Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Street Level Marketing with your host, Mark Lamplugh. We have a really good show for you this evening. My guest today is Nicholas Boatman. Nicholas is the president CEO of Discovery Institute, and he's also the president of Poplar Wellness. I brought him on the show today to talk about Poplar Wellness and, you know, how he came about wanting to start this business. What are some of the struggles he had in, in the beginning, you know, launching it? I know when we're running certain businesses, you know, we see opportunities to maybe add, to make our businesses better with different applications, and that's just what one of these were. Nick, welcome to the show.
[00:01:12] Speaker A: Hey, Mark, thanks for having me.
[00:01:14] Speaker B: So, you know, first off, just tell me a little bit or tell the, you know, the guests or the, you know, a little bit about Poplar and, you know, what it is.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: Sure. I'm co founder, president of Poplar Wellness, and what we do is we're a technology company, we're a software company, and we take the latest and greatest in technology and apply it to the behavioral health field for better outcomes and better patient safety. So we launched Poplar about a year ago. It's still kind of in startup mode, but it's really getting some legs and we've had just some great success with it in this market. Just an overwhelming response.
[00:01:56] Speaker B: What was your thought process and what, what were some of the reasons that you thought this would be like a viable application in the, in the space that you're in? You've been in the behavioral mental health space, addiction space for almost 15 years now.
When you're thinking about coming up with something like this, what made you think it was going to be something that was going to be useful and beneficial for. To, you know, add on to the services that you provide?
[00:02:24] Speaker A: Yeah, it's really, it's really finding a need, you know, in the market. And we knew coming into this that this field was desperate for innovation. You know, addiction treatment and mental health are the number one problems in America as far as I'm concerned. You know, everybody that's listening to this either has been impacted by it or they have a close family member or friend that has been impacted by it. And I've been in the space for 12 years. I'm actually in recovery myself. So, you know, through my 20s, I, I went to college. I was an mis major. I got myself through college. I was an ebay power seller. I've had a couple of businesses and, you know, we got. Got caught up. I had surgery one year on my shoulder and broke my ankle in the same year. And a lot of people, you know, that are, that are in their 30s and 40s got caught up in OxyContin. And what happened there was I, I changed my life around.
You know, recovery became my life and bettering myself became my life. And, and that got me started in the behavioral health field. I started off small. I started with some sober livings, turned that into, you know, 80 beds on a treatment center, about 110 beds of aftercare over a couple of years. And you know, overall I've had about six treatment centers anywhere from Florida to St. Louis, Kansas City, California. And I'm actually here in my office right now at Addiction Treatment Center. I'm the president of, in New Jersey. So I knew through my experience some of the holes that were in this space and outcomes, they're not good. Overall, they're not good. So it's really purpose driven for me and I know that we have to do better and somebody's got to lead. And I think it's a really exciting time to be in healthcare right now. You know, there is the technology, as you all know with AI and some of the things that are coming on, it's rapidly advancing. And I was just at the Artificial Intelligence Healthcare symposium not long ago and in San Diego, and it's wild, some of the stuff that's coming out right now, but it's in every other sector of healthcare, it's not in behavioral health. So that's what really sparked the idea is to fill those gaps and get better outcomes.
[00:05:06] Speaker B: So when you were, you had the concept, you had the idea, you kind of knew what it was you wanted to do, what was your initial steps and starting to roll that process out.
[00:05:17] Speaker A: Yeah, actually I have a partner as well. She's out in St. Louis. Her name's Sarah Riley. She was working for a company and had some remote patient monitoring. So she brought me the idea and it was, it was incredible. I knew that it was going to be a hit.
So one of the things that we did was we took some traditional remote patient monitoring devices and we applied them to this space. And where I'm at now in my treatment center, everything is tested and trialed here before we release it to the market.
[00:06:01] Speaker B: How long have you been, how long has it been since you started rolling it out? And where are you at in that process? Is it out in other treatment centers? I mean, how long has that process taken you? Has there been any hurdles along the way?
