The Entrepreneurs Radio Show_ 108_Dr Arlen Meyers

THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW

Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur‟s Radio Show of 16




Episode 108: Dr. Arlen Meyers

In this episode, Travis interviews successful entrepreneur, physician, and professor Dr. Arlen

Meyers. Dr. Meyers is a world-renowned physician in the field of ENT medicine as well as a

professor at the University of Colorado. His valuable contributions to the medical and

entrepreneurial field have helped entrepreneurs and physicians alike with their businesses and

careers.

Travis and Dr. Meyers spoke of valuable information that can help physicians and business

owners in prioritizing what is important and taking vital steps in growing your business. Dr.

Meyers' experience in the medical field has been applied to his business acumen and

philosophies that are practical and applicable in today's market. Concentrating on a particular

target segment and providing solutions for that particular niche is a great way to scale your

business. He also believes that taking responsibility for your actions is a great way to learn from

the mistakes you've made. These and so much more are what's in store in this episode of the

Entrepreneur's Radio Show.

The 3W’s For Growing Your Business

TRAVIS: Hey, it's Travis Lane Jenkins welcome to episode number 108 of the Entrepreneur's

Radio Show, a production of rockstarentrepreneurnetwork.com, where each and every week I

connect you with rock star entrepreneurs that explain their journey to success and what the key

principles have been to them finding a high-level of success as an entrepreneur. Now today, I'm

going to introduce you to Dr. Arlen Meyers. Although before we get started I want to take a brief

minute and recognize another listener for writing us a great review and given us a 5-star rating

over on iTunes before we get started. This review comes from Richard Crosek, Mr. Blueprint

from here in the United States. Richard writes, great content rich podcast, that is, the headline.

5 stars, gives me some great feedback there, thank you very much Richard, I really appreciate

it. Just in case you don't know, writing a review really helps us reach more entrepreneurs just

like yourself. So if you have the time and you find value in the show I'd really appreciate it if

you'd go and leave us a review and tell us how we're doing. And of course I'll recognize you on

air by saying thank you personally.

One other thing I want to cover is I want to apologize for missing publishing a new episode last

week. Unfortunately I was sick for several days and wasn't able to get out before the deadline.

So, I apologize for that. I believe in consistency and I know consistency builds trust. And that's

not like me to miss deadlines. I normally have a reserve of shows in kind of a backlog and

unfortunately I didn't this time. The good news is, is I'm back to good health and back on track.

One last thing, remember there's 3 ways you can take these interviews with you on the go,

through iTunes, Android, or Stitcher. Just go to rockstarentrepreneurnetwork.com, click on the

http://rockstarentrepreneurnetwork.com/





iTunes, Android, or Stitcher button right there on the menu and it will take you directly to the

podcast rather than having to type it in and try to find it, where you can subscribe to the show

there.

Now that we got all that out of the way let's get down to business. Without further ado welcome

to the show Arlen?

DR. MEYERS: Thanks for having me.

TRAVIS: Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule. I don't know if you've listened to the

show very much but one of the things I like to do is get the back-story of what brought you to

where you are today, would you mind sharing that with us?

DR. MEYERS: Sure. I was born and raised in Philadelphia and was educated back east in a

fairly traditional academic, medical track. When I completed my-- I'm an ear, nose, and throat

surgeon by training, and when I completed my residency I was recruited to the University of

Colorado to be part of an academic department, which I've been part of ever since. And that

was back in 1976 so it's been a long time. As part of my academic career development I was

interested in bioengineering, and more specifically bio-photonics, which is the interaction of light

with human tissue. I was interested in that as a way to solve ear, nose, and throat problems,

one of which was oral cancer. Since I'm and neck surgeon, which was sort of a sub-specialty of

what I do. So to make a very long story short as part of my academic career in research and

development publishing 10 year track all that business, we collaborated and invented a device

that optically detects cancer. Basically it's a gadget that you shine in the mouth and if it lights up

it says you have cancer. That led to technology transfer, intellectual property protection, patents,

regulatory reimbursement, etc., to the point where we eventually created a company called

Oncolight to commercialize the device. And the rest as they say was history.

The reason that I really got involved in what I do is that experience and many others as an

entrepreneur in an academic setting is how difficult it is for people trying to do what I do to get it

done. Most doctors and a lot of people have ideas but they just don't know what to do with

them. And they don't know how to navigate the barriers and that's basically what I dedicated our

work to.

