Kyle Gray: (00:37)

Hello, and welcome to the Story Engine podcast. My name is Kyle Gray and today on the show we have Reed Davis, founder of the FDN Functional Diagnostic Nutritionist program. Now Reed is coming on the show to talk to us about what it takes to create a certification program. This is something that’s really, really interesting and really applicable no matter what field you’re in, if you’re in marketing, if you’re in coaching, if you’re in health and wellness, if you want to take what you do, build a process around it and then train other people into it, there are very powerful and scalable results you can get from doing something like this. And Reed is going to break down everything from how he got started, to what the program looks like now, and how he scaled it beyond just himself. There’s a lot of great insights in here, and I’m really excited to share it with you. So without any further ado, let’s hand it over to Reed, Reed Davis, welcome to the Story Engine podcast. It is so exciting to have you today. 

Reed Davis: (01:44)

Kyle, thanks so much for having me here. I look forward to an excellent little show. 

Kyle Gray: (01:48)

So, Reed, I want to introduce you the same way I introduce all the guests. Can you tell me about a moment in your life that has defined who you are and how you show up in the world today? 

Reed Davis: (02:04)

I think so. I mean, I’d have to go back a few years to time, and of course, people know I’m in functional medicine, functional lab training, and natural protocols. You see, I’m a teacher, but it’s all based on the experience of working in a clinic for ten years. I ran thousands of labs on thousands of people. And very early on, I knew I was on the right track, Kyle, when a lady was in the office, and she was a chiropractic patient. I would usually give her a little massage on her neck before the doctor adjusted her and walked her back to a treatment room, and she was just really looking down in the mouth, you know? And I said, “What’s going on?” You know, by her name. She said, “I’m just so upset with what’s going on. I’m 40 pounds overweight, and I just can’t lose the weight, and it’s because of this medication I’ve been on for two years.” And she explained that she gets hives if she doesn’t take this medication.

Reed Davis: (03:02)

And she gets the hives because of this medication. And she had just been to her doctor and explained to him that she was upset about the weight, and all he told her, she said was, “You have your choice. You can be fat, or you can have hives.” And she said that made her very depressed. And when she told him that, he says, “Well, I can write you a prescription for antidepressants if you want?” And of course, you know, in our world that doesn’t fly. And so I looked at her, and I said, well, what, you know called her by her name, I said, “Why haven’t you figured out why you get the hives?” 

Reed Davis: (03:43)

And man, her head just about snapped off her neck, like “What?” I go, you know, “It seems like if you just figure out why you get the hives, you don’t have to worry about the medication, getting fat, depression, more drugs.” And she said, “Well, yeah, well, how do I do that?” So I again, next, moving forward quickly, hopefully, she ran a test or two, found out she was sensitive to soy, corn, dairy, eggs, and other grains, like mostly wheat. So that’s the five big ones. And she was, had sensitivities to all of them. She got off those things. And this is by her words. In nine days she was telling her doctor, “I’m not taking this medication anymore.” You know, she’s just going to avoid these things because she already felt better. She’d be eating some of those things every day for her whole life. 

Reed Davis: (04:38)

And so within another couple of weeks, she was losing weight, and she was doing two things she told me that she hadn’t done in two years, that I didn’t even know about yet. She goes, “You know, Reed, I just want you to know I’m so incredibly happy. I’ve been doing two things for the last few days that I haven’t done in two years. One is taking a hot shower.” She hadn’t taken a hot shower in two years.

Kyle Gray: (05:00)

Wow.

Reed Davis: (05:00)

Because even on the meds, she got the hives, and she hadn’t worked out to the point of sweat in two years because even on the meds if she perspired, she got the hives. She just said she was so elated and happy. You know, that’s a defining moment when I said, “Oh, I think I’m onto something here with this lab testing for underlying causes, conditions,” and then all-natural protocols, there’s no drugs involved. So I would say that’s one, I have a lot of stories like that, but I remember that one.

Kyle Gray: (05:32)

Yeah, no, that sets the stage for the real movement you’ve created. I had the honor of attending this event of your association and certification and community a few months back. But where this is something, and this is kind of not necessarily news. I think a lot of people who’ve been listening to the show have heard similar stories and testing. But what’s incredible here, is this was a moment of discovery where you not only started working with your patients and your clients in this manner, but you put together a certification called Functional Diagnostic Nutritionist. Which has hundreds of people that you’ve certified now that are all addressing these problems. And it’s changing the way a lot of us look at health and how we manage it. It’s incredible to see how it started with one conversation and is now causing this significant impact around the world.