[00:06:16] Speaker A: Oh, of course, it's, it's been, it's been a grind. I will say that it is. We've been at this for almost two years and a lot of that has been development. Nobody. We're the first people to do this. So we've really want. Went down an unpaved path. You know, we. There's nobody I can call and say, hey, how did, how did you get that done? You know, which, you know, there's a million treatment centers out there. I can do that. I have a lot of other friends that are owners. I can bounce things off them. This is something with software development that we had to create our own thing. So there's been all types of trials and tribulations and working through kinks, getting it out there. But, you know, the biggest thing is believing in yourself, believing in the product. And that's why purpose and doing what you love is so important. Because when I get up every day and do this, it's exciting to me. It's exhilarating. And that is our purpose, is to revolutionize behavioral health. And I believe that we can do that through technology and data.
And yes, the hurdles as far as anything from bootstrapping this thing from the ground up and funding it ourselves to, to raising capital, to working through the software, to long nights, long hours, weekends, dealing with our developers in Singapore, working through things, just testing products, you know, at the night, trying to, you know, see if things work. What's. What's the problem? Where are the kinks? And just pushing through that. But it's all worth it at the end.
[00:07:59] Speaker B: Yeah. Now, is it strictly for other behavioral mental health facilities or is this something, you know, an individual can get off the shelf?
What, who is it for and what does it do?
[00:08:11] Speaker A: Yeah. So right now we have two main products that are out in the market. So we have wearable watches. This is an example of one. So when somebody comes in, right now we're in 12 other facilities and we have a whole lot that we're about to go into. So this is our wearable. When somebody walks into our treatment center, we detoxify their body. They're here for seven to ten days in detox, and then they go over to what's called a residential level of care. This monitors real time heart rate variability and oxygen saturation.
So that's all projected on a screen for the nurses station. Anybody can view it. We have big TVs up in our nurses station. Our medical director can see it from home, whoever wants to view it. And it gives us a real time look at all of our patients and what that does is it allows the technology to be the eyes and the ears for the medical staff.
So if somebody has some type of catastrophic event, you know, there's over 5,000 overdoses that happen in treatment centers. Maybe, you know, they have a heart issue. We actually caught a heart attack in here. And it's about getting in front of things before they actually happen. So yes, we are, we are in 12 different centers. We have that. And we also have a vital software. So everybody, any treatment center that you go into, you have to have your vitals taken. They take your temperature three times a day, they do your blood pressure and they do an oximeter for your oxygen. Well, it's a very manual process. They have to manually do that. They have to write it down, they have to enter it into the electronic health records. With us through our software, you click a button on thermometer, you take the temperature and everything ports straight into the hr. So we have that. And we're also about to release what we call our self serve kiosk. So it's, it's really cool. It's high tech looking. Clients can walk up to them to it themselves and they can take their own blood pressure. It's got an infrared temperature gauge that you put their hand up, takes their temperature, their oxygen levels. It's all touch screen and that ports straight into the hr. So what it does is, you know, we're creating efficiencies inside of the treatment center and for the clients. So it cuts down on manual labor and also data entry and increases accuracy. So it really helps the treatment centers and the clinicians and the medical staff focus on what really matters, which is delivering good patient care.
[00:10:51] Speaker B: And there's probably alarms set in there at different parameters for each patient to kind of give you a warning, you know, when something goes above or below a certain.
[00:11:02] Speaker A: Yeah, there's audio alerts, there's visual alerts, so it'll start beeping at you. We can send text messages, emails. Actually the first 24 hours we had one of these watches in here. We had a 20, 20 year old kid and he smuggled in fentanyl through his rectum. We had no idea. And went into his room and they just sat down to put him into his room. The nurses went back to the nurses station. They have to do, it's called narcotic count. And all of a sudden they see the screen that starts going nuts, starts beeping at them. And they ran into his room and they knew that he overdosed so they were able to Narcan him and bring him back. He may have died. So it's getting in front of those things and making sure that patient safety is number one.
[00:11:52] Speaker B: That's. Yeah. At working in the space, I, I understand it a little bit. So I, I know how some of that information can be vital, you know, getting to it right away and getting those warnings. So we're coming up to our first commercial break, but when we come back, we're going to talk about, you know, what you did with marketing, this how you determine your budgets and all that. So, uh, you know, we'll be right back after these messages.
[00:12:16] Speaker A: Sa Foreign.