TRAVIS: Okay. You said bioengineering, is that correct?

DR. MEYERS: Correct.

TRAVIS: What is that specifically?




DR. MEYERS: It's the intersection of engineering to solve biomedical and health problems. And

it's actually one of the fastest growing careers in engineering. So basically you take mechanical,

electrical, computer science, the traditional engineering disciplines and apply them to medicine.

So the typical example is a biomedical engineer who works with a bunch of people to build a

medical device, or device a medical device. Or more recently build a digital health application.

So it's the intersection of engineering with medicine.

TRAVIS: Okay. And one of the reasons why I ask that is you and I were talking about this

before the show and the listeners of the show are not just doctors in general. It's really kind of

wide range of entrepreneurs. And one of the things that I've noticed in my 20 plus years of being

an entrepreneur is when left brain and right brain skills are developed to a high level, normally

you will find that the entrepreneur is much more successful. And now most entrepreneurs that

don't have a background that comes from where you have are right brainers and they lack a lot

of the left-brain skills. And then I found the doctors a lot of times are left brainers that don't have

a lot of the right brain skills. However, I coach a lot of doctors and I found that doctors are very

easy to coach because they've already learned how to distill information and apply it. So they

catch on very quickly. What do you think about that whole right brain-left brain thing and do you

agree with it?

DR. MEYERS: Well, I agree with some of the things you said and I disagree with others. And let

me just step back a minute and say that there are an awful lot of parallels between physicians

and how they do their work, and entrepreneurs and how they do their work. And the simplistic

way of my explaining this is that just like there is an art and techno science to medicine, there is

an art and science to entrepreneurship. So the art part is what you're referring to as right brain

skill, and the techno science is what you're referring to, as I understand it, to left brain skill.

TRAVIS: Right.

DR. MEYERS: And the example I would use is that when you go to see a doctor, and some

people have mumped the fact that the art of medicine is being destroyed by techno hype. But

the fact of the matter is that most people when they go to a doctor expect some sort of art. And

what that means is intuition, gut feeling, experience, communication, empathy, etc., as they

apply it to the patient. I would make the same argument in entrepreneurship. A lot of

entrepreneurs and you maybe one of them, and I know I am, make what we call gut decisions.

It's based on you have fact pattern in front of you which may tell you one thing but your gut tells

you something else. To me that's an example of the art of entrepreneurship that while it can be

taught, may not necessarily be learned other than through the school of hard knocks and

experience. In medicine we call it clinical judgment. In business we call it business wisdom. It's

the same kind of thing. So my argument to your question is I think that entrepreneurs and

physicians, or physician entrepreneurs have both capabilities. In a lot of respects though they

don't understand how to apply them, more do they understand they even have those skills.




TRAVIS: Right. Well, so to take that a little further, and again, I don't want to make this a

conversation just for doctors. I want everybody to think about what we're talking about here.

Now early on using your example as a very young entrepreneur, and even in the mid-years of

being an entrepreneur I based a lot of things on gut. And there's a time and a place for that gut

but the facts need to be analyzed first. And most people have not set-up systems in their

business to where they can empirically tell what is or is not happening. That gut aspect of things

comes in either different situations or later in the decision process. Do you agree with that?

DR. MEYERS: Yeah, I agree with that and I think that, again, businesses and leaders of

businesses need dashboards. They need the latest buzzes, analytics, and intelligence, but they

need dashboards to identify the critical success factors and monitor them on a real-time basis.

Again, going back to physician entrepreneur example doctors do that every single day, every

single time they see a patient. We take a history, we do a physical, we look at lab tests, we

come up with a differential diagnosis, we decide what we think is wrong, and we institute a

treatment plan. And we have certain metrics and outcomes that we monitor. If people are

getting better, great, if they're not getting better based on those metrics then what we do is

change the treatment plan. What business and lean startup gurus are not calling pivoting.

TRAVIS: Right.

DR. MEYERS: Well, physicians have been doing medsurg pivoting ever since the beginning of

time. They're used to doing that. It's an experiment, it's a clinical trial, it's a clinical response. If

you get better, great, we assume things are working. You're getting better whether the treatment

made a difference or not who knows. But if it's not working we have to monitor that in pivot. So

we're used to doing that but again, doctors don't know what they don't know when it comes to

entrepreneurship. And that's one of the missions that we're trying to fill.

