Leveraging Your Expertise to Start a Side Hustle
Dustin & Melody Hartzler talk about their healthcare side hustles, how these ventures have accelerated their financial goals, how they balance and prioritize their time, and how they work together as a couple when it comes to business and managing their personal finances.
About Today’s Guests
Dustin Hartzler is a Happiness Engineer at Automattic by day, where he helps business owners work all of the kinks out of their WooCommerce stores. If working with WordPress all day wasn’t enough, he spends time each week recording his WordPress podcast called Your Website Engineer (http://YourWebsiteEngineer.com). He enjoys helping people understand and use WordPress to its fullest capacity and spends time tinkering with code. When he’s not in front of the computer (which is rare), he enjoys spending time CrossFitting, reading and traveling. He lives in Dayton, OH with his wife, 5.5 year old daughter, and 2.5 year old son.
Dr. Melody L. Hartzler, PharmD, BCACP, BC-ADM, is a family medicine clinical pharmacist and Associate professor of pharmacy practice. Dr. Hartzler is a graduate from Ohio Northern Raabe College of Pharmacy. She completed her PGY-1 Pharmacy Practice Residency with emphasis in Ambulatory Care at the Chalmers P. Wylie VA Ambulatory Care Center in Columbus, OH. Following residency, she joined faculty at Cedarville University School of Pharmacy and developed a collaborative practice in a family medicine residency program. She now serves part-time for Cedarville University School of Pharmacy and part-time as a clinical pharmacist at Western Medicine Family Physicians. Her primary practice interests are diabetes, IBS/IBD, and functional medicine. In her current clinical practice, she works collaboratively with her physicians through a consult agreements. She is board certified in both ambulatory care pharmacy as well as diabetes management. She is a nationally recognized speaker, who has presented 6 times at the ASHP Midyear Clinical Meeting, as well as numerous state and local programs. She is an active member of American Society of Health System-Pharmacists as well as state and local organizations. She is also is a current board member for the Ohio Pharmacist Association. Dr. Hartzler’s passion for functional medicine lead her to start her company PharmToTable, LLC; she blogs at PharmToTable.Life. Her newest adventure is FunctionalMedicineCE.Com, she is making quality continuing education for Functional Medicine convenient and affordable.
Summary
Dustin and Melody Hartzler share their career journeys and how they are leveraging their expertise to start a side hustle. They have created multiple side hustles built on needs they are seeing while also fulfilling creative outlets they crave. Melody works 3 days a week at Western Medicine Family Physicians and teaches at Cedarville part-time. At her office job, she focuses on diabetes medication, transitions of care, medical reconciliation and does functional medicine consultations. Dustin is an electrical engineer turned Happiness Engineer at Automattic where he supports customers set up their WooCommerce stores and websites.Together they have created two side hustles: Functional Medicine Continuing Education and Pharm to Table. This episode focuses on Functional Medicine Continuing Education.
Dustin and Melody share their roles in their businesses. Dustin is able to have a creative outlet by building websites for their businesses and Melody often brings new ideas to the table based on the needs she sees in the pharmacy and functional medicine fields. They often have business conversations while driving.
Melody dives into functional medicine, a break down of what it is, her personal story leading her to learn more about functional medicine and how she incorporates it into her office practice as well as in their side hustles.
They speak more about their business model and the costs behind getting websites like they have up and running. The couple also share their advice for getting started in a side hustle and the podcasts and books they help to inspire their journey.
Mentioned on the Show
Episode Transcript
Tim Ulbrich: Hey, what’s up, everybody? Welcome to this week’s episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast. I’m excited to welcome onto the show Dustin and Melody Hartzler, proud fellow alums of mine of Ohio Northern University to talk about their unique career journeys with multiple side hustles, which most recently culminated in the launch of FunctionalMedicineCE.com and a virtual symposium that they are launching on Nov. 9, 2019. This episode is an extension of the work, the excellent work, that Tim Church has been doing as a part of our YFP side hustle series where we talk about ways you can create additional streams of income to reach your financial goals faster and highlight pharmacists who are making this happen. Now, before we get started with today’s episode, I want to mention an awesome giveaway that we have going on this month in combination, in partnership with Brandon Dyson and the team over at TLDR Pharmacy. And this is the ultimate residency prep giveaway, and you can learn more and enroll in that giveaway to get yourself eligible over at YourFinancialPharmacist.com/giveaway. Again, that’s YourFinancialPharmacist.com/giveaway. In this giveaway, the ultimate residency prep giveaway for five winners, we have a variety of resources, everything from interview prep, letter of intent prep, a pharmacy residency bootcamp from the Pharmacy Advisory Group, lots and lots of resources, including the forecast application fee that, of course, costs just over $100. So again, you can learn more at YourFinancialPharmacist.com/giveaway. So Dustin and Melody, welcome to the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast.
Melody Hartzler: Thank you.
Dustin Hartzler: Hello, hello.
Tim Ulbrich: Well this has been a long time in the making, so excited to have you guys on the show. And we’re going to talk everything from business and side hustles to how do you guys effectively work together, what’s the purpose, what’s the goal, why are you doing these side hustles, so I’m excited to be able to have our community, our listeners, get exposure not only to the businesses that you’re working on but also a little bit of the behind-the-scenes of how the two of you operate and the success that you’ve had. So why don’t we start with each of you — Melody, I’ll start with you. And then Dustin, I’ll ask the same thing. Melody, can you start and tell us a little bit about your day job, what you’re doing every day as a clinical pharmacist? And then from there, we’ll jump later in the show about some of the side hustles.
Melody Hartzler: Sure. So three days a week, I work at Western Medicine Family Physicians, which is a private practice family physician office in the Dayton, Ohio, area. And then I also teach at Cedarville part-time, so I get the opportunity to still teach what I love, which is endocrinology and diabetes-focused. And also I am in charge of our residency teaching certificate program at Cedarville. So during the week at the office, I do a lot of diabetes management, also transitions of care, helping med reconciliation for post-hospital discharge patients. And then I do a lot of functional medicine consults too, which I think we’re going to get into later.