[00:12:53] Speaker B: Welcome back to Street Level Marketing with Mark Lamplugh with our guest from Popular Wellness, Nick Boatman. We're going to start talking about, you know, getting it back into that marketing, where we're going to determine where that marketing spend is going to be. As new businesses, you know, it usually finances are the thing that you hold dear and you want to spend as little as possible because you're new. So you, you know, want to come up with innovative ideas on the way you can get your product or your service out into the marketplace and, and, you know, so you can start generating more business. And, you know, Nick, when you were starting this, you know, what was the process and going into your marketing plan, you kind of had to figure out who your customers were going to be.
So, you know, what did that look like for you?
[00:13:52] Speaker A: Yeah, you're exactly right. Marketing dollars are something that you really have to pay attention to.
And, you know, the best advice that I can give you, it's. It's having a plan. You know, we put together a performer, you know, to where we've allocated every dollar from the beginning and putting together all the pieces of the puzzle for a projected strategic plan. Right? So we have our business plan. We know who our target market is, who we're going after, who our competition is really narrowing in on that, and then outlining a performer, which is, you know, financials, where what we're going to need to get this off the ground, where we're going to spend our money. And when it comes to marketing, I, I don't care what anybody says. Marketing is everything for any business. If you don't have marketing and you can't sell product, you can't do your business isn't going to succeed. So, you know, a lot of it at the beginning is what I call just guerrilla marketing. You know, it's, it takes an endless just pursuit of going after it and in working harder than the next people, hard work and consistency Just determination beats everything. So what we did was, you know, we are B2B so we go directly to other businesses, other treatment centers. LinkedIn was a huge tool for us because that's where you can reach other business owners, right? You can reach other CEOs, you can reach CMOs. So I think it's really understanding who you're going after and then the need, right? How are you going to help them? If you have a product or a service, you have to offer something for somebody else. And that's what we do, right? How is this going to help you in your business? How is this going to increase your bottom line or help your population and separate you from other people? So LinkedIn was a huge tool for us and kind of mass messaging on there. We also did a lot of email campaigns to where we went out and had lists that you can find them all over, right. You can purchase them on the Internet.
You can find anything on the Internet and a lot of mass mailing and then just getting out there. We went to conferences, every single event that was happening that we knew that was big in treatment, putting together some basic marketing materials and making it look good. You can go on fiverr some of these other websites and get logos made for really cheap and you can get marketing materials, brochures and starting to get the word out. And it's, it's really proving the concept at the beginning. And that's all us. There was, there was two of us, three of us at the beginning, right. And we had to go out there and just represent it because nobody as far as capital raise and doing any of that, proving the concept comes first, showing that you can sell it's a viable product, making sure you're making those, those marketing dollars count and taking it to the next level after that.
[00:17:21] Speaker B: Yeah. One of the things in doing marketing now that I love is, you know, a lot of the AI tools and platforms. I mean there's, you know, websites out there that you can go to another person's website and they'll pull all the emails and you can create email lists and, you know, it's actually kind of fun. You know, you're putting.
[00:17:42] Speaker A: Is my, one of my best friends, let me tell you, I've saved so much money on attorneys, lawyers, finding out, you know, writing content, writing emails, producing images, you name it that, and that's technology. Use it to your advantage. It's a huge help and a huge money saver.
[00:18:02] Speaker B: I think one of the things too, especially understanding, you know, what you're providing, treatment centers, it's not necessarily for them. And I think the hurdle that you have is you have a product you know, to offer that there might not be a direct return for the business other than being able to teach them how they can use that in their marketing to generate business for themselves. Because you're off.
[00:18:32] Speaker A: And it is because there's an indirect return. Right. So we're not directly depositing anything into your bank account. We are a subscription Service. This is $100 a bet. Right. And that's a monthly cost. But what this does, like you're saying, there's a couple advantages. One, from the marketing standpoint, nobody's using this and most treatment centers out there, I'm sorry to say it, are, they're the same. They offer, you know, medical services and talk therapy. But to use technology to differentiate yourself from the competition is huge. You can use it on your website and your emails, all in your marketing material and it gives you a competitive advantage. So that's one. And then you know, you have to know how you're going to help that center. Yes, we help the clients and client care and safety, but we also can help on the staffing side. Everybody's, you know, short staffed on nurses and medical staff. And if something happens and you get hit with a lawsuit, that's big money. So we can save you on getting ahead of things and give you more bang for your buck because you're able to monitor all of your clients even if you have lower staff. And then we're also saving on hospitalizations. We get in front of these things and for a treatment center, if their client goes to the hospital, it's not good for the client. They're in there for three days. The treatment center has to hold that bed for that client. They're not billing and they're losing out on thousands of dollars while they're gone. So this helps get in front of that and we reduce hospitalizations so they see an indirect return. But it's, it's selling that portion and having people realize, hey, is there's more.
