it worked, and then to do something we’d never done before. Open a brick and mortar, health and wellness business.
We joined the nearest Osteostrong to Abilene, the one in Colleyville. This meant a 3 hour drive each way to go to our sessions. Luckily you only have to go once a week. But we did that for months.
About 8 weeks in, I was convinced it worked.
Obviously this wasn’t because the Mrs had another DEXA scan and seen bone growth. That’s way too short a time for those results. Rather, I put on 8 lbs of lean body mass.
You see at the same time I was going to a doctor who required me to get on a fancy body composition scale. I’ve been weighing myself with a scale that gives me body fat percent for years, but this was a whole other level of accuracy and specificity. I’d known my percent body fat had been the same for awhile, but my weight had gone up. That meant I wasn’t gaining fat, it was something else. The doctor’s scale confirmed this.
Now that I knew Osteostrong could deliver incredible results, I decided to come out of retirement and buy an Osteostrong franchise. Anyone who has opened a business knows it is a process. Add in a business that requires finding a location, doing build out, getting equipment delivered and installed, dealing with supply chains in the post-COVID era, contractors…well, you get the point. It ain’t easy.
But I kept telling myself, “Osteostrong needs to be everywhere, especially Abilene.”
I was determined to do it as quickly as possible and spent day after day pushing everyone from Osteostrong corporate to my contractors and electricians to get things done. I experienced more stress than anytime in my life, but I was determined. I was going to get this thing open.
And we did. We opened the Tuesday after Thanksgiving for those people who needed a solution to their osteoporosis that didn’t involve drugs with horrible side-effects, and believe in us to provide it. There were literally wires hanging from the ceiling and half our modalities weren’t there, but we opened.
That’s when lives started to change.
I set down to write a blog post about my recent long discussion with ChatGPT about time travel, but that will be for another day. Hopefully in less than 18 months.