Tim Ulbrich: We are. And that was — part of wanting you to share that is I think often the value in a side hustle — most side hustles that often turn into successful businesses I think is where there is synergy between someone’s area of expertise in their day job and what they’re able to do. So split position, teaching as well as practice in functional medicine. Dustin, why don’t you give us a little bit of background on the work that you’re currently doing at Automatic as well as the previous work that you had in starting and owning your own business?
Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, absolutely. So I do work at Automatic now. I am on a support team, so I help people set up websites. And you might see where this is going here in a little bit, but I had a business when we moved to Dayton in 2010, I set up my own company because I wasn’t going to do my electrical engineering job, drive to a factory two hours away, and it just didn’t make sense. So I’m like, let’s see if I can start something here. And I started, and I had a business building websites for people. And so I have a lot of experience, 10 years almost, in just building websites and helping people get their websites set up. So that’s my primary focus, and that’s my primary day-to-day.
Tim Ulbrich: So you’re title, Dustin, if I pulled this correctly from your LinkedIn profile, is a “happiness engineer.” What is that? I mean, what does the day-to-day of that look like?
Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, so that’s just a name for our customer support team. And so our goal is to make everybody happy, I guess if you will. It’s mainly — it’s kind of a unique position in the fact that we’re not like a normal call center that says like, “Oh, you can only give them refunds if this, or you can only do this.” Like there’s so much flexibility in our jobs, like you know, if somebody has paid for a plugin or paid for something and it just doesn’t work, we can go outside their window to refund them or we give them extra time or give them free plugins. Like I’ve given customers who’ve spent thousands of dollars with us, just oh, this wasn’t working when you try to check out, it’s on me. Like it’s one of the cool things that we can do for our loyal customers and just try to make everybody, that experience when you’re building a website is so frustrating. And so our goal is to help people get what they need and to also just do it without having to ask for extra permission. Like, “Oh, can we give someone this $100 thing worth of value?” Just go ahead and do it, and everybody moves on with their lives.
Tim Ulbrich: So one of the things I don’t think I’ve ever asked you this and I don’t want to gloss over, Dustin, but you mentioned obviously you’re trained as an electrical engineer and you abandoned — for lack of a better word — abandoned that work, started your own company. You mentioned the long commute, but what other reasons, what other factors played into that decision in terms of leaving a career in a field that you had spent a lot of time obviously in training and becoming an expertise and deciding you want to go this route into web development?
Dustin Hartzler: I think the two things that stand out to me is one, I don’t like meetings. I worked at Whirlpool, and I would literally have like seven hours of meetings in an eight-hour day, plus have to do all my other work.
Melody Hartzler: He wouldn’t do well in academia either.
Tim Ulbrich: No, no, he would not.
Dustin Hartzler: And then I think the other thing was just the inspiration I was getting from listening to so many other business podcasts and people creating their own thing and doing their own thing, and the income level was — you were never capped. Whatever you could create, that’s how much money you could make. So I think those were kind of the two reasons besides the long commute. And honestly, I liked the commute more than the work because I got to listen to podcasts the whole way to and from work.
Tim Ulbrich: I love that. I mean, so the aversion of meetings and the advantage of not having a cap on your income certainly can be reasons to be able to start your own business. So I agree, though, Melody, academia would not be the environment for Dustin. You’ve got to love the meetings that are about the meetings. Those are my favorite types of meetings. So let’s jump in. And Melody, if you could start, and Dustin, feel free to chime in, you know, I’m always curious, obviously here we are on a personal finance podcast, but I think so much of people’s success in business or here in side hustles or side hustles that turn into businesses over time is really dependent on people having a solid financial base and foundation from which they can build. So tell us a little bit about your personal finance story and journey as an individual, as a couple, and how that has put you in a position to be strategic and on the offense when it comes to these business opportunities.
Melody Hartzler: Sure. So I probably didn’t have the best understanding of finances when we got married and even going into school. I had a lot of private loans that had a variable interest rate. So by the time 2008 came around, before the stock market crashed, some of those were at about 16% interest.
Tim Ulbrich: Wow.
Melody Hartzler: Yes. So we left, I graduated in 2009, and I had about $120,000 in debt plus an additional $12,000 that I ended up paying back to Walgreens about three years later. Maybe a little longer. And so from that point, we knew we had to pay it back, and we wanted to pay it back quickly. We really wanted to pay it back before we had kids. Dustin had a lot less, which he can talk about. But so I — even during residency, I wanted to pursue residency and I knew that I liked talking with people and I loved the idea of community pharmacy, but I knew that the way that it was going wasn’t going to work for me and my goals. And so I did my residency in an outpatient facility at the Columbus VA. And I didn’t have weekend responsibilities there, so on the weekends, just like every other resident in town, I was working on the weekends. So I worked at Walgreens every other weekend throughout my whole residency. So pretty much had four days off a month because I was working the other weekends. And you know, that helped us a lot because we were able to significantly increase even just that first year. If you think about four days a month of a retail pharmacist’s salary plus the residency salary, it almost was about the same.
Tim Ulbrich: Absolutely.
Melody Hartzler: You know, when you got down to it. So that was a blessing to still be able to have that residency experience and then be able to get paid a separate position to help us dig out of that a little bit and then ended up having one of our cars died that year, and so we ended up having to use a lot of that to purchase a reliable car to get to those jobs. So and then Dustin, I can let him talk a little bit about his strategy when we were paying off loans. He was even paying them off when we were in Ada still at Ohio Northern, so my last two years of school, I worked as a head resident — actually three years, the last three years I was at ONU, I was the head resident. And so my room was free and we had the stipend plus we got a meal ticket. So here we got married and we’re living in an apartment on campus and going to the cafeteria as a married couple because that’s what made the most sense. I mean, we didn’t have our awakening on the whole health and nutrition thing at that point, so we were still OK with eating the food there. And so that was a big savings, we didn’t have a rent to pay for our first early years of marriage because of that. And so Dustin really was able to start driving down some of those high interest loans.