[00:20:26] Speaker B: To this even in the rep. The reputation aspect of it when, when there are deaths unfortunately at facilities, the long term effect that can have on a, on a treatment center's reputation.
[00:20:41] Speaker A: So yeah, yeah, we, you know, that's a huge thing. We see it happen all the time.
[00:20:51] Speaker B: When you were coming up with your like in the beginning, your, your limited resources as far as you know, financially go, you know, the aspect goes for your spend.
How did you determine what you could spend based on what you had, like was there Any sort of process you went through was there like test runs for advertising?
[00:21:13] Speaker A: Well, you know, first off, I always recommend, you know, unfortunately I'm in a spot to where I could, I could bootstrap this and use some of my own cash. I've gotten to a point to where, you know, I, we're raising capital right now as we speak, but you have to work with what you have. And if you're going out to get capital, I would much rather have too much than too little because investors get short arms when you, when you come back to them for more money. They don't like that. You don't want to be in that position. So you have to make use of what you have. And the most valuable, valuable thing that you have is your own time and energy. Right? So we put, we know what we have for the day to day operations. We save money any place that we can for just I guess our original product, our software, get it to a point to where we can at least release it onto the market. And then I'm a big believer that everything that you can, you put as much money into market, you got to be smart on where you put those dollars and what you're doing. But start running some different campaigns. You take a couple of things, email marketing, you know, LinkedIn, maybe you're doing PPC, some pay per click ads, but you choose what you think is wisest, right? That's, that's going to be the best for your brand and your product to sell. You allocate a budget to each one of those and they call it split ab testing. So you're testing these different campaigns and you have to, you have to know what, where things are coming from. If I'm making a sale, where did you hear about us? Where did that come from? And you'll see over time what's working and what's not working. And then you have to constantly go back, restructure and say, okay, you know, the PPC and the pay per click, that was working, let's put more dollars into that. We didn't get much off the email campaigns because not many people were opening them. We didn't have a good conversion rate there. Let's change it to where 80%, you know, of this budget is now going to go over to the, the pay per click and we're going to limit and you know, switch some things up with the email marketing to see if we can get a little bit better.
[00:23:34] Speaker B: Now having another business while you're starting a, you know, a new one kind of has its Advantages because you might have a lot of the team in place. Did you utilize a lot of the marketing team from your one business in creating like the brochures and everything that you needed to get out there? Or did you do you keep everything separate and kind of, you know, do it separately from one business to the other?
[00:24:02] Speaker A: Yeah, well, the way that I did it, speaking from my own experiences, having another business and trying to start another business, it's dicey because you have to make sure that you have everything in place. Focus is the most important thing. If you're trying to do too many things at one time, nothing will succeed. You have to have laser focus on whatever you're doing. So people and the structure, the bones of your organization is so important. So I have a management company and on my management company I have an executive C suite. Right. See, I'm the CEO, the coo, cfo, cmo. I have a full call center. I have, you know, a creative branding director that does all of our design, our brochures, all that. So that's the central hub for anything that I get into. And you have to have stability and make sure that good people, if you are going to start up another business that that's running and that's doing well and you have the appropriate infrastructure before you do anything else. And fortunately for us, any business that I have right now, they blend together. Right. And it's all start part of the same field and we utilize each business to our advantage to grow them simultaneously, if that makes sense.
[00:25:24] Speaker B: Yeah, it makes perfect sense. Well, we come up at a time for this segment, so we'll, we'll be right back after this commercial Break it.
[00:25:59] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:26:09] Speaker B: Welcome back to Street Level Marketing with your host Mark Lamplugh. You know, this is real people talking about real marketing strategies. And we're, we're here talking with Nick Boatman, the president and CEO of Poplar Wellness.