Reed Davis: (06:38)

Well thanks for that. And yeah, we’re honored to have you as a guest speaker and vendor at our conference. It was one of the best functional medicine type conferences I’ve been to, and I’m really proud of that. It was our second one. We’re going to do it every year now. And it is mostly the FDN community, it’s graduates, but a lot of non-grad, just other people. And of course, our affiliate, vendor type partners are there because we want to teach and have fun and just build on the community, which has been a fantastic benefit. I didn’t know there was going to be a community when I first started teaching. 

Kyle Gray: (07:21)

Yeah. 

Reed Davis: (07:22)

But that came out of just having an excellent course that people loved, and then they like hanging out with each other, you know, and contributing. And most of my best ideas for improving the course, over it’ll be 12 years this summer; my best opinion’s to improve the class have come from the people who took it. So it’s a sort of group sourced and a fantastic opportunity to learn and do some good in the world. 

Kyle Gray: (07:50)

So you’ve mentioned a course, and there is a community around this, but I’ve seen certifications in the health and wellness world, I’ve seen certifications in the marketing world, in the coaching world. There are certifications like this everywhere. There’s a gap that I want to explore with you. You put together this body of knowledge, and then all of a sudden, you’ve come to a point where you decide this is comprehensive enough that you want to be able to certify other people in it. And have people learn it and stand behind this body of teaching that you’ve created. What does it look like to, how does this, how does the certification evolve and come into place? How does that even get built? 

Reed Davis: (08:42)

Yeah. Good, good question. Well, after ten years and running thousands of labs on thousands of people and creating a system of investigation nodes, I learned which small handful of labs you probably want to run on everybody. Remember, I’m not a physician, so I don’t want to diagnose and treat a specific condition. I just want to figure out what are the healing opportunities, generally in hormones, immune digestion, detoxification, a couple of others. What are the healing options and then apply the general principles of health building? In other words, how do you fix it all at one time? How do you affect every cell, tissue, organ, and system? That’s real health coaching. 

Reed Davis: (09:23)

And so I developed a system, and then everybody pretty much was telling me, you should be teaching other practitioners. You know, I love to lecture. So I was out lecturing in the community anywhere from libraries to grocery stores and some bigger venues. But you know, it was mostly just to get my clients. I had considerable practice. People said, “Reed, you can only help so many people. You’ve got to teach others how to do this.” 

Reed Davis: (10:12)

And so it came upon me that I should create a course. So my advice to anyone thinking that, if you’ve got a sound system, this is not, again, something I just learned at school and repackaged and teaching like that, this is something practical that I did every day for ten years. Or almost, and so I just codified everything and put together about 200 slides, and I invited some people to come, and I think I charged about $800.00 for a two-day workshop. And you know, I’ve sweated those slides, and now when I look back, this is 12 years ago. They sucked, you know, but it was the best thing at the time. And you know, I just stood there flipping through slides and cracking a few jokes and being myself and just let the chips fall where they may. 

Reed Davis: (11:05)

And there were only 19 people there. Well now we’ve trained, this is 12 years later, we’ve trained 3000 people in 50 countries because I listened to the people who took it. They said, “Well, what about this? How did you do that? How would you do this?” So I gave the original content, the labs and the protocols, the philosophy, you know, they call it a didactic form of training. You’re telling them how to do something, not just the theory behind it. And I had all that face to face time with customers like that lady I was telling you about. So you just have to put what you know together. Put it in some slides come up with a somewhat entertaining way of presenting it. You don’t want just to read slides. I don’t use scripts, which I noticed a lot of these lecture or certification programs, they’re reading a script, and it puts you to sleep. I can’t even get through it. I just have bullet points, and I’ve sweated over those a lot. But I know my points, and I just make it more fun than that.

Reed Davis: (12:14)

So people just loved it, and they referred to people. That first class was 19. The next course was 40. Then I did a course of 60 after that. Well, then, I went online. I started doing it online so that I could reach people from all over the place. That was d to one of my trainees or graduates saying, “Hey, I’m an IT guy. Let me help you put this online because you’re not doing good enough.” So that’s what I’ve done, I’ll say at least that much, to get started, put your stuff together, have a weekend workshop, and you’re running your flag up the flagpole and seeing who salutes.