Tim Ulbrich: So Dustin, give us the strategy a little bit — and obviously chime in with your own financial position as well in terms of student loan debt. But those together when I hear 16% interest loans, were those just things you aggressively paid off? Did you guys refinance those? But in addition to that, what was the motivation for you that even while Melody was still in school that you obviously had very significant intentions of trying to aggressively pay those off. Tell us a little bit about that backstory.
Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, so when I started — so I graduated. I’m two years older than Melody school-wise. And so I graduated two years earlier. And I had a full-time job, you know, a full salary engineer position, and I drove to and from work. And this was like right at the dawn of podcasts, believe it or not. And the iPod, video iPod is the first iPod with the thick wheel, and I felt like I could invest $300 in this Apple device so that I could play it through my car deck tape player.
Tim Ulbrich: Yes.
Dustin Hartzler: To and from work. Like I was commuting an hour to and from Whirlpool. And I was like, well, I just want to learn about money. Like nobody ever teaches you about money. And so I got hooked on the Dave Ramsey Show, and all of a sudden things that he was saying was making sense. And we didn’t full out Dave Ramsey — like we took vacations while we were still in debt. Like we lived life, but we still were pretty aggressive with our student loans. But what happened was I ended up with like $20,000 in student loans. I throw that number out there like, oh, just $20,000. That’s still a lot. It’s not Monopoly money, like we paid it all back. But so I ended up — he was talking about creating a budget, and this was all before Dave Ramsey has his budgeting tools and stuff online. So I had an Excel spreadsheet, and I figured out — and I don’t know if this is true or not — but as an engineer, you’re always trying to figure out how you can save the most amount of money in interest. And so like we figured that it made more sense for Melody to take out new loans for the last couple years while we paid off her current loans. And so we had about three things we had to pay for: We paid for gas for my car to and from work. We paid for renter’s insurance. And I think we paid for like some groceries for breakfast and lunches for me. That was pretty much all of our bills. And so it was like every week, I figured out that if I wanted to spend $2,000 per month towards the loans, then I could spend $500 per week. And then that last week, whatever we had left in the month, we got that, that’s what got sent over to Sallie Mae at the time. And so that was kind of the strategy and the thought process. And was it the coolest life to live? No, not really. But looking back, our first two years of marriage, we lived on campus. And I mean, I got to do all the intramural sports and all that kind of stuff, and there were still a lot of friends that I had because I had just graduated. And so it was kind of cool, like it was a good jumpstart with such a weight around our ankles, if you will, with all of the loans that we had.
Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, I mean, there’s nothing like a good date night at the Macintosh cafeteria, right? At Ohio Northern University. I mean, what I love about that though is I love the intentionality, I love that Melody, you kind of admitted that you didn’t necessarily come in with the same appreciation for that and obviously had more debt, although that’s still well below the national average of what we’re seeing now even though it was a higher interest rate. But still were really, really aggressive. And I want to follow up on that and hear from the two of you. We talk a lot on this show about the importance of having a financial why. What is your motivator for why you even care about this topic of money to begin with? And we’ve preached over and over and over again that that’s going to be different for everyone. But if you can articulate that, especially as a couple if you can articulate that, I think it makes so many other parts of the financial plan easier to work through, such as the month-to-month budget and being on the same page and all the things that cause so much heartache and a lot of difficulty for people. So for the two of you, what’s the vision? What’s the dream? What’s the why when it comes to money in terms of why you wanted to be intentional in paying down the debt? And what’s the future hold in terms of why this topic of money matters?
Dustin Hartzler: I think the first thing that really comes to mind is like, I didn’t like paying people to use their money. I don’t know, like I had never had any credit, I had never — before, it was always like, “Oh, interest. That’s what the bank pays me.” And then when we see how much the interest is making, or how much we’re spending in interest, it just like takes your breath away almost. It’s like, wow, on our mortgage or whatever, that’s a lot of money just to spend to have used somebody else’s money. And so I think that’s kind of the driving force behind it, and then kind of looking out — and I do this a lot too with trying to figure out what happens the day comes and we don’t have our mortgage anymore, like look at all of the possibilities there. Like, oh, if we didn’t have a mortgage, we could easily cash flow college for our children. Or oh, if we didn’t have a mortgage, look how much money we would have to do these other things. So I think some of the why is just giving us the flexibility to do what we want. You think about it, and I told this to Melody, I don’t know, a few weeks ago or months ago, we were driving somewhere and I was like, “I am so glad that we do not have any student loans anymore.” With all of the things that we’re doing, the pieces of the puzzle, like you start tacking on $500, $1,000 here or there doing other things, we would rather spend instead of $1,000 to Sallie Mae to pay for education, like we would rather spend $1,000 to have our kids be more bilingual and go to a Spanish immersion preschool, which they do, and a kindergarten. So those are some of the kind of the things that I can think of right off the top of my head when it comes to financial motivators for us.
Melody Hartzler: The other thing too is that we’re Christians and we’re also passionate about giving and serving, and so we feel called to give back. It’s not really our money to begin with. And so how can we be a better steward of that? And so paying it down quicker as far as the debt that we had and even with our mortgage now is important to us so that we can be better stewards of the finances that we’re given and the opportunities that we have. We do give at least 10% of our incomes to our church and to various ministries in our community, even through the things I’m doing on the side hustles, the blogs and things like that. I also make it a priority to tithe those and things like that as well. So that’s important to us. Travel is also important to us. So I love, I’ve been to 49 out of 50 states. And so I grew up — and a lot of times, my parents didn’t have any super fancy we did, timeshare travel and different things like that where we’d cook most of our meals throughout the week, but hey, we were at the beach. And we did a lot of trips where we’d drive to the Grand Canyon or drive to Yellowstone and stopped at a lot of places along the way. And so I sort of got the travel bug and then like Dustin said, even when we were paying off debt, we were still traveling. So we went to Hawaii. My parents had gifted us two timeshare weeks out there that we were able to line up sort of back-to-back. But you know, when we were out there, we definitely used a Red Lobster gift card in Honolulu. And we totally ate peanut butter sandwiches at the feet of waterfalls. And so it was OK. We saw the beautiful creation that we were there to see. And obviously if we went back now, it would be a little bit different. But we laughed at that, and again, before our healthy food awaken, but we still have great memories of that. And even when we went to Europe before we got pregnant with our daughter, we went with another couple, we split Airbnb’s, so we weren’t out there spending — when I look at the Travel & Leisure magazine, I just sort of read it like, oh, this is beautiful. I’m never going to stay at these places. It has cool places to go, but never am I going to go on this place that costs $3,000 for the whole week just for one person. But yeah, so we really do want our kids to be exposed to travel, and that’s also important. And we like to — even each year, we like to go someplace by ourselves to sort of just disconnect from the day-to-day and I guess you could say the rat race sometimes. And then we like to take our family on a trip as well. So we just got back, actually, from St. John. But even within that, we went on Marriott points, and we got a good deal on flights. So it wasn’t like we’re just still — we’re still trying to be budget-friendly because we still are in debt with our mortgage and trying to be good stewards of our money.
Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and I think you guys have been great examples that you can enjoy something that both of you are very passionate about in terms of traveling and exposing your kids to that but also do it in a way that fits in your financial plan and is reasonable to do in terms of how much money you have. And what you all are going to remember, obviously, is the experience. Right? I mean, not necessarily using a Red Lobster card, although that’s a great story. I mean, the meals and the food and all that are good, but obviously the experience and the time you have with one another and with your family is going to be what you’re going to remember in the long run. So let’s talk business because I wanted to lay that foundation because as I mentioned on this show and I say often, being able to aggressively pursue business opportunities, whether it’s a side hustle, whether it’s investing in another business, whether it’s buying real estate, whatever it be, doing so when you have clarity on the things that we just talked about I think allows someone to be able to pursue that opportunity with confidence and to do it in a way that’s not going to add on stress. And I think that’s so important that we all know the stress that can come from our own financial situation. And when you think about things like debt and not having emergency savings and obviously you put kids into the picture and expenses go up and home prices, all those things, and if you want to then pursue business opportunities but you already have those stressors, obviously this could be one extra layer of stress rather than hopefully something that can produce additional income and also allow you to pursue something that you’re passionate about. So what I would like to do is talk through two businesses I know that you’ve worked on, and we’ll talk about the one a little bit more in detail that you’re getting ready to launch, the virtual symposium, the functional medicine CE, but I also want to talk about your other venture in farm-to-table. But before we jump into those two, help me understand — obviously, we’re going to talk about two pharmacy-specific oriented businesses, but Dustin, obviously you’re not a pharmacist. We’ve learned you’re an electrical engineer, you’ve got a web design background, so what is the role that each of you play when it comes to the business ventures that you’re working on?
Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, so the thing about working at Automatic, it’s an awesome company. It’s the — WordPress.com is the company behind that, and there’s a specific little thing in my contract with them that I have a — it’s a conflict of interest for me to build websites for other people and charge money for it. I can out of the goodness of my heart for as many people as I’d like, but the time doesn’t really — I don’t really have the time to build websites for the goodness of my heart for many people. And so I think one of the really interesting things with that conflict of interest, you know, I was always trying to think like, OK, what can I do as my side hustle? Or what can I do that I’m really passionate about? But everything I’m passionate about is WordPress and websites, developing code and stuff like that. And so that’s one of the things that really, it was kind of once I started at Automatic back in 2013, it was like for a few months and a few years, it was like, well, I don’t have to do anything else. I’ve got this good-paying job, let’s not worry about it. But then that itch continues to be there. And then Melody comes up with these ideas, it’s like hmm. So I can build something for free, and I get revenue from it, essentially. So like I was talking to some people at we have an all-company meetup. It’s once per year; it was back in September. And I was telling people like, oh yeah, I built this. I was using WooCommerce and my wife is making all this money with this website. And they’re like, well don’t you mean you? And I was like, no. My wife is making all this money. So I think that’s a really good blend of what we can do as a couple because I can’t create that kind of thing on my own, mainly just because of the conflict of interest. Like had I — if I leave Automatic, I can go and do whatever I want. But I really like my job, and so this just gives me the opportunity, it scratches the itch of I get to build things but then I’m also getting the benefit of building this by as much as Melody can fill.
Tim Ulbrich: Hey Melody, I know how big of an asset that is, you know. For us, we have the magic bullet of Tim Church. You have the magic bullet of Dustin Hartzler that can do all of that. But the web design piece, the opt-ins, the lead magnets, the format, that can often consume people when they’re trying to just get their idea off the ground. So what an incredible resource. So building on that, it sounds like based on what Dustin said, you’re often coming with the vision, the idea, and then are you batting that back-and-forth with Dustin? Is he helping on the execution? Help me understand how you’re fleshing out a business idea that you come up with.
Melody Hartzler: Yeah, so normally, honestly, it’s a lot of conversations in the car when we’re driving places because if the kids are watching something on the iPad and you can’t do anything else when you’re driving, that’s when we have a lot of our business discussions. But I think a lot of times, it’s like, hey, this is what the need is that I’m seeing. And then like we’re just sort of going back-and-forth about how we can meet that need but also turn it into that side hustle and generate revenue from it.
Tim Ulbrich: Yes.