TRAVIS: Yeah, I completely agree with you. So for me, those are KPI's. I completely agree with

you on the dash. So KPI is key performance indicators. Do you have a set of key performance

indicators in a business that you like to look at that tell you your business is functioning the way

it should be?

DR. MEYERS: Well, to me at the very high level, when we're talking biomedical and health

innovation and entrepreneurship. And I think this applies to any entrepreneurial endeavor. At the

very high initial level you have to ask yourself what I call the 3 W's. Is this something that

customers want? That's the first view. Number 2, is this business worth it? In other words,

you're going to put an awful lot of time and effort, and brain damage into this, and either from a

personal satisfaction standpoint or an economic standpoint, is it worth pursuing? And you have

to answer that with the hard facts. Market size, market growth, market potential, etc. Or as I said

intrinsically, how are you going to measure success internally and it's going to make you feel

good and follow your passion. So that's the second view. And the third is can you win at it?




Because there's no point in tinkering, particularly in health care. So, this old GE thing, they're

not going to create something, or they're not going to dominate a market and be first AB

second. In health care it has to be the same thing. You have to go big or go home. And if you're

not going to win then just fold-up shop and do something else.

TRAVIS: Okay, so I think I missed the third one. So the first is, is it worth it? No, I'm sorry--

DR. MEYERS: Do customers want it?

TRAVIS: Oh want it, okay.

DR. MEYERS: Is it worth it, and can you win at it?

TRAVIS: Oh, can you win at it, okay, alright. And you feel like, even say a local business, if they

can't dominate their local area then they should reconsider whether they should specialize in

that at all. Is that what I understand you say?

DR. MEYERS: Well, that's what I'm saying in health care. Obviously there are entrepreneurs

who create businesses and they're simply lifestyle businesses. They're looking to create a

reasonable living. It could be a „me-to‟ business, it could be a similar product in competing with

an existing entity. But in my view, that's just me, I wouldn't do that. First of all, the cost of

competing and the cost of sales entering a market where there are a lot of competitors is much

more difficult. So, I urge people to innovate and create things that haven't been created

because it's not always easier, in fact it's harder. The whole Apple story is a perfect example.

Create something people didn't know they needed. Well, that wasn't easy but look at the result.

TRAVIS: Right. Yeah, one of the most profitable companies on the planet.

DR. MEYERS: Right. So I think health care needs the same thing, we can't tinker.

TRAVIS: Okay. So, one of the common problems that I see, and I'd like to hear your

perspective on this, is most businesses have not set systems up where they can tell what'

generating profit and what's causing them to lose money. And when you provide a large variety

of services and maybe this is where the specializing and one thing comes in. Is there more

KPI's, or is there more parts of that dashboard where you teach people how to hone in on the

profitable parts of their business? I have found that more often than not, 80% of what

businesses are doing are not profitable.

DR. MEYERS: Well, the general answer is creating a dashboard and key performance

indicators really depends on the business and it depends on what the critical success factors

are for your business. So let's say for example in health, which I know best, and biomedicine. If




you're trying to get a drug to market, if you're trying a device to market, you're going to have

certain key performance indicators that you have to have to, number 1, be successful in growing

the business, but more importantly getting money. In other words, clinical trial success,

intellectual property protection, regulatory affairs and reimbursement clearance, that kind of

stuff. So those are the key benchmarks and those are the key indicators. And if you don't hit

those benchmarks you're dead in the water. When you look at digital health, that is the

application of information and communications technologies to improving health, it's been found

that the single biggest predictor of success will be the speed of scale. In other words, how

rapidly can you grow this business and get eyeballs in front of the screen, if that's what you're

intending to do. If you're building an iPhone app to help people-- We have some fairly large and

numerous digital health companies in Colorado that I'm involved with. If you're trying to build

and iPhone app to help infertile couples monitor their reproductive cycles, or you're trying to

build a website to help diabetics maintain the adherence to their treatment plan, or if you're

trying to build something to reduce childhood obesity, there are a number of issues that are key

performance indicators. But probably the one that's most important is the rapidity of which you

scale that business. If you don't get early traction and scale it, it's likely to stall. So that's the key

performance indicator. And if you're not making the numbers day-to-day, week-to-week, month-

to-month, something is wrong and you need to fix it. Otherwise you're going to be dead in the

water.

TRAVIS: Right. So these are product-based type situations as oppose to service because a lot

of times the bottleneck with service is the capacity of performance where products apps, or

whatever it is, there's not much of a bottleneck there. You can add 2,000 new customers

tomorrow and 10,000 the following day. So that's the path I hear you going down there.

