Garrett Salpeter, the founder of Neufit, suffered a wrist injury that necessitated surgery in 2007. Before undergoing surgical intervention, a chiropractic neurologist introduced him to functional neurology and early forms of DC devices as an alternative treatment. Salpeter used himself as a test subject, and within three weeks, he achieved complete recovery. This sparked his interest in the nervous system and how it could be used to help people heal. NeuFit was launched in 2017 and since then, the company has helped thousands of people unlock their healing potential and achieve significant results.
In this episode of TechTalk Podcast, Brad Cost, Dr. Jay Greenstein, and Garrett Salpeter sit down to discuss:
How Garrett intertwined his interests & education into one: NeuFit.
Important pieces of advices of becoming a CEO and/or entrepreneur.
Why prioritizing your patients & employees is necessary for a thriving business.
SHOW NOTES:
1:45 – Life-altering disappoint to life-changing discovery. “Well, I feel very fortunate to have found a place where my interests and different academic training in engineering and neuroscience overlap. The initial catalyst for it was because of an experience I had. I played ice hockey growing up, played in college, and I had an injury where I had some torn ligaments and was told I would need surgery. I had other previous experiences with different injuries and traditional physical therapy and orthopedic medicine - I was just really disappointed. I didn't think there was much there for me. I figured that if you told me surgery, there was not a better avenue. Through fortunate circumstances, I met a chiropractor, who was a functional neurology doctor, that taught me the importance of the nervous system in healing and showed me earlier versions of direct current. At the time, it was an analog device with different dials on it. I saw firsthand how these direct current electric fields actually helped me heal my ligaments and avoid surgery. I was just so grateful and relieved as an athlete, as a pre-engineering student, as a physics major at the time. I’m someone who really cared about the science and physiology of finding something that actually made sense scientifically. That's what really got me excited, and it created a calling within me to pursue this work. I had no idea what it would look like at the time, but I knew I had to share it with as many people as I could.”
3:48 – Torn ligaments and the power of direct current. “It was in my wrist. There were a couple scapholunate ligaments and another one whose name I'm forgetting right now, but the direct current electric fields helped me identify and address the location of where the nervous system was shutting down around that locally. We also looked globally at the autonomic nervous system and how that may or may not be supporting healing. We also saw how the direct current electric fields helped the ligaments grow and heal by increasing blood flow by causing cells to move and migrate in different ways.”
4:40 – Building NeuFit. “I went to engineering graduate school at the University of Texas in Austin and, while I was here, I networked around a little bit. I met a guy who was a chiropractor for the UT Longhorns football team at the time. He also had a private practice in the Austin area, so when I was in my early twenties, completing my engineering grad school and additional grad school in neuroscience, I rented a 120 square foot room from him and started working as a non-clinician. I started using older versions of electrical stimulation technology and working with people in the community in his office and under his license. I was treating people for about seven or eight years, putting in 10,000 hours of using older versions of this technology. I kept seeing ways that I wanted to improve the technology and methodology to bring it into the future or at least into the present. I had been waiting for someone else to come out with something better that I could use to open more clinics around town, but eventually, I finally concluded that the best path forward was to create a device myself.”
6:05 – 10,000 hours of hard work! “10,000 hours means a lot of time spent in the trenches actually doing the work. Whether that’s a musician practicing his or her scales or a hockey player shooting shots at the net or a basketball player practicing free throws and three pointers. For me, it was treating people throughout the years and using these older versions of electrical stimulation technology. I saw how people responded, what patterns emerged, what worked for different types of acute injuries or chronic pain, what combinations of exercises, pad placements and settings on the machine worked well and how hard to push people on the machine. I built this whole methodology around it. It allowed me to have a lot of time to experiment, get a lot of reps and get comfortable with the patterns opportunities to improve.”
8:03 – Working in the trenches to building official prototypes. “I fortunately didn't really tinker in my garage or plug people into things that I rigged up. As part of the journey, I had a client, who was a local real estate guy, that was coming in for treatments and getting great results. He told me that if I ever wanted to make one of my own versions of this, he owned a building over by the airport and the tenant was a prototype design engineering firm. I eventually got to work with them to create a prototype, so it was more sophisticated than if I would have tinkered around in my garage.”