And we, you know, the first segment we talked about, you know, the business and you know, how he got started. In the second segment we talked about, you know, his marketing span and budgets and you know, how that's important and ties in to the growth of the company. But now we want to talk about, you know, how he found his niche like and, and when you're starting a business and you're going to go out there and market it to other businesses or to even people like what, what makes you different than what, what else is out there. So Nick, tell us a little bit about how you determined there's lots of competition out there. You know, a Lot of times they say the more competition, that means there's more opportunity for market.
Because when you don't have something that has a lot of competition or might not be a, a viable application for it, and it might not be a viable business, but when you have competition, you know, there's room to grow in that space. So how did you, you know, determine what your niche was compared to, you know, other people that might been doing similar things?
[00:27:27] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, one thing consistent about life is change, right? Everything's always changing and evolving. Like you said, even if there is competition out there, there's, there's technology, there's new ways of doing things, there's better ways of doing things because you see it all the time, right? Companies that have been doing the same old things for years, years. And then somebody else comes in and does it better, right? Blockbuster, you go to Netflix and online streaming, there's a million examples out there. But for me, it's, it's really finding our niche, our lane and going with it. And how we did that is, is we went into the behavioral health sector. So, you know, as I was saying earlier, we use some traditional remote patient monitoring tools, right? Vitals, wearable watches that are out there. And you know, hospitals use some of this stuff. It might not be watches, but they monitor patients in the same way they do them in other verticals of healthcare. But nobody's doing it in behavioral health. So that's what we're doing is taking the latest and greatest in healthcare tech and applying it to behavioral health. Understand your market size, understand where you're going and create that niche. How are you going to separate yourself from other people? And in our space, we're the only ones to do this. This is an unpaid path, so there is no competition right now. We did have one other company, they do something with watches, but it's a little bit different than what we do. But this is a massive, massive market. There's plenty of room, right, for, for competition. But we are some of the first one. We are the first ones on the scene and that has really helped us and push it and drive it.
[00:29:18] Speaker B: So, you know, a business like yours, like Poplar, is offered to other businesses. So in the marketing aspect, a lot of that approach and how you're going to get new customers is a lot different than it would be as in, you know, you're just running some advertising on TV or selling a car.
You know, you're running PPC campaigns or Amazon ads. The approach that you take to get new customers is completely different.
How did you kind of determine that approach when you were going to go out to other businesses? Did you hire a business development team? Do you have a representative that goes out and kind of gets new clients? Like what your approach to that?
[00:30:08] Speaker A: I mean, I've done it multiple times in different businesses. And what, what happens is typically I'm the one, you know, I'm the one or my partner and I that started, we get out there, you know, you, you have to be willing to play all the roles at the beginning, put all the hats on. I don't care what it is and I don't care if it's cleaning the toilets. You get in there and you get it done. And there's levels to this, right? So once you get to a certain point, yes, you start hiring teams and that, that comes with the financial part. If you're raising capital, put that in there, right? That's, you're going to have a sales force and that's the most important thing. And who you pick, right? People are everything in life and in business.
And somebody that is really good in sales, that's really connected in that space, you gotta know, you gotta pick the right people. So to answer your question at the beginning, typically it's, it's me that's going on something. And even still, you know, this is, there's no better salesperson than the person who started it and co founded it.
But as that grows, right, you, you build out infrastructure to then have a team that, that goes out there.
Like I said, conferences were extremely important to us where you have the latest and greatest and then really catchy email campaigns. Hey, never want another patient to die in your facility ever again. You know, they click it. There's, you gotta, you gotta get after it in different ways.
[00:31:56] Speaker B: When, when we were talking about getting started and you know, trying to get those first customers, one of the, I guess propositions is, is you know, providing a value to another center.
And we were discussing this a little bit off air, but if you're, you know, having trouble in the beginning getting new accounts, you can offer the service or you know, a trial out for a few months to a center, get people using the, you know, the product and then use that as, you know, for marketing to other, you know, other centers because you have, you know, some examples. Did you do any of that? And, and how did that work out?
[00:32:37] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, to a certain extent. So with this particular business and popular wellness, the good thing is that I have my own treatment center. So we, we started here, but what we did do is getting it off the ground. We offered serious discounted pricing. Right.
And selecting the right people, if you're going to the top players in the industry or people that have respect in that field and other people are paying attention to, give it to them for free, give it to them at an extremely low cost, and it's going to help them. And we talked about it before, they're using that as a marketing tactic. They're going out there and, you know, marketing it for you.