Reed Davis: (12:56)

And also, I would say get someone to help you with maybe breaking you into a particular group. You know someone that will help promote you. I had that going for me. 

Kyle Gray: (13:12)

There’s a lot of magic in here that I’m hearing that no matter what space you’re in if you’re in marketing if you’re in coaching, services, health, no matter what, this is encouraging news. A couple of core principles that I’ve heard over are, I think it’s encouraging that this isn’t something where people have to go and study at a university to get. This was practical, on the ground learning, and this is what you are learning, with the next key point, face to face with customers. You were working with people, you were getting results, and you were getting feedback from them, and so just getting in front of the right people, the people who you want to serve, and listening to them. That’s where the magic happens. I think that by tuning into what they were doing or what they were saying, they guided you to this. Once you find customers that do that for you and you start to listen, that’s really where a lot of growth and magic happens, and I’ve heard it over and over again. 

Kyle Gray: (14:27)

Another cool thing that I heard you say is that you were speaking and you were presenting, and there’s this theme with a coach, actually you may know him as well, I’ve been working with a guy named Mark England, a brilliant presentation coach, and speaking coach. And he was just telling me the other day, getting on stage and presenting, a lot of people think you have to become an expert to do that. And I think doing that makes you become an expert. It’s kind of like getting on the stage. You said it yourself like the slides weren’t the best at first, but you learned, you got up there, and you took risks. And I think there are far too many people in the world these days who are afraid or feel like they need to have everything perfect. And maybe that they think like, I need to have this ideal script. 

Kyle Gray: (15:20)

But again, from you having these boots on the ground learning, you were able just to talk. A lot of my mentors have taught me my speaking and presentation skills with this deep expertise like Pete Vargas from Advance Your Life as well. He has so much knowledge like he needs a script not to keep him, to keep him from just like dumping too much experience. And I think bringing that real expertise forward again by only being experienced with your clients is cool.

Reed Davis: (16:04)

You mustn’t go over your head too. The way I teach my course is the way that I learned how to do what I do. I start with those first labs, like the first lab, checking the hormones. Before I run all the tests that I ended up running and what I can run now, I just run a lot of hormone tests. I had a very sort of small demographic. It was all women who are concerned about bone density because I had my bone density testing or scanning company. That was another thing I did while I was managing the wellness center was I had an outside service. I would go out and do this bone density test. So I got really in touch with the women who are concerned about bone density. Now in 1999 and 2000, 2001, most women were on hormone replacement therapy, the dangerous drug kind, and then some studies came out that that’s bad for you, for your heart. It might be right for your bones. But you might get cancer or heart disease or something. 

Reed Davis: (17:08)

So they all got off that. It’s like, “What do we do?” So I said, “Natural stress reduction or hormone balancing and things.” So I did have a group to work with, and it grew from there. I learned how to do that testing well. Then I learned how to do well, what else? Because you can’t just be like, “Oh here, you’re going to balance your hormones.” You have to have proper digestion. You have to have proper detoxification. You have to have an excellent immune system. I learned over the years by running thousands of labs just a network, I was able to make my observations. We’re going back to create a system. So you probably, if you’re listening and you’ve been working somewhere or maybe working on it, then you think you have something to teach, just don’t explain what you know now. Teach the steps and how you got to know all of this stuff, that it’s something you’re an expert in. 

Reed Davis: (18:06)

The other thing I’ll say about speaking is, I was not a shy guy, but I wasn’t a public speaker when I first started at the wellness center, and I was a pretty good salesman and organizer, manager. I just started taking courses in nutrition and personal training and things as I was working at this clinic. I have my coach from way back, long before Pete Vargas, who’s excellent and some of these other guys. It was a chiropractic consulting firm run by David Singer, and he encouraged us to have a wellness center there to do lectures. So my job as the manager of the clinic was to set up the speech. I just told everybody, “Hey, next Tuesday night at 7:00, we’re going to have some refreshments. We’re going to do a new patient workshop orientation, and you’re going to bring your spouse with you.”

