A Path to Wellbeing: Building a Growth Factor Science-Based Business

Dustin Baker, President of BioProtein Technology, discusses the benefits of BioPro Plus, a non-synthetic alternative to prescription human growth hormone. He explains the difference between synthetic and non-synthetic hormone replacement and the importance of maintaining optimal growth hormone levels. He also discusses his journey and the importance of mentorship.

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📌TALKING POINTS

02:12 - Synthetic vs. Non-synthetic Hormone Replacement

04:02 - Gender and Age Factors in Growth Hormone

10:52 - Effects of Growth Hormone on Energy Levels

11:35 - Other Benefits of Growth Hormone

16:01 - Normal Ranges of IGF-1

18:45 - Dustin's Personal Journey and Mentorship

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Tom Finn (00:00.926)

Welcome, welcome to the podcast, my friends. Today we are learning from my main man, Dustin Baker. Dustin, welcome to the show.

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Dustin (00:08.11)

Hi Tom, how you doing today, buddy?

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Tom Finn (00:09.986)

I am absolutely lovely and looking forward to this conversation. So if you don't know Dustin, he is the president of BioProtein Technology and a creative product called BioPro Plus. He's got years of experience, but his passion has remained the same to help individuals maximize their physiological and cognitive potential safely. So he's been instrumental in the product design, brand development for prescription drug alternative products in professional athletes, fitness, medical supply categories. So lots of great background and deep knowledge, but let's start right at the top. BioPro Plus, what is it? What type of product are we even talking about when it comes to physiological and cognitive homework?

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Dustin (00:57.69)

So BioPro Plus is a non-synthetic alternative to prescription human growth hormone and peptide treatments. So in human beings, growth hormone is the master hormone for metabolic function, sexual function, workout recovery, workout performance, your skin, your hair, all kinds of fun stuff. And it declines every single year after we finish puberty. So, you wake up 44 years old, you look in the mirror, you don't really feel or look like you used to, you wonder why. A lot of that has to do with hormone decline, growth hormone being one of them. So people reach out to their physicians, to clinics, et cetera. It's a big thing these days with hormone replacement and they get a hormone replacement drug. Not all of us are interested in hormone drugs and synthetic treatments and pharmaceutical applications that are administered through a needle or things that cause lots of side effects. Not that those drugs don't work, but they come with a potential for risk. So what we do is we offer patients and users a third option that is a hundred percent non-synthetic. So it's… 100% bioidentical, meaning it's molecularly identical to what your body already produces. So you can have the same exact benefits as say, uh, prescription hormone replacement without any of the added risks. Another side effects. It comes in at about a fraction of the costs and, um, yeah, it shows up right at your door and you're off to the races.

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Tom Finn (02:12.046)

So let's go back to this conversation of non-synthetic. For our novice users, I think we get the hormone replacement component, but what is the synthetic versus non-synthetic and what does that actually mean?

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Dustin (02:24.358)

Sure, so a pharmaceutical drug is a synthetic, non-naturally occurring drug, meaning we'll talk about growth hormones specifically. Growth hormone is a recumbent DNA product, meaning recumbent DNA makes you stuff in a petri dish, it spits it out, you inject it. It's not natural, it's not your natural hormone, right? It's replacing your natural hormone with literally a manufactured synthetic drug.

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So as opposed to non-synthetic where we are extracting something from another mammal that is exactly the same as what your body already produces. So your body doesn't notice it as a synthetic drug. It doesn't spur the same type of side effects that come along with prescription drug use, which prescription drugs are great when they're medically applied appropriately. They have their, you know, they have their appropriate applications. And, but they all come with a potential for side effect.

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And we like all the benefits of synthetic hormone replacements, but we're not big fans of the needles or the potential risks that come along with it, whether it's, uh, everything from carpal tunnel syndrome to cardiac arrhythmias to, uh, you know, like, I mean, really bad stuff from, uh, neurological diseases, insulin sensitivity issues, weight gain, all kinds of infertility, all kinds of weird, crazy stuff like that.

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Tom Finn (03:46.442)

Yeah. So is this when we think about this product in particular, and this isn't a product commercial, but I'm deeply interested in sort of, uh, human growth and hormones, I mean, it just affects all of us, right? Dustin, this is not unique to you and me. This is this affect women as much as men, or is there a, so what's the gender, the gender mix when you're talking to people, what, what type of folks are thinking about, uh, this type of homework?