Because every time, right. People are going on tours, other treatment centers that want to work with them, doctors, physician groups, they're all coming through on tours because their business development people are bringing them through. And they say, oh my gosh, look at those. Look at those watches. That's incredible. You guys use this. I've never seen that before. Where did you get these? Right? And our brands on their name and word of mouth is the best form of marketing that's out there.
[00:33:46] Speaker B: Yeah, that's so true. Now, when you were determining, like, you have a little bit of experience because of being in the behavioral health space, and, and with this product being, you know, applicable in that space, you kind of knew a lot of the places to go, like the conferences and things like that. Did you have any other ways that you figured out, like, new conferences to go? How did you deter. These conferences are expensive. How did you determine whether it's worth it to put a booth up? As in just maybe just sending a rep to, you know, be one of the guests?
[00:34:21] Speaker A: Like, well, I mean, that's things that we allocated in our performer beforehand. Right. And test the waters. If you haven't been there before, you don't know. Don't spend a bunch of money going in. Go to that first conference. Show up, just buy a ticket, you know, bring your brochures, bring your marketing material, talk to people. That's what it's about. It's all about networking. It's all about people, and it's all about connections. And they have that saying, right? It's not about what you know, it's about who you know. And that's. That's so true. Look at the people that are around you. Try and surround yourself in those circles. Even if you don't have it, fake it till you make it a little bit. Go out there and. And try to talk to the right people. Test the water. So, you know, we did a lot of that. I would show up at conference. We didn't have a booth at the beginning, but I'd go talk to all the booths. I'd go talk to all the treatment centers. I'd go talk to the owners. We would get these meetings arranged on LinkedIn before we would go. Right. So you're targeting certain CEOs. If you look on the Internet, you can see the conferences that are out there. They'll have sponsors that you're going to know. You can find who's attending those. Once you know who's attending, then you reach out to decision makers on LinkedIn. Right. And it's a numbers game. Not everybody's going to say yes, but it's law of averages. You knock on enough doors, somebody's going to answer and somebody's going to buy. So it's, it's going to all of them reaching out, trying to set that up. And again, you're giving away these services. It's word of mouth and it continues to grow. So the hardest part is at the beginning, but it's like a snowball. You know, you start to roll that snow and it's real small and it's hard to get it there. But then once it gains momentum, it rolls and rolls and it gets bigger and faster. So the biggest thing is, is that people give up. Right? It's too frustrating.
They don't think it's going to work. And just when you feel like that is when you end up knocking out of the park and something good happens. So I can't say that enough. Do not give up. Keep going. Keep thinking outside of the box and pushing the envelope.
[00:36:35] Speaker B: Real quick, before we go to the next break, because this leads me to my next question.
I've been to a lot of these conferences myself, and, you know, there's a right way and a wrong way to really get the maximum value from what you spent at these conferences. A lot of people, you know, they go, they think it's a social hour, you know, it's. It's a fun weekend for them, and then they go back. But what are some of the tips you can give? Maybe the listeners that are doing B2B on how to maximize the spend that they, you know, they put out at these conferences once they leave.
[00:37:12] Speaker A: Once they leave? Yes. I mean, you got to do your research before you go there. Don't just show up. Who's going to be here, what's going to happen? You know, they have apps, you know, most of these big conferences, they show you who the attendees are. You can look all this up. You have to know who your target market is. Email lists, you can get them through the conference. You can collect cards.
You. A lot of the times they'll give you the other contacts, right, that are at these companies. When you're at the companies, you gotta follow up. Follow up is so important, right? You're getting conversations and just the little things, right? Remembering somebody's name, remembering what you talked about, who's their favorite football team, you know, what was their wife's name, what was their husband's name? Who, who was that? So writing that down, following up, right?
Email lists, touching base through phone LinkedIn. And it's also, if you're going to run some campaigns, there's something called retargeting, right. Everybody's on social media today. If they're interested, we follow them through the Internet. You know, next time you're on Google or you on YouTube or something like that, you're probably going to see our ads. And we just want that constant contact in somebody's head because a lot of the times we know that it'll take them a while that, you know, I know people in the treatment center world, they're going to click on seven different websites, five to seven different websites before they choose which place they're going to go. So you have to be in front of it.