Reed Davis: (19:01)

It’s a way to increase your business to get your clients’ spouses also to be a client. So I invited, I had about 22 people showing up, and we had, back then, it was just a flip chart to go through. There weren’t any PowerPoints or any of that stuff. I mean, even only the old fashioned slides where you press a button, and a fan and a light is blowing and this noise, we did all that stuff. But I was just going to do a flip, or the chiropractor’s going to do a flip chart. So I had everybody in the room, our patients and their spouses and refreshments and took her in, and I said, “Okay, they’re ready for you.” 

Reed Davis: (19:42)

She goes, “I’m not giving that lecture.” She goes, “You’re giving that lecture.” That’s how I started lecturing was like 10 minutes before the lecture; you’re giving it. I didn’t think I was ready at all, but I just went and sort of blundered through it and thought I got a rush, thought that was cool. So I went from flipping a slide, a chart that we’d purchased for new patient management to the slides, and then I started creating my own. Now it’s 20 years later; it’s a different story. But man, start with just doing it. You only need 10 or 15 people at the most to get going. Now I lecture to maybe 300 or 400, but it doesn’t matter.

Kyle Gray: (20:27)

Plus, I’ve seen people to this day, we don’t need anything fancier. You can run a $10,000 workshop with a flip chart and nothing else. Maybe some coffee in the back, and just depending on if you’ve got good content, you’ve got the right expertise to share. It creates the ability to do this is creating a process, really getting clear on the steps of what you do, and being able to explain those steps in a way that somebody else can pick it up [inaudible 00:21:08].

Kyle Gray: (21:27)

If people can see the road ahead of them and know where they’re going, they’re going to trust you a lot more. But yeah, this is the key to being able to scale it up or delegate something if you’re in your business. There’s so much power and really understanding and being able just to write out the process for doing something. What was your method for discovering this or how did you start to codify what you are doing? 

Reed Davis: (21:57)

Well, as far as what FDN is, FDN in our DRESS protocols, I would say that the number one driving force is, and again, this is a bit of a story, but you gotta be able to tell your story. If you don’t have your purpose identified, you’re not going to impress people. So I don’t know if this would be compelling to anyone, but when I started working in that clinic, I had come out of the environmental law field. I was saving the planet, air, birds, water, trees, bees. I was on a mission to clean up the world, the whole earth. Now, because I started in the environment, I started wondering, “Well, what’s this environment doing to people?” It’s not dead birds and seals and whatever, but I’m like, “Well, what about people?”

Reed Davis: (22:49)

That’s when I changed jobs, started working at the clinic to build a wellness center. I started taking nutrition classes and all the other certifications that I have. People walking in the office had all seen five to 10 different practitioners already. I eventually identified this cycle of trial and error that people go through. They’re on an endless journey trying to get their problem solved, and no one’s fixing it. Over 20 years ago, that pissed me off. A lot of people come to health practice and professions because they had their health problems, and then slowly, they overcame it. Now they can become a hero for those with a similar question, and that’s their story. 

Reed Davis: (23:39)

That’s not my story. I was in perfect health, in great shape. I just got furious that people had already seen five or eight or ten practitioners and spent how much money? That’s crazy. I’m going to be the last person you need to see. That became my, that’s my basic story. So that was driving behind everything. Keep digging; find out what are the underlying causes and conditions. The last thing they need is another diagnosis from another doctor or just to buy some therapy, like try my treatment, no, try mine. Try a colon hydrotherapy standing on your head with carrots in your nose

Reed Davis: (24:19)

There are people just selling a bunch of stuff that might help, might not, but with no objective criteria. Remember, I came out of environmental law, which you have to study. You got to know the history and the rules. So I was a pretty good researcher, and I got fortunate and met a couple of doctors who trusted me. They thought I was a bit naive but respected the ambition that I was going to solve people’s problems, and I couldn’t just get out a prescription pad to do it because I’m not licensed to do that. So I can recall a doctor saying, “Gee Reed.” He goes, “You’re going to have to help people to be successful.” What a concept. So anyway, so better have that story together. 

Reed Davis: (25:07)

Then what I did is I just worked, really, really hard for several, several years, really building up a busy practice. I had thousands of clients and thousands. I was lecturing three times a month, usually. I was screening with the bone density testing up to eight times a month for a couple hours every Tuesday and Thursday. So I just had tremendous exposure to the public, and what they’re facing and I had solutions. I’d be like, “Hey, let me run some labs. These are experimental labs; these are new labs.” The saliva-testing back then wasn’t even considered real testing. Now it’s a common occurrence with over 300 white papers written on how great it is, and everyone does it. 