DR. MEYERS: Yeah, but if you consider a physician practice as a time-limited, a service

business. You can only see so many patients in a day.

TRAVIS: Right.

DR. MEYERS: Well, if you're trying to build and scale a medical practice for example, or some

sort of health service organization business, you run into the same issues of well, what do you

manage and measure to maximize efficacy and efficiency. But probably the most prominent one

now is accounts receivable. Because as ObamaCare has been rolled out, as first dollar health

insurance has been eliminated, as the ACA is pushing more cost, and deductibles, and co-pays

on the patients, it's getting harder and harder to collect that money upfront from patients. So

there are enormous revenue leaks that happen. And if you don't keep an eye on that as a key

performance indicator, you just can't make it up in volume.

TRAVIS: Yeah, and it becomes a cash flow problem, right?




DR. MEYERS: Right. You go out of business.

TRAVIS: Yeah, not only profitability but instantaneous cash flow.

DR. MEYERS: Right. It's not very common and the press likes to make a deal out of it. But

whenever a doctor goes bankrupt they make a big deal out of it as either a right wing, or a left-

wing argument for or against the health care system. But in fact it has really very little to do with

that. It has to do with how the doctor/entrepreneur runs the business.

TRAVIS: Right. You keyed in on something that is a buzzword for me. And that was a „me

too‟ type of business. So I completely agree with the problems with me too. I offer the same

thing as the guy down the street, we're just better. And that's a very naive argument, and that's

something that-- I've been in business 24 years and there was a time when there was such a

plentiful amount of work for everybody that you could get away with „me too‟ type positioning,

and that really doesn't work anymore. And I see a lot of doctors and business owners using

the „me too‟ type marketing where they're focused on their credentials, their office, all of the

things about them rather than digging in to what the problem is. And then having a multi-step

campaign that takes their prospect down a path that conditions them to ethically know, like, and

trust them. What's your mindset on that and do you have much experience with that?

DR. MEYERS: My take on that is that the single biggest reason why doctors are now interested

in innovation and entrepreneurship is because they have to. What you just said applies to health

care. In the past, and you could argue is that 2 years or 20 years, anyone who graduated

medical school did a residency, became board certified, but essentially practice medicine and

make more than 99% of the people in the world by showing up. You can't do that anymore. So

you have to begin to differentiate yourself, you have to be able to demonstrate value; you have

to be able to measure quality. You don't get a trophy for showing up anymore; you have to be

able to demonstrate value. And that's true across the industry. So, that has caused enormous

problems, because people don't like to change. Just look at the VA and what's going on there.

Organizations have certain cultures and it's very difficult to change them when you change the

rules. But health care is exactly the same, and physician entrepreneurship is the same. So if

you're offering a „me too‟ orthopedic practice, or a „me too‟ ENT practice-- in fact I would make

the argument that that's the goal. You want the quality and the outcome of a given operation to

be exactly the same every single place in the world. It's never going to happen. But you want to

eliminate as much variability in the outcome of a procedure as possible so that you can take the

quality for granted. That's not going on in the United States now, or around world. There are

enormous disparities and outcomes of care, and how different doctors do things. But let's

assume for the sake of argument that the outcomes were exactly the same, that every ENT

doctor in the world had a 1% post-op bleeding rate after the operation, which is what the

number should be. Well, if patients then commoditize mentally the outcome, now they're going

to be more interested in service, access, speed, price, transparency, and the patient




experience, which I think is happening more and more. And it's very difficult for doctors to make

that transition because they're focused on quality of care. Patients, it's very difficult to measure

or understand quality of medical care so they focus on the things they can relate to. How long

do I have to wait in the doctor's office? Did he see me or she see me on time? How hard is it to

get them to return phone calls? Is it convenient, or do the office hours make sense, all that other

stuff. So I think that's what we're seeing.

TRAVIS: Well, so, one speaks to the delivery of the service and the other one speaks to the

positioning of the service. So, all of us like to believe if there's 5 doctors in an area that we're

going to choose from or 5 businesses that do the same thing. I want to choose the one for me

that is going to provide me with the best experience. And if something goes wrong they're going

to stand behind what it is that they offer. I want accountability, right? I'm not looking for a cheap

price. And there are different segments of markets going on there. But I want the removal of

risk. And so that's how you present the offer, which is different. And then after, if that one

business had multiple locations, then they would have a multi-step process to deliver a

consistent result. I think those are kind of 2 ends of the spectrum that you're talking about, isn't

it?