Melody Hartzler: And so for example, with the functional medicine CE, I all the time was seeing people saying, “Hey, I want to learn more about functional medicine. Where can I go?” And there’s a lot of great organizations teaching about functional medicine. The challenge is not a lot of them are providing pharmacist CEs. So if people are looking to meet their Continuing Education requirements with this education, that wasn’t happening in a lot of those situations. And also, the conferences are sort of expensive. And so when you’re looking at Institute of Functional Medicine, which is a great organization, and I’m hopefully going to be — I want to go to their conference next year at some point. It’s a great organization, but there’s no pharmacist CE currently, and there’s also — it’s a couple thousand dollars, if not more because you’re talking plane travel and really nice hotel stay for five days. And that all adds up really quickly. And so you know, a lot of people are too like I’m not sure if I’m ready for that. What can I learn to before I get to the point where I want to spend a couple grand on this. And so a lot of the other functional medicine programs out there, there’s Functional Medicine University, which is a great site that’s a couple grand to do their certificate program, which is actually one of the lower cost ones for getting a whole certificate. But anyways, so if you’re talking like IFM, you’re talking maybe $20,000 by the time you’re done with all the things you need to do to get that certificate. So I thought, you know, there’s got to be a better way to do this. So with my background in education, I’ve developed a lot of Continuing Education as well over the years as a faculty member. And I thought, you know, we can teach people, and we don’t have to have them go anywhere. You know? We’ve got webinar, you can Zoom software, and the ability to work with — I work with CEI, which is a great CE company. And so the ladies there that I’ve worked with have been fabulous. And so I’d already been working with them a little bit, writing for them. And so I thought, you know what? I can do this but host it on my own site and then I can still pay them to certify the CE and get this sort of going. And so I started talking about this with Orthomolecular, there’s a pharmacist that works for Orthomolecular, which was like, hey, that’s a great idea. We could sponsor it. And I was like, awesome. And so you know, the more I talked about it, the more people started to say, OK, yeah, we can do this. And so I had a lot of support. The speakers that are speaking this time around are all awesome and have been sharing a lot about the conference, and so Lauren Castle (?) is the founder of FMPhA. It’s funny because I was on maternity leave with my son, I think, and I saw the flyer for OPA that year. And it was this Introduction to Functional Medicine. And I was like, who in the world is giving that talk? Here I am holding this baby. So I looked at it, and I looked her up and I called her and we started connecting, and so that’s been awhile now. It actually might have been when I was on maternity leave with Kinley now that I think about it, about five years ago. But then now she lives like 10 minutes down the street from me. So —
Tim Ulbrich: Small world.
Melody Hartzler: It is a small world. But it’s been fun to help encourage her and what she’s doing in the functional medicine world and also have her support for what I’m doing as well.
Tim Ulbrich: So we’ll link to this in the show notes as well, FunctionalMedicineCE.com. The first virtual symposium is starting on Nov. 9. So for those of you that are interested in the topic, obviously check it out. Also I would encourage for those of you have an educational idea that you’re batting around and wanting to get a feel for what a virtual symposium is, I would check that out as well. You guys did a great job with the website setup, Dustin. Nice work. And I think it looks really clean, you’ve got great speakers on there, and I think it’s a great model that others can look at and build off from as well. So let me — couple more questions. I want to dig into this business model a little bit further, but for those of our listeners that maybe aren’t as familiar with functional medicine, give us the down-low on what is functional medicine? And why is it a topic that you care so much about? And why as a pharmacist do you think you have a lot to offer in that space?
Melody Hartzler: Sure, that could be a whole hour conversation, so I’ll try to not do that. But so essentially, functional medicine is really looking at the root cause of disease. And so we do that really well when we talk about infectious disease, you know, we have a treatment, it gets rid of it, we’re gone. But as far as the chronic disease model in this country, when we think about chronic disease, we really don’t have a lot of cures for most of our chronic diseases. It’s just something we manage with symptom management, and I do that every day in my practice too. I manage diabetes with medications, but I also try to incorporate some of these functional medicine principles as well. But essentially, it’s acknowledging that patients are individuals too I think is a big component of it. So just because something works in the population health, it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily going to work for this person sitting in front of you. And so trusting that what the patient is saying about their symptoms and using information that’s evidence-based is part of it, so it’s not like we’re just throwing these supplements that don’t have any science. It’s so much biochemistry, I wish I would have really paid a lot more attention in biochemistry. I give these reports, I do this one report from Genova Diagnostics called The NutriEval, and you literally get the kreb cycle printed out with all the different components of it of the patient’s actual body, and then it tells you what nutrients you need to make that cycle more efficient. And I was like, man I should have — and it seems like such a long time ago too. So it’s good — that’s why education, Continuing Education, is so important to try to keep brushing up on those skills. But I think the best example that I like to give is functional medicine approaches IBS. Irritable Bowel Syndrome is not just constipation or diarrhea. Like there’s something causing it. But the drugs that we have both of those conditions, whether it’s IBSD or IBSC, are just symptom-managing drugs.
Tim Ulbrich: Right.
Melody Hartzler: They’re not actually correcting any of the issue. And so typically, IBSD is often caused by a dysbiosis or an imbalance in the microbiome, which is why we do now have a prescription agent that is an antibiotic. But there’s also challenges with that because it’s only 60-70% effective after one course. And so there’s other things that we have to think about. And then as far as constipation, we don’t really have anything that addresses a lot of the root cause. And so when we are looking at someone with IBS, we’re thinking about is there a potential pathogen that’s causing this? Is it a parasite? Is it a microbiome imbalance? Or is it inflammation? So even some of our IBS patients, their fecal count protectants (?) is really high, so there’s a lot of inflammation going on there even though you wouldn’t classify it necessarily diagnostically as IBD. And so looking at some of those things, is food intolerance related? And so we organize sort of our thoughts based on the patient. There’s this whole timeline piece of functional medicine. So they look back questions that we’re asking patients on our intake survey: Were they breast fed? Were they born prematurely? What kind of stressors did they have early in life? Was it parents went through a divorce and then all of a sudden these abdominal symptoms started to appear? And so there’s different points in your life that this cycle piece and the stressors also sort of turn over the epigenetics. So epigenetics is, you know, you have this genetic code at the beginning, but then the influences in your life turn on and turn off different things. And so everyone is unique in that aspect because we’ve all had different influences in our lives, whether that’s chemical or external stressors from family circumstances and things like that. So my stressor that led us to functional medicine was actually the birth of our daughter. So it was quite the experience, and we sort of planned for this natural birthing experience, and our doula was in jail, so that’s a podcast for another day.
Tim Ulbrich: Oh gees.