Reed Davis: (25:56)

But so I was fortunate to have some great mentorship. But I also made my observations, and I’m a good organizer, and I just codified it in what we call a heuristic. A heuristic is a way of doing things that work. It’s not necessarily perfect. You can argue with specific points, but it’s a heuristic that works. Looking at the hormones, immune, digestion, detoxification, energy production, and nervous system. That spells HIDDEN. That’s a way of looking at the body. That’s a lot of data that you can use to identify the healing opportunities. Then to apply the general principles of health building, it took me a while to figure out what I was doing, but I knew diet wasn’t enough and just, “Oh, get a good night’s sleep.” That’s not good enough, and exercise, that’s not good enough. 

Reed Davis: (26:47)

Stress reduction is significant but alone isn’t enough. Supplements, everyone back then in the nutrition business, was a supplement salesman. Not everybody, I take that back, but a lot was just to sell supplements, which is just replacing drugs with another product, and that doesn’t work by itself either. So what I figured out was you need a complete holistic epigenetic program, a lifestyle and environment, if you will, that has an effect on every cell, tissue, organ, and system in the body. I called that DRESS or DRESS for health success, D-R-E-S-S, stands for diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction, and supplementation. That covers everything. That includes your whole epigenetic program. So, but it took a while to figure out. I listened to a lot of tapes. I went to a lot of lectures, and I talked to a lot of clinical advisors at all these labs, like a thousand times, and I had real experience in front of people looking at them in the face as the patient educators. So a lot of feedback, you’d get a lot of feedback, and if you want to do some good in the world, you can’t. So now what I would say is I’ve done the homework for you. You don’t have to run thousands of labs and thousands, and figure it out. I figured out a perfect working heuristic and a protocol that helps everyone no matter what the problem is. 

Kyle Gray: (28:12)

There’s a lot of magic I hear right here. One quick speaking tip for the listeners right now, something you just said that I picked up on when you’re talking. This is something called a compression statement, when we’re looking at this and saying like, “I over, X amount of years and this many clients later, I’ve figured this out through a series of costly and painful mistakes. I have figured this out for you.” 

Kyle Gray: (28:57)

Having a purpose and a why behind you and being able to bring your story forward is essential. This is something that’s particularly challenging in the health and wellness field. People have a high level of expertise, they become such experts, and they want to just rely on that, and they think that if you show us like an abstract to some medical journal or something or tell us how many papers you’ve been published in, that that is what’s important to people. 

Kyle Gray: (29:46)

But we want a human connection. We want to know that this person that we’re working with is not just in it for profit, but they care about us, and they share values with us so that we can trust and work with them. 

Kyle Gray: (30:21)

I love the new things you’ve had in there, the HIDDEN and DRESS. Where you put these together in acronyms or simple, one, two, three steps so that it’s easy to remember and easy to navigate. When people have so much knowledge flying around, if you have something that just makes it simple to navigate, that’s where your certifications and your education can empower and accelerate your clients’ results. Not only the clients that you’re working with but the people that you’re certifying and teaching. 

Reed Davis: (31:04)

Yeah. That should apply to any profession. I’m in the healing arts if you will. I’m not a physician, but really, really epitome of I think health coaching, which is a new term. But it’s become prevalent, and I realized we’re kind of sitting at the top there because we do teach all the lab work, we give access to the lab work. This is another thing about our certification, what does it get you? So with us, it’s the use of our medical director program, and you can run the labs under a medical director. 

Reed Davis: (31:38)

Remember, I had to have one at the office and so because that’s who I worked under. So when I started teaching, I had to figure that piece of the puzzle out. So you may have, let’s say, you’re teaching in financial services, they have all kinds of certifications there for finance. I use a certified financial planner, so there are lots of certifications and they 

Reed Davis: (32:00)

Have something that if you’re going to train others to do it, you better have some tools that are unique to the trade that you give them access to in these kinds of things. And one last job in certification, since that was a new question, at first it was just a certificate of completion. So if you have a small course, it’s a weekend course or a six-week course, you meet once a week or something with mentoring in between and all that, you can give a certificate of completion. That’s all mine was at first. But certification means more than that like recognized. And at first, I didn’t care about that. So you want the training. I’m going to teach you to do some good in the world, and I don’t care who approves of it or not. But just because of the way the marketplace works, you want that to mean something. So you get yourself the other organizations, and bodies, and agencies, and things will start to recognize you. Hey, your people know something. And actually can do some good in the world in our case.