DR. MEYERS: Well, what you just said is just your opinion. And basically what you're saying is

whenever anyone buys or considers doing something, they do the cost benefit. And that cost

benefit translates into value. So what value means is the difference between the tangible and

intangible benefit of a product or service, less a tangible or intangible cost. So you do the cost

benefit. It's everything from who do you date to what do you buy. So you do the cost benefit and

you have certain value factors. You just mentioned access, convenience, accountability, price,

whatever, but that's your individual mindset. There are some patients, and telemedicine is an

excellent example. There are some patients that will forgo the perception of quality for

convenience and access. So for example, you're a mother, your 3-year old wakes up with an

ear ache at home at 2 in the morning. The last thing you want to do is take your kid to an ER, sit

there for 4 hours and pay a fortune.

TRAVIS: Right.

DR. MEYERS: When your perception is all I want is the doctor to prescribe an antibiotic.

Whether the prescription of that antibiotic is the right thing to do or not, that's what you want.

And you're willing to forgo the possibility of poor quality for convenience and access. So it

depends. There are some patients that want certain things, and other patients that want others.

And you can't be all things to all people as business. So to get back to your question, you have

to focus on what you think your target segment is and what products and services will solve

their problem based on their value factor.




TRAVIS: Yeah, I completely agree with you and I think we're getting into the core of what I think

the problem is with most practices, most businesses, is they don't recognize that there are

multiple types of clients and then go after those prospects in a very specific way. And to my

point earlier, multi-step system that educates the prospect can also eliminate the prospect that's

not a good fit. So for me there could be someone on the complete opposite in of the buying

criteria or just like you explained. And there should be-- I don't see any businesses targeting

specific segments of those markets. And I think that's where a lot of the problems come into

business.

DR. MEYERS: And I would disagree that you don't see-- they're called market leaders. The

market leaders are those that are meticulous about targeting customer segments and satisfying

their wants and needs.

TRAVIS: Right.

DR. MEYERS: They don't try to be all things to all people.

TRAVIS: Exactly.

DR. MEYERS: And they understand-- an example is an orthopedic surgeon, again, I'll use a

medical example but could be applied at any business. An orthopedic surgeon, a friend of mine

has devised a software product that you may or may not like this, but basically identifies patients

who will generate maximal revenue. And I'm not saying he's compromising on quality of care.

But if you think about it you have a certain number of hours in a day, you have a certain number

of appointment slots. And if strictly from a business perspective you want to maximize revenue,

it should fill those appointment slots with people who are most likely to generate the most

revenue. Businesses call it the highest profit margin. So you try to move up market, and you try

to identify people with a given complaint, who will then translate into a give procedure that

generates revenue. And you eliminate the people who want to make appointments that won't

generate as much revenue. Now, there's an argument that well isn't that too cheered care,

aren't you rationing care, aren't you being cold and callous in terms of applying business to

medicine? Yes. And we can have that conversation some other time, but I'm just giving an

example of how to maximize profit. It's a service business.

TRAVIS: I think it's the way that business should be done. Very few people have taken the time

to engineer a path that clearly speaks to their ideal avatar. We call that an avatar. We sit down

and list who that exact person is, what their education, what their income; every aspect of that

individual is an avatar. And so I completely agree with it. And that with the business his position

to deliver their absolute best to that prospect, no one else. So yeah, I guess my statement was

inaccurate because I say no one-- I guess where I'm coming from is I very rarely see it and it

drives me crazy. And your right leaders of any industry normally had this down. So in the things




that you do with your business do you guys set-up any multi-step funnels or campaigns that

automate this process and educate the prospect, and move them down that channel like we're

talking about?

DR. MEYERS: Well, again it depends on the business. I'll give you a couple of examples. For

example, in the digital health business and we don't have to go into all the details. But in a

digital health business where basically you're trying to get the attention of prospects, you're

trying to convert them to leads and you're trying to convert those leads to customers. And

there's a process for doing that. In fact, there's a very well worked out process and people make

lots of money doing consulting and create businesses translating prospects into customers. It's

no different in a biomedical or health industry than other industries. And incidentally it's no

different for not for profits versus for profits. So one of my activities is with the society at position

entrepreneurs, which is a global biomedical health innovation and entrepreneurship network. It's

the largest physician entrepreneurship network in the world. Basically we help people get their

ideas to patients. We provide them education resources and networks. Well, I'm trying to grow

in scale the organization. We've been reasonably successful in doing it. We've gone from 50

people in January of 2011, to approximately 12,000 on a LinkedIn site as of today. Well, how do

we do that, how do you scale the business? In this case, a non-profit and it has to do with

techniques turning prospects into leads, into in this case members, dues paying members,

which is part of our mission to sustain the organization.