15:01 – The hard lessons of a CEO. “It's sort of figuring out as you go along. It reminds me of the time my wife and I were bringing our first child home. We didn't have to pass a test. We didn't have to get certified. We just had the kid. It’s sort of the same thing with running a business. Thankfully, there's great books and mentors to help out along the way. One of the big things that really stood out to me was that initial transition. I mentioned my time working in the clinic, where I strongly identified with doing that work, helping people feel better, and getting that result. If I'm being honest, I deprived a lot of my sense of self-esteem and self-worth from doing that work. It was actually difficult for me. I was having to shift my identity in order to step out of the day-to-day and transition into a CEO who can lead this business. Work on the business instead of in the business. Figure out who I am and what I should be doing. Realize the opportunity cost of treating one person versus spending that time building the business to help tens of thousands of other people. We use the EOS system - people might be familiar with the book Traction. One of my internal models, if I reflect or coach myself from that book, is delegate and elevate. I've certainly learned a lot of lessons around interpersonal relationships. I have had one mentor along the way tell me that building a business is one of the greatest spiritual journeys. I would agree because there's so much stuff that comes up that forces me to look inside to do better and recognize fault. It has brought up stuff that I have to deal with personally because it manifests in my business. It has brought up issues that I have around being a people pleaser and having difficulty setting boundaries. It has manifested in issues with keeping around the wrong people for years longer than I should have. Some of it's mindset, scarcity versus abundance mindset. It's just a great vehicle for personal growth really. When I reflect on those past issues and the ones I’m still working on, I am a lot better because of the lessons that running a business has forced me to learn.”
20:34 - Toughest struggle as an entrepreneur. “There's a lot. I would say the toughest thing is the background existential question of ‘are we going to make it?’ As a business owner, there may be stages that it turns off eventually, but I haven't gotten there yet. It's always on. Everyone probably has some version of that in their own life. If business is a spiritual journey, there is that notion of understanding that I'm full and complete, independent of external circumstances, and being able to adopt the mindset of putting the right people in the right seats to set us up as best we can for success. I'm really not able to control the outcome, so focusing on what I can control is the approach I take to deal with it. Yet, I still wrestle with that. I always have a little baseline level of the existential question, even after six or seven years and making the Inc. 5000 three times in a row. The toughest part of entrepreneurship is the delayed gratification, the long space of time between action and result sometimes.”
26:33 – The beauty of building a strong culture. “In terms of business and leadership, my favorite is The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle. He looks at high performing teams, from the Navy SEALs to the San Antonio Spurs to a comedy troupe in New York City, and figures out what makes a good culture that builds a cohesive team that works together effectively. He tells these stories about a fascinating statistic that there's an expected winning percentage of NBA teams based on the talent and quality of their players. For the most part, there's a line. The better the quality of the players, the more wins they have. Almost everyone fits, but there's this one huge outlier: Greg Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs. He wins way more games than he should, statistically expected, based on the quality of the players he had. It goes into what he does, and he has this amazing combination of just loving his players, right? He establishes these deep personal relationships, trust and intimacy and combines that with maximum accountability. He'll tell them when they messed up - from a place of ‘I love you, I'm trying to help you get better’ and it lands well. They told stories in the book about how they would lose a game, and everyone thinks they're going to have to go run sprints or go watch film and he takes them out for a great dinner with wine to gel together as a team. It's just this beautiful story there.”
32:58 – Aha moments for patients & businesses alike! “When practice owners or their staff are using the newbie device, it creates a lot of these aha moments. One of the things we're best known for is our mapping process. You can take the newbie, take a pad and scan around on a patient's body. Because of the unique effects of direct current, you can identify where that individual is guarding neurologically in response to injury and shutting down muscles. Someone may have an injury and there may be something wrong with the hardware of the muscles, bones, tendons, ligaments, but we've found that working with the software often leads to breakthroughs. A common reason it takes so long to recover is due to the neurological response to injury and the guarding/protective/compensatory patterns that develop over time. Being able to precisely find where those are and apply a very powerful form of neuromuscular reeducation to change patterns, creates these wow moments for patients. Around 91-92% of patients notice functional improvements and/or reductions in pain in their first session. Patients are excited. They're willing to pay cash because they're actually getting a result. They're willing to come back for more sessions. They’re more likely to complete their plan of care and refer. Patient satisfaction rates are higher. For the first several years, a lot of our messaging was ‘do this because it's better for patient outcomes.’ Now, we've added there's a clear bottom-line return on investment for your business to that messaging. It's good for the patient and good for the business.”
37:17 - Climbing Mount Everest. “There's this notion of crossing the chasm, right? There are the innovators, early adopters, early majority. We're a tech company, so we are working on improving the technology, but the biggest limiting factor for us is being able to get the word out to more and more people who can benefit from it. That's a big part of why I'm grateful to be here talking with everyone listening to this. For us, I liken our journey to climbing Mount Everest. We've come up a few thousand feet so we can look back, see how far we've come, and admire at the view; however, we can also look up the mountain and see we have a long way left to go.”
EPISODE RESOURCES
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