Reed Davis: (33:03)

So we’ve been fully accredited by the American Association of Drugless Practitioners, which is odd because that was the first organization that I ever recognized that I liked 20 years ago. They’ve been around a long time. They have tens of thousands of members. So when they finally knew my course as fully accredited, when you are finished with the FDN course, you get our certification. You get their certification as a holistic health practitioner. That doesn’t come overnight.

Reed Davis: (33:36)

So as you’re starting your certification course, it’s a certificate of completion until you get started to get recognized by other bodies and organizations, and you want to work at that. And if they have a fee for them to look at you, pay it. I’ve had people charge me hundreds of dollars to look at even just parts of our course for continuing education credits, professional development credits. So we’re now recognized for those kinds of things, too. You can too.

Kyle Gray: (34:06)

So that is a good insight into kind of the process from having your certification, just kind of being your own thing and slowly starting to build a reputation. You’ve mentioned already some people just came out of the coursework that, hey, I love this. I’m a technician. I’d like to build this for you. Can you share some of the lessons that you’ve learned, putting together a team that has helped support you in this?

Reed Davis: (34:58)

Okay, sure. A lot of lessons. A lot of them you get the hard way. They say that it’s better to learn from someone else’s mistakes than your own, so I’ve had good mentorship. I’ve paid a ton of money for consultants. Some weren’t worth a crap, and some were just amazing that I still talk to today all these years later.

Reed Davis: (35:23)

So organizational, there are areas where your business will break down if it does. One will be an organizational structure. If you’re by yourself, I will hire an outstanding office manager, someone to handle the administration, the appointments, the money. You, basically as a practitioner, are going to be doing the production work. You’re going to be the one seeing the patients or providing the service, or building the product, or whatever it is. You’re going to have someone else who does all the admin, sales, marketing, and the other kind of thing. So you have your promotions, and you have your production. If you just start with that, okay, promotions, production, promotion, production, not everyone’s good at both. I happen to be able to go out and sell, and lecture, and talk to people, and do the production. You’re going to have to think about things, organizational structures.

Reed Davis: (36:19)

The other thing is that it will hold you back if you don’t set goals for monthly, and 90 days, and yearly goals. I work now on three- and five-year planning. I even have one of my consultants say, “What’s your 20-year plan?” I go, “In 20 years, man, I might not even be around.” But you know. So you have to do, number one, organizational structure. Number two is goal setting. Number three is planning. Now, those aren’t the ordinary skills of a doctor, let’s say. Or if you’re an expert in something, but you better associate yourselves with someone who can help you with the organizational structure you’re in, and set your goals, and plan because it’s not just what do I have to do today, you know? I mean, you do have to get it done today, something, but you better have your structure, your goals, and your plans in place. I don’t know if that’s helpful if that’s what you’re asking [crosstalk 00:37:12]

Kyle Gray: (37:13)

And kind of the big, the how I would distill that down is you need to know yourself enough to know where your weaknesses are. I had a considerable insight just last year, where through a coaching process, I discovered. However, I’m good at managing and kind of the admin process of making sure all the projects are accounting for, all the boxes are checked and things like that, I’m good at it, but it drains my energy, and it was where I noticed a lot of mistakes were happening. And as soon as I brought somebody on to help me with that aspect of my business, it freed me up. Because I like you enjoy engaging with people. I enjoy working with my clients and helping them prepare great presentations, but also presenting, and going out there, and marketing, and creating sales.

Kyle Gray: (38:09)

I at first, and I think a lot of people have this, there’s this doubt or this uncertainty that bringing somebody on is going to slow you down or maybe convolute things, but it sets you free in so many ways. Or you may feel that you can’t afford or can’t afford to bring somebody on at this time. But as soon as you do bring somebody on and it opens up so many new doors to do things.

Kyle Gray: (38:38)

I brought on a great project manager last year, a great technician that has helped with a lot of the website stuff, also stuff that I was pretty good at managing. But as soon as I freed myself from that, I was able to do so much more higher level, higher-value things that were energizing and inspiring for me. And I see that in the same way in what you’re describing. So you got to know yourself, know where you’re brilliant, and be able to allow yourself to hand off and let go of those other things. And don’t just let go of them and ignore them because that’s risky, but handing it off to somebody that you can trust.