Melody Hartzler: So from that, it turned into a pretty stressful induction, long labor and the first five weeks of her life, she was super colicky and tongue-tied, and it took us awhile to realize that. And so all of that stress I think just sort of set my bad diet, probably poor microbiome balance, sort of over the top. And then, you know, about a year later, I started to have this abdominal pain that wasn’t going away. And everybody was like, oh, you’re fine. Yeah, basic interventions type things. Even then GI specialist was like, no, there’s no reason to scope you, you’re completely fine. I was like, well I literally have this pain every single day in the same exact spot. And so I finally found some functional medicine practitioners and turned out it was probably dysbiosis, probably CBO — I never actually did the breath test, which I don’t always do for our patients either — but did some of the comprehensive stool testing and took some antimicrobials. I even tried the laxin (?). It was a long journey, so it was about at that year point from her life for about a year and a half that we were still sort of going through the journey. I even went to the Cleveland Clinic Functional Medicine Institute. And I felt a lot better at that point, but I had finally made it on the waitlist, and so I was like, you know what? I’m going to go and learn from them. So let’s see what they have to tell me because at this point, I knew functional medicine was something that I wanted to incorporate, but I wasn’t sure exactly how to do that because I was working at the time in a federally qualified healthcare center, which was a little bit challenging because, you know, the cost of a lot of these interventions right now is really only available to people in the middle class and above. So I think some of the things other people are doing in this community to try to make these resources more available to the masses is awesome. So but at this point, it was challenging for us to do a lot of that testing. But there’s still a lot of basic things we can do, not only in community pharmacy but also in settings like that, you know, as far as testing vitamins and using probiotics and doing nutrient supplementations to help to heal the gut. And so even in that practice, looking back, there’s probably a lot more that I could be doing at the time, but I didn’t have enough experience to know what that was. And so — but anyways, so at about that time, it was right before, actually, we got pregnant with our son that we decided that I needed to go part-time with my faculty position. And that was coming from a lot of the stress with not only not knowing what was going on in my body and trying to — I was like, if I’m going to have another child, like I really need some extra time during the week. And I also in my head also had a lot of these ideas sort of out there, that I would like to do the blogs and stuff like that. And so made that decision and then started my part-time position with Cedarville and also at that time then, transferred offices to work in a different family medicine office, which that was really I think one of the pivotal points for my career because the family medicine physician that I work for is wonderful. And he is very open to a lot of these things, and so when myself and actually my best friend is one of my colleagues there who’s a nurse practitioner, and we sort of went to him together because he needed a new nurse practitioner. But we had also heard that he needed someone to manage his diabetes. And so I was like, well she may not want to manage diabetes, but I can do that. And she didn’t want to do something else, so we sat with together and sort of said, this is what we can do, that we both have this interest in functional medicine. And then fast forward to today, we have a functional medicine service that patients see her, sometimes they see me as part of that. And so we’re starting to be known in the Dayton area for our functional medicine service, so it’s pretty exciting. And so I really feel like had we not made that decision to go part-time, like that really wouldn’t have been where we would be landing right now. And so yeah. So it’s exciting and I really think the passion for sharing about functional medicine is because of that experience that I had as a patient, and I think that’s a lot of pharmacists that are involved in functional medicine had some kind of personal experience, whether it was them or it was their spouse going through something or their child. And even with our daughter, I’ve learned a lot about pediatric approaches to functional medicine through some of her journeys with allergies and asthma and things like that. And so a lot of my initial blog post that I have on farm-to-table are based on a lot of those topics that I was sort of walking through and researching anyways for our own personal health.
Tim Ulbrich: And what I love about this is one, just great example of — I think great businesses are made out of identifying a problem that needs to be solved that people actually care about, and you’ve checked that. Obviously, there’s lots of concerns people have out there about their own personal health and diet and exercise or not getting successful treatment plans with traditional medicine. It also has a combination of certainly your expertise, so an area of practice and an area that you’ve experienced firsthand, an area that brings your educational background as you’re looking at building CE and online courses and things like that. And then obviously, it has a personal component as well. So I think as people are out there hearing this, I think it’s just a great example of as you’re thinking about a business, you’re thinking about a side hustle, is there something out there — you mentioned you and Dustin talking in the car where you often say, OK, well, there’s a need here or there’s a problem that’s here, something that needs to be solved. That’s where it starts, and then it’s trying to figure out what is the solution? And is it a solution that you can bring value to based on your previous experience and personally? Or based on your experiences and expertise in what you do every day. So before I ask you a question about the business model of this, Dustin, as I look at the website, which again, is incredible, as I look at the website if I’m somebody listening to this podcast and thinking, oh, I have this idea and I need to build this site whether it’s a site for a CE program or whether it’s just a site for what they’re trying to do, I look at this and say No. 1, I could never do this. I don’t have time or this is way too expensive. So give us a ballpark. Like what would be involved here if somebody were building a site in terms of time and roughly expense to get something like this off the ground?
Dustin Hartzler: Sure. And this was one thing that — I mean, you mentioned it earlier. Like Melody’s able to do these things because she doesn’t have a lot of upfront tech costs because like that’s my thing. But honestly, I bought a — I didn’t do all the design, I didn’t have time for that either. But I bought a $20 theme online and I did some customizations and I did some things with it, and you need a website and you can get hosting for $5-10 per month or $50 a year or so. You can even go to WordPress.com. We’ll do a little promo there. But they have the ability for $100 a year or $300 per year, you can get live chat support and do all kinds of things online. And you can have somebody physically help you if you run into things like that. So I would say all in all, with my development time if you were to pay somebody to do it, I probably have 20 hours in the site and just because it was a lot of tinkering, and there’s probably 20 more hours of things that I want to do because I know — I want to be able to do this multiple times. Like that’s kind of our goal. We want to have this virtual symposium and then another one and another one. And a lot of the stuff that’s in there is kind of hard-coated. It’s like built right into the theme. And so if Melody needs to make a change, I have to do it. And I don’t want that, I want her to be able to do all the changes because I want to make it easier for me in the future. And so I don’t know, I would say you — if you would invest like $500, you could get a pretty decent website up and running to test a business idea or test a model out or something like that. You could go a lot less than that if you are a little bit techy and you’d rather do a little sweat equity if that’s something interesting to you. You know, a minimum if you bought a theme and you have some hosting, you could get by with about $100 investment. And so I think anywhere between the $100-500 could get you a pretty decent website up and running to start testing that idea out.
Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and I think that’s great. That’s what I want our audience to hear is that we’re not in an age where you have to be paying $10,000 or $20,000 to get your site off the ground, right? When you look at themes and you look at some of the things that are out there in terms of plug-and-play and what you can do with e-commerce, whether it’s them digging a little bit deep to read and learn on their own or ultimately hiring that out, it shouldn’t be an expense that is unbearable, even if they don’t have a Dustin Hartzler on their team. It should still be an opportunity they could pursue. So Melody, let me ask you a question or two in terms of the business model of this. And I want our audience to hear kind of your thought and vision of where this is starting and where this could go in the future. So I’m on the website right now, FunctionalMedicineCE.com. I see you have a symposium on Nov. 9, and I see you have a silver package, which essentially is the live option that people can tune in for seven hours of CE, it’s live only, $129 all the way up to a platinum pass, which gives them both the live as well as the video recording and then a post-conference networking. So what, as you were putting this together, what is the business model? What’s the goal in terms of running this? And I know there’s other virtual symposiums that have been out there that offer a free option and then they offer a buy-up option and then they’re promoting additional products and services. So as you started this way, why did you start this way? And where do you see this going in the future?
Melody Hartzler: So we started this way because looking at what other people were paying for functional medicine education, this is still much less than that. Even the weekend, I went on a Saturday-only symposium, that was Pharmacy CE in Indianapolis in September, which was great. But it was like the conference fee was $499 for the day. And then there was a discount code that got it to $299, but then we stayed at the Marriott downtown and the gas to drive there and a lot of people flew there, and so it added up to probably $1,000 pretty quickly for a lot of people. So we knew that — and there was I think 115 pharmacists that were there that day, and so I knew that if people are willing to fly across the country for this one day event, I feel like there’s enough people out there that would pay a fraction of that to be able to learn this information from people that are experts in the field. And so that was sort of the thought process by not having a free option upfront, and also I think the cost of the CE was part of that too and having to pay for accrediting the CE, AACP-accredited. And so we didn’t want to lose money on our first adventure in this, and so that’s part of the reason. We do offer discount codes, and we actually did make a YFP code as well. So if anyone’s listening to this and wants to sign up, YFP will get you 10% off. And so our future plan is to move forward with more of these virtual symposiums. And so our goal is to have three or four a year but then also eventually have a membership to the site where you would get all of those included in your membership throughout the year. So we’re looking at doing our second one probably late February, maybe early March, focusing on pain and inflammation. And we’re also going to try to have a session on CBD since that’s something that’s very popular right now and a lot of pharmacists have questions about because their patients are asking questions. And I think that’s the other thing about functional medicine that’s so important is whether or not you’re interested for yourself, a lot of your patients are interested and they’re asking you questions about way more herbal supplements and different products than they probably ever have. And so really being able to have the tools to answer some of those questions I think for a lot of people is important. I just kept hearing over and over, like hey, where do I get good information about this? And so I really just felt like we needed to try to provide that.
Tim Ulbrich: So when you think of threats to this, I think of the concept of how do you bulletproof your business, right? So you mentioned membership, which I’m guessing is maybe one answer to this, but what thoughts do you have in terms of the next person who comes on and says, “Well, I’m going to offer a free symposium, and I’m going to offer it for $79.” Like what’s the differential advantage that you see here? Because I think that’s an important aspect people need to think about when they’re working on a business idea is of course there will be competition, but what differential advantage do you have to this business model that you think will allow you to be successful in the long run?
Melody Hartzler: Well, that’s a good question. I think overall, the having a team of people of that have expertise in this subject, I mean, there’s a lot of people growing and learning more about functional medicine, so I anticipate that there’s going to be other opportunities. And I think the membership piece, we might morph into having a certificate program as well because I know a lot of pharmacists are looking for a lower cost certificate training program compared to some of the other options that are out there. I think developing a community is also important in trying to keep people engaged in your business versus looking at other places, and so I’m hoping that after this conference, we’re going to develop even just a Facebook group to start out with for people that all attended and just sort of stay connected and offering discounts for the next conferences for those that attended. And so I think trying to get the community built around it, I mean, you guys are a great example of that with the community that you’ve built around YFP. And so I think that’s really important to being able to continue to drive what you’re trying to do.
Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, I really like that aspect. And I think the book that comes to mind if people want to learn more on that, one of the books that will never leave me that I always think back to is called “Tribes” by Seth Godin. He talks about exactly that concept of how do you build a community? Another article out there is around the concept of superfans and 1,000 superfans. But building a community that are passionate about this topic, which I’m guessing people are that are engaged here, either because of personal experience or because of the outcomes they see with patients that they’ve worked with and how do you create that platform and community that they can engage with each other all the time, throughout the entire year as well as these events that may happen throughout the year. So let’s jump into some fun questions to wrap up here. And we didn’t get to talk to as much but I want to reference our listeners to you also have another site you’ve worked on, which is Farm to Table, FarmtoTable.life, where they can learn more about the blog and the work that you’re doing over there. But I want to talk about some more of the fun, lighthearted questions on the business. And Dustin, I want to start with you because obviously, you’ve gone through this process of owning your own business. You started your own media company, and I’m sure there’s many people that are listening to this podcast that have some type of business aspiration, whether it’s big, small, medium, anywhere in between, they’ve identified maybe a problem that they see as unsolved, the process that could be done better or differently, or maybe there’s others that are just out there feeling stuck and they don’t even have an idea formulated but know they want to do something different. So from your experience of both starting a business and now working with Melody on this, what advice would you have to them in terms of next step that they may be able to take?
Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, I think it all really depends in your life is like, it depends on how much time you have. Like if you’re young, you’re right out of school, like you have so much time available to you that it’s kind of silly that you say you don’t have enough time. But I think really, the big thing is just spending some time thinking about it and just starting. Ask some people. Like when Melody figured out this thing was — she’s seen all these people commenting on Facebook and relationships and connections she has, like she saw the need there. If you find a need — you know, I found a need. I wanted it to help people have less horrible websites online, and that was a passion of mine to do that. But then also, I wanted to learn more about tech. And so the two things really came together for me, which was super nice. And so the advice is just start. I mean, it’s so hard to just start anything. But if you have a passion, you have an idea, like come up with a little thing that you can do. And I think the other thing that’s a big that was always a big thing for me was like, let’s just work on it for five minutes. Like five minutes goes by really, really fast when you’re working on something. And then all of a sudden it’s 10 minutes, and then it’s an hour. And then it’s like, wow, I spent a lot of time on this today, and I’ve made progress. I’m moving forward in the right direction.
Tim Ulbrich: And Melody, let me follow up with a different question. But you know, often people are interested in side hustles, of course, in part because they’re passionate about the idea and helping others but also the idea that there’s additional income that can be used for other financial goals and things that they’re working on. So for the two of you and your family, what are you hoping to do with the additional income that you’re earning through the business side hustle?
Melody Hartzler: Well, should I say the truth? Dustin wants a new pair of running shoes.
Tim Ulbrich: Yes.
Melody Hartzler: We definitely want to invest back into the business as part of that. So anything from this first conference, honestly, we probably won’t do much with personally but invest into this concept and continue to grow it. We may set aside some for our emergency fund or car funds because our one car has got 245,000 miles on it and something is loud in the back that needs fixing bad. So there’s that. But you know, that’s part of the financial goals. And we’ve always driven used cars and we would still buy a used car with the next step, but that’s part of how we are able to afford travel and things like that. But I think also, we want to give. We’re going to be giving back to the people that are sharing about this conference too. And so all of our speakers that are promoting the conference have a specific code and even your code and whoever’s, we’re going to be giving a percentage back to those people because again, we want to create that community and everybody is a part of that for promoting this. And it’s not just our work that’s helping to spread the word.
Tim Ulbrich: And I want our community to hear from the two of you. I sense — and Dustin, you alluded to certain podcasts that you turned your car drives and your commute essentially into an additional education or two that you received along the way — I think it’s so important for our audience to hear, what are you reading? What have you read? What are you pulling inspiration from? So Dustin, let me start with you. Is there a book or a podcast or a resource that you would reference people to that was really helpful in your own journey?
Dustin Hartzler: I have so many of these. Like I could go on for hours. I’m looking at my podcast archive here, and I’ve got hundreds that I’m subscribed to and just listen to ones that are encouraging to me. The ones that — I’m still a Dave Ramsey subscriber. Like he just gives me inspiration like hey, look what you can do when you have your financial life in order. It’s all about you don’t make money to — how does he say it? He says something along the lines of like, you really want to — look how generous you can be when you have more money and you have your life in order. So that’s one of the things that I like. So the Dave Ramsey Show is one. I listen to a bunch of podcasts that are tech-related to give me inspiration of how I can become a better developer and how I can — some of the tech tools that I can do.
Tim Ulbrich: Sure.
Dustin Hartzler: And then I’m also reading a book that was a recommendation from a podcast. But it’s called “PsychoCybernetics,” and it’s a book written by a guy, his name is Maxwell Maltz. And he’s an MD, and it was written a long time ago, before digital technology. And so it’s kind of a cool thing, it’s talking about your brain and how you can — some experiments of like thinking through the visual success. Like they did experiments with people shooting free throws. The first group — you shoot 20 free throws every day for a week and see the results at the end of the week. And you have one group that shoots 20 in the first day, and then shoots 20 on the last day and see how they have improved. And then the third group was like, they shot 20 on the first day and then they did nothing but imagine shooting 20 free throws every day. And then their percentage improved by 50-some percent, even though they never actually made a shot. So it’s kind of an interesting book. I’m still at the very beginning of it, but it gives me some inspiration of like, hey, here’s some things that it’s not all about your life and your circumstances, like how you think about things. And I think that’s really interesting.
Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, mindset and visualization. Those are great takeaways from that resource. Melody, how about you?
Melody Hartzler: So most of the podcasts that I listen to are functional medicine content podcasts. And so I really love Kara Fitzgerald’s New Frontiers in Functional Medicine. It is a good one that — she’s an MD, but she interviews people all over the country that are researchers, that are MDs, that are PhDs, that are clinicians, like doing the work of functional medicine, and goes through great protocols and just getting people’s opinions about different things and how they would treat things. Some of the people she interviews are even, you know, the lady I was listening to yesterday on my drive to Columbus for the OPA meeting was a nurse practitioner in New York that was treating a lot of weird patients and just gleaning insights from that. So I like those. I also love from a faith standpoint, “Dayton Women in the Word.” It is a local organization here. The podcast obviously airs wherever there is Internet, but it’s been a good, you know, like hey, I need to listen to something that’s about — get me away from all the business ideas because I’d drive to work and just think about all this stuff and what I need to do. But it helps keep me grounded in what my true purpose is. So obviously our church and things like that have podcasts. But sometimes I even forget to turn on the podcast when I get in the car because I — sometimes, I’ll use that time to pray and sort of reset my thought processes for the day and just pray over the people that I’m going to interact with.
Tim Ulbrich: Which is always important before you get home, especially with young children and kind of entering that space. So thank you so much, both of you, for taking the time to share your journey. And I think it’s going to be an inspiration to many. And again, I would reference our listeners to FunctionalMedicineCE.com, virtual symposium beginning Nov. 9, as well as the work they’ve done over at FarmtoTable.life. So appreciate the time that you’ve taken. And as always, I would ask our listeners if you like what you heard on this week’s episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast, please do us a favor and leave a rating and review in iTunes, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your shows each and every week. And as a last reminder, make sure to head on over to YourFinancialPharmacist.com/giveaway. For those that are pursuing residency training and are going through that application process, we have the ultimate residency prep giveaway going on for the next couple weeks where we’re giving away over $349 value in resources to five different winners: information on residency interviews, how to effectively write letters of intent, we have a boot camp course, and a great resource from TLDR Pharmacy as well. So again, YourFinancialPharmacist.com/giveaway. And until next week, we appreciate you joining us.
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