[00:38:50] Speaker B: Well, we run out of time for this segment, so that's. We'll be back after a word from our sponsors.
Welcome back to Street Level Marketing where we're real people talking about real marketing strategies. We're on with Nick Boatman from Poplar Wellness. You know, we've had a pretty good show here over the last 45 minutes and we want to, I wanted to wrap up the segment, you know, talking about you, you got a business now you're trying to grow and you know, you're, you're thinking about now it's time to, you know, raise some capital to grow more. Sometimes those pigeonholes come up where you gotta raise more capital to, you know, expand the business and reach more customers. So Nick, have you been into this process yet to where you're going out and raising money?
You know, when did you determine that it was time to do that?
[00:40:19] Speaker A: Yeah, it really depends on where you're at with the business. I've raised a lot of capital in a lot of different situations. And you know, as an entrepreneur, especially if it's your first time business, where there's a lot of different routes that you can go. You know, you could go on Kickstarter and raise that you can find angel investors and different areas that you can go and pitch your idea with some investors to try to get them to throw capital in. It but, you know, if you're first starting, what I would always recommend is first off, you have to have a strategic business plan and you have to have a performer. It has to be written out on paper because any investor, it doesn't matter what the business idea is, they're going to flip right to the back and they're going to look at the margins. They're going to look at is there, you know, is this a worthwhile investment? How much potential is here? And also remember that people are always, especially me, this is the way that I think. I'm betting on the archer, not the arrow. It's. It's the people that are behind it that I'm betting on. So, you know, if you're first starting out, I always recommend to, you know, try to go to family and friends or some strategic partners or somebody that, you know at the beginning to get it off the ground.
Like I said, you can go the other routes, but make sure that you get enough capital to get it to where you need to go. Don't go short. If anything, tack a little bit more on. And it's about proof of concept at first. So you got to prove your model, you got to prove that your whatever you're selling is going to be successful in that market. And once you've done that, everything's off. Off your financials, right? It's off. Ebitda, they're, they're looking at, you know, your revenue versus, you know, your net income and where the potential of this can go and what your next moves are. So once you get it to a certain level of ebitda, right, Once you get the company worth enough to where you feel like it's taking it to the next level, that could, it's different for everybody. That could be, you know, a million dollars in ebitda. You get enough cash flow depending on where you're at, then that's the next level is when you start talking about private equity or you start talking about seed funding. But if you go to them too quick and your company's not worth that much either, A, they're not going to be interested, which they're probably not, any big boy is going to want to see the company at a certain point on your EBITDA before they're even going to look at you. But you know, you're going to be giving up too much of the company. If it's not worth that much on paper, then you're going to give up a massive chunk and you're going to have a much smaller piece so that's where the Archer is so, so important. Like, if you are a true entrepreneur and you want to succeed, you have to put your nose to the grindstone and you got to get it where it needs to go. And it's tough. I mean, you got to put in the work. Sometimes it takes years to do that. But, you know, we have a choice. Either, you know, you're waking up and you're, you're working for somebody else to help them chase their, their dreams, or you're chasing your own dreams. And I promise you, you put that work in at the beginning, at the end, it's going to be well worth it. And you're going to have that, that freedom to do what you want to do, when you want to do it.
[00:44:01] Speaker B: So when you're doing this and we're going back to the marketing plan, is it important to make sure you have a really structured plan in place when you're going to raise that money, Are you going to have to show where you're going to spend and allocate the money that you're raising?
Do you have to put a lot into, you know, the market share that's available to you and how much you can potentially capture of that?
[00:44:32] Speaker A: Sure. I mean, you want to have all of those things. And again, it's about having a detailed plan, your strategic plan. It's who you are. It's a, it's a SWOT analysis, it's, it's looking at your competition, it's the market size, the market cap, where you're going as an organization, what is your purpose? Right. What is your mission statement? Who are you? It's outlining those things. And then in your Performa, it's showing exactly where you're going to allocate every dollar to a T. If you're going to get paid, that's on there. If you're going to spend it on marketing, that's on there. What do you need for software? What do you need for infrastructure? What do you need for inventory? How often are you going to have to buy inventory? At what point? Every detail that you can think of needs to be put in there and project out. Right. So try to do a couple years, five years, I would say, on what that looks like. And, you know, you want to get as detailed as you can so people can buy into that vision and also understand what that company could be. And again, looking at the Archer, I want to know if I'm investing somebody, that there's laser focus, there's a hunger there, and this is you know, something that the people behind it are really passionate about. And if I see a plan and I see the structure, I see the potential and I say, you know what, this, this could work in this market. And I really like these people. These people are behind this. That's a product or a service that I'm going to think about investing in.