Reed Davis: (39:24)

And training them. And training them. Don’t just assume anything that they know. So as a business owner, and maybe the president, let’s say, you end up just where you’re setting policy on time. Only, people don’t know how to handle something like, “Oh, we got a customer’s mad because of this or that. What’s the policy?” My staff now, they just, “What’s the policy?” They now know if there’s a policy in place, they can execute it. If there’s no policy, let’s make one up. And you do a lot of that sort of stuff.

Reed Davis: (40:01)

But again, typically people start with the right product, they’re making something, and it’s got great value, and they’re out there kind of pushing it themselves, and they start making money. And once money comes in, you got to be a good money manager. You have to know where to squirrel it away, here and there, and here and there. You have your little buckets you put. You don’t just spend it all. That way, you’re going to have money when you do need to invest it.

Reed Davis: (40:26)

The other mistake I see to watch out for is, let’s say you got money rolling in. And you’re building your staff. You’ve got an outstanding, reliable office manager. You got to have someone I call it who wears their hair in a tight bun, like someone that knows how to get things done and get people to do stuff and including you. He doesn’t mind getting in the boss’s face either. You need one of those. Then you can peel off as you grow.

Reed Davis: (40:56)

Now, what’ll happen is you’ll get profitable, and you get money coming in. And you’re the owners, so you’re taking the lion’s share, whatever. But you’re paying people well. You have to pay people well. And you’ll get scared to grow. And what happens as soon as you do that is you start to contract. Periodically, you’re going to have to go, “Okay, we don’t have all the money coming in that we want, but we’re going to hire two more people here and two more people here.” It could be part-time, whatever. Then you’re going to grow into that. Again, if you have a positive and the cup is half full, abundance mentality, you’re going to go ahead and hire that person even though you’re not sure because that’ll help you to grow. You will expand into that if you orientate them properly and train them to do their job well and set policy that they understand, that’s very clear, that they can sort of perpetuate

Kyle Gray: (42:03)

Very good. Reed, we’ve explored a ton of different areas. Still, we’ve got an excellent grasp on kind of how a certification program can be created and scaled to something from a small weekend workshop to something that’s impacted over 10,000 people, and probably 10,000 practitioners that have impacted no doubt hundreds of thousands of people. So it’s been a massive thing in the world, and I feel you’ve absolutely at least begun to achieve that purpose that you set out to, and I want to commend you for that.

Reed Davis: (42:43)

Well, thanks.

Kyle Gray: (42:43)

Do you have any closing thoughts for us? And where can we go to learn more about your program?

Reed Davis: (42:54)

Well, the program is Functional Diagnostic Nutrition, and you can go to that URL, functionaldiagnosticnutrition.com. That’ll explain the training program. There’s so much more to it, but there’s enough there for people to get to know us. But the other thing is it started with one purpose in mind, to help as many people as possible get well and stay well naturally so they can, in turn, teach others, and that was a mission 20 years ago. I figured that out, and it hasn’t changed. It’s never changed. Again, the reason I do it was what I said, I was upset that people are stuck on the cycle of trial and error. The mission became helping as many as possible. So I would just say stay true to your purpose and never give up. Just get proper guidance, get some help, and keep yourself balanced, and on, and on, and on.

Kyle Gray: (44:02)

No, but that’s a great way. That’s good, and you’ve brought a ton of story into this. I think you’ve served the mission of this podcast well. So thanks again, Reed, for joining us.

Reed Davis: (44:14)

Thank you, Kyle. My real pleasure. Anytime you want to chat, I’m happy to talk.

Kyle Gray:

Thanks for listening to the Story Engine Podcast. Be sure to check out the show notes and resources mentioned on this episode and every other episode at thestoryengine.co. 

If you’re looking to learn more about how to use storytelling to grow your business, then check out my new book, Selling With Story: How to Use Storytelling to Become an Authority, Boost Sales, and Win the Hearts and Minds of Your Audience. This book will equip you with actionable strategies and templates to help you share your unique value and build trust in presentations, sales, and conversations, both online and offline. Learn more at sellingwithstory.co. 

Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time.