TRAVIS: Nice, well done. And you said, how long has it taken you to grow that from 50 to

12,000?

DR. MEYERS: It went from in January of 2011 until today. And we have many tens of

thousands, we have 15 or 20 chapters around the world. So the whole infrastructure had been

scaled. But we really had to rely on social media and combined marketing techniques to make

that happen.

TRAVIS: Right. And so, is that what you spend the majority of your time on now?

DR. MEYERS: Well, when people say majority of your time, as you well know, you spend 24

hours a day on all the things, it's kind of hard to decide which one to do. We got a lot of balls in

the air but it's part of--

TRAVIS: What's your main focus?

DR. MEYERS: Well, my day job is I'm an ear, nose, and throat surgeon at the University of

Colorado, I'm in the school of medicine. So, I'm involved with basically research education and

practice of physician entrepreneurship and ear, nose, and throat surgery.




TRAVIS: Okay, so you're still practicing and are still teaching?

DR. MEYERS: Yes.

TRAVIS: Okay, great, excellent. Let me ask you, looking back on your career, obviously

hindsight is 20/20. What was the turning point for you and your business? Was there a dramatic

shift, something that happened with you, or an aha moment for you when you finally woke up

and kind of shifted your life, your business? And if so, can you share it with us?

DR. MEYERS: Well, I'll go back to the story on Oncolight, I think the short answer is most of the

time these things happen when you fail, not when you succeed. And, it's been shown that--

some people learn from their mistakes and other people don't whether it's a 4-year old, or

whether it's someone in your 50's. And the question is why. And the answer, to make a very

long story short based on research is those who take personal responsibility for their mistakes

seemed to learn from it. Those who don't and blame other people don't. So, the question is so

what happened? Well, we created this company, and again to make a long story short, a bunch

of stuff happened, the management team went south, we ran into a bunch of hurdles, we ran

into all kinds of problems that we had to negotiate. And I think what that said to me was, there's

got to be a better way. And what it also said to me was I like this. I like dealing with this stuff. I

like making this better. So I think that was the turning point. And then we followed a different

path and went down a different direction. I just got really interested in the business and science

of medicine and entrepreneurship because fundamentally I'm a teacher, I'm an educator, I'm a

professor, and I like helping people kind of achieve their goals.

TRAVIS: Yeah, I'm right there with you. It's really strange that very little is learned from your

successes in virtually everything for me has come or my insights have come from failures and

some really incredible failures where I thought it's the end of the world when really it was just

time for me to make a shift and grow. And so I completely align and understand where you're

coming from on that.

DR. MEYERS: And in this business of failure as it applies to a physician entrepreneurship is

interesting because it you think about it, high school students, college students who get

accepted to medical school don't get selected because they're failures. They get selected

because they're lifelong overachievers and presumed successes. So when you put a person

like that in a situation where you expect them to fail orally, fail often, and fail cheaply, they have

a very hard time dealing with that.

TRAVIS: Interesting.

DR. MEYERS: And it's one of the problems that we have to address in the culture of medicine if

we're going to innovate and fix this system. Our system is totally screwed up, and the only thing




that's going to fix it is innovation. Well, if you're relying on people who don't understand failure to

fix a broken system you're stuck. And that leads me to believe that health care cannot be fixed

from inside.

TRAVIS: Right. Well, I think that mindset was bred from first grade of school. You're not

rewarded for coloring outside the lines. You're rewarded for getting everything accurate. And so

for me early on I was a terrible student because if someone, if a strong personality wasn't

around to keep me motivated and inspired I wanted to venture and do other things. And it really

puzzled me for a long time, and I come to realize that it was a bit of a-- I guess I'll call it an

entrepreneurial spirit because I wanted to challenge the status quo and that's what I hear you

saying is you need to challenge what's going on, you need to color outside the lines and you

need to be willing to make mistakes because that's where the quickest changes happen, rather

than getting 100 on every test.