[00:46:15] Speaker B: So you say you're in 12 centers now.
[00:46:18] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:46:20] Speaker B: What, where do you see yourself this year? Like what's, what's the plan that you have? What's your goals? Where do you see the company say going into 2026?
[00:46:29] Speaker A: Yeah. So you know, the goal for this next year, we're, right now we're raising a little more capital. We're going with strategic investors. Right. So we're giving away a piece of the pie. But if we hit certain markers right on our revenue and we get it to certain points to where the investors paid back, we can then buy back that equity. So there's some different strategic structures that you can use. And again, Mark, like we were talking about earlier, use chat, GPT, use AI. They'll tell you all about creative ways to do that, you know. But our goal on this next year is to have a 2 million dollar EBITDA and we have some advancements that we're going into. So we have a new wearable that's coming out. It's called our wellness wearable. It does all types of biomarker, data, tracks sleep, it can do ECG with your heart and people can wear that through a full continuum of care and then they can wear it when they come home. So we have a full telehealth and telemedicine platform and we want to be able to fill some gaps where we can treat people for life and keep them connected with chronic care physicians. Right. People, they might have be a diabetic or, you know, they could have a thyroid disorder. We want to be able to treat that through telehealth, through your doc on our app, your medication management therapy. You might be connected to, you know, your alumni, the treatment center that you just went, but everything's in one spot. It connects to our wearables, it connects to everything to where when somebody leaves, we can help treat you for life.
[00:48:10] Speaker B: When you're talking about those strategic investors, that's one thing that is probably pretty important to determine when you have a, you know, potentially you have a lot of people interested in putting money in, is picking those investors that can maybe provide some doorways to open. Is that something you're looking at when, when you're choosing these investors 100%.
[00:48:34] Speaker A: You know, we are in a market right now in healthcare. It's a very large market. It's also a tech company. Right. So there's, there's huge multiples in this field if you make it successful and everybody's on the AI train. We have partnership with a big university on data collection. Right now we're working on white papers, preventative algorithms. So in order to get there on raising the capital, we got a lot of people that are trying to throw money at us. But it's about, again, who we're going with because people are everything. And we can go get money from somebody that wants to throw it at us, but it'd be a lot better if we got money with somebody that could help offer something to advance our company. Right. Whether that's relationships. I'm always looking for people that are way smarter than me. I better not be the smartest guy in the room and everybody around me. I want smarter than I am. And that's what it's about. Show me your five friends. Show me the people that you're surrounding yourself with. Same thing in business and investor, because they'll take you farther, they'll give you advice. We don't know all the answers, but the people that are behind it and the people that you do get capital from matter, matter a lot.
[00:49:46] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, I want to thank you, you know, for being a guest on the show. It was really good to hear about Popular wellness and, you know, you starting a business, some of the marketing challenges you had, you know, do for the listeners if they want to be able to find you, you know, what, what's the website? Is there a phone number? You know, how can they reach you?
[00:50:08] Speaker A: Sure, you can find us online. It's popular wellnessgroup.com poplar is a tree. It means resiliency. P O P l a r wellness group.com or you can just call us at 8888-poplar if you need any kind of help with addiction, need a resource, struggling, we can, we can help you in any way possible. Visit us at discovery nj.org that's discovery nj as in new jersey.org and even if we're not the right fit, you know, I've been through it. So many people I know have. And pick up the phone, give us a call. I promise you it'll change your life.
[00:50:53] Speaker B: Thank you so much, Nick, again for coming on the show. It was a lot of great information and hopefully our listeners can maybe pick up a few tips on, you know, how, how they can go about starting a business and, you know, being successful in that venture and then marketing it and getting it out to the customers so they can grow.
Thank you for watching another episode of Street Level Marketing. I'll see you next time.
[00:51:18] Speaker A: This has been a Now Media Network's feature presentation. All rights reserved.