DR. MEYERS: Yeah that's true. On the other hand you also have to make a living. And there's

this conversation about how far can you go. So, entrepreneurs, there's this traditional notion of

the lone ranger, going their own way, beating to their own drum, etc. But the reality is you have

to play nice with people if you're going to get along. And if you're not going to get fired. So you

have to understand the limits of how much you can push. Andy Grove who used to be the CEO

of Intel in his book had this notion of you can drill holes in the ship as long as it's not below the

waterline.

TRAVIS: Right. Yeah, great point. We're running a little long in this segment. What do you say

we transition into the lightning round? I've got 3 questions that I sent over to you that I wanted

you to think about and you probably know the answers off the top of your head. But are you

ready to transition?

DR. MEYERS: Sure.

TRAVIS: Okay, great. So my first question was what book or program made an impact on you

related to business that you'd recommend and why?

DR. MEYERS: There's a lot of really great literature out there. I was really impressed with

Leading Change, John Kotter's book the Harvard Business School in terms of change

management, developing a sense of urgency, all that business. I think the Drucker Literature on

Innovation and Entrepreneurship are sort of classics and always hold the test of time. And the

third that I would mention is The Diffusion of Innovation, which is a book that was written very

many, many years ago but was the original description of innovators, early adopters, early

majority, that kind of stuff. So for anyone who's interested in technological diffusion and

innovation I'd suggest that.

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TRAVIS: So, Leading Change and I've got Drucker's book. What was the last one, Diffusion and

what?

DR. MEYERS: The Diffusion of Innovation.

TRAVIS: I'm not familiar with the first and the last book.

DR. MEYERS: Diffusion of Innovation is by Everett Rogers.

TRAVIS: Okay, great.

DR. MEYERS: It was actually printed in 1992 but is one of those classics.

TRAVIS: Excellent. You ought to check out a book called Think. And it's a brilliant book wrote in

the 50's or 60's. And it is manuscripts of this individual that come in and spoke to all of the

people at IBM whenever IBM just produced cash registers. And it's some of the most brilliant

talks, information perspective that I've read. It's absolutely wonderful book. So what's one of

your favorite tools or pieces of technology that you've recently discovered, if any, that you'd

recommend to other business owners and why?

DR. MEYERS: Well, and I'll refer to the society of physician entrepreneurs and how we scaled

it. We're a global organization and what we did I think would have been impossible without

social media and particularly LinkedIn. Basically, we built this organization around social media

platforms with a local chapter network. So I'd have to say LinkedIn is probably the most effective

technology that I've used to build this organization.

TRAVIS: Yeah, I'm a fan of LinkedIn myself. What famous quote would best summarize your

belief or attitude in business?

DR. MEYERS: If you haven't seen the Steve Jobs valedictory address to Stanford, I would

suggest that you watch it. It's all over YouTube and it's going viral. And at the very end of the

speech speaking to all these smart Stanford grads knowing that he's dying of cancer, given his

story all that other business. He basically at the end said, "Here's my advice, stay hungry and

be playful."

TRAVIS: Good stuff. One question out of left field for you. If you had to start over today, what

would you do to get the fastest results?

DR. MEYERS: Well, I'm a little uncomfortable with the notion of fastest results, because in

retrospect there are no easy solutions and there are no shortcuts. And I kind of believe that

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things happen when they happen for a reason. And unfortunately I think when you try to get

things done quickly and take shortcuts, it creates more problems than it solves.

TRAVIS: Completely makes sense, I agree with you. There are no easy buttons in life is there?

DR. MEYERS: No, there are just no shortcuts, you just got to pay your dues and put in the time,

and hope for the best.

TRAVIS: Alright. Or there are shortcuts but the majority of them that I've seen normally have

some pretty negative collateral effects, right?

DR. MEYERS: Yeah. And usually when people take those shortcuts they compromise their

ethics and that's not good.

End of Interview

TRAVIS: Right, excellent, thank you for that. Remember that you can find all the links to the

books and the resources mentioned in the show notes. Just go to

rockstarentrepreneurnetwork.com and look for episode number 108. Now before I close the

show today, I want to read you a quote. And the quote comes from John F. Kennedy. And the

quote reads, "Things do not happen, things are made to happen." This is Travis Lane Jenkins

signing off for now. I hope that you've been working on finding that mastermind and that

personal mentor that I have mentioned in previous episodes here recently. To your incredible

success, take care my friend.





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