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Dustin (04:02.138)

100%. Yeah, 100%. Most people who are passing the age of 35, however, the market is heavily focused currently on testosterone and estrogen, right? So men go through a period called andropause as they age starts. They start feeling it. I would say, uh, starting to get into their thirties, women go through menopause. Um, and those are sex dominant issues when it comes to growth hormone, growth hormone is not sex dominant. It is absolutely equal in both men and women. In fact, it's symbiotic and parallels all of the hormones like testosterone and estrogen in men and women to help them work optimally in those separate genders. The issue with growth hormone is that many times it goes untreated or even overlooked upon these days. You have to ask for a specific test. It's no longer a normal thing. So you have to go out and do extra work. It doesn't come on a normal blood panel. You got to go and get it tested. So I think it's heavily overlooked in the medical markets specifically. I don't believe it is anymore. In fact, with the release of things like peptide secretagogues, which help to stimulate things like growth hormone, they become very, very popular. So popular in fact that the FDA stepped in last November and banned them, which did a lot of our job for us because that's one of our only competition. But it's becoming quite popular in the medical space.

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The normal population don't really come in until several years after it's become popular in specific spaces. But I believe the word peptides, which are directly related to things like growth hormone and human growth hormone are becoming a little bit more mainstream and have done a lot of our work for us actually.

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Tom Finn (05:55.106)

So let's go back to this idea, this growth hormone idea of getting tested, because I think that was an important point that you made. So most of us, if we're in our forties or fifties or what have you, we're going into a doctor on an annual basis with any luck and we're doing our physical and we're doing our blood work. And this is preventative in nature for the most part. But what I think I heard you say is in this particular case, growth hormone isn't one of the standard tests. So how do you, how does somebody that wants to think about this, that wants to be healthy, how do they actually get to the point where they're getting tested to determine if they have a need?

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Dustin (06:30.022)

Sure. So my first recommendation is finding a physician who has knowledge in this space. You'll find a lot of physicians are becoming increasingly more passionate about human optimization, whether that's through hormones or whether that's through diet. It used to be what you would consider in the medical field kind of fringe. They always say on the left side of the spectrum where root cause approach was fringe and then you had pharmaceutical intervention we'll say is on the right. And now within the medical space, you're finding this really awesome middle ground which is given, which somehow is coined the term integrative approach. So an integrative medical practitioner is what you would wanna look for. Somebody who does integrative medical medicine, whether that's an MD, a DO, whatever that is, but they meet in the middle. So they look for your… First, they do all of their tests, like we're talking about blood panels, and then they look for the root causes to fix whatever you're coming in there for, and then they'll apply a medical intervention if necessary, whether that's a synthetic drug or protocol, whatever that is. Now, the reason why I say that is because if you take this to a primary care doc who has no education in hormone systems or the endocrine system, which is your hormone system, which isn't necessarily a huge part of medical schooling general medical schooling, you have to go to additional different schooling or additional training for this type of stuff. You might not get a thorough answer that you're looking for or you're probably just gonna get referred anyway. So when you go in to get your blood panels and you get all your normal hormone blood panels, you're gonna want to ask specifically for an IGF-1 test. So the letter I, the letter G, the letter F, the number one test. It's insulin-like growth factor number one. And the reason is because growth hormone is a pulsating hormone. So it's not constant in the blood at all times. It gets pulsated depending upon what you are doing, whether it's sleep or exercise, whatever that might be. And the metabolite is IGF-1. So the actual metabolite that's consistent within your bloodstream is called insulin-like growth factor one. Growth factors are really cool. Growth factors are the end results of hormones. So hormones are simply chemical catalysts created in the body to then cause a change.

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Dustin (08:49.754)

So a catalyst is just a chain reaction to cause some sort of a cellular change, okay? With growth hormone, before the body ever uses it, it has to be converted by the liver first into these growth factors. So growth factors are just cellular signals. They're no longer the hormone. In fact, they are what are called protein cytokines. They're complex amino acid profiles formed into proteins that get sent out into the blood to trigger cells to do stuff. So your cells have to, in order to stay, let's just say young or when you're very young, your cells multiply and differentiate and that is cellular health. So these cellular triggers are sent to your blood to trigger that multiplication and differentiation. The reason why your skin starts to sag as you age is your skin is full of very specific cells. Okay. And they die off quickly.

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When you're younger, they multiply and they differentiate at the exact same speed as they die off. However, as you age, growth hormone declines, meaning the growth factors that are created by the conversion of growth hormone declines along with it. Therefore, these cells are dying off, but they're not getting as many cellular triggers as they used to multiply and differentiate. So the rate of the cells dying off is faster than the rate of your cells multiplying. Is that make I know that's a whole lot and I kind of puked out there for a while but I hope that makes sense. Your cells are dying off. You have to have cellular triggers that are made from this hormone to then trigger them to say hey make more of yourselves. However the cell rate that they die off stays the same. The rate at which you create these triggers declines. So that's why people start to go into these physicians or different things or use our products to then kind of fill that gas tank back up of cellular triggers to then at least mitigate the damage being done and or slow it down or, you know, stop it hopefully, which, you know, is an ongoing battle.

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Tom Finn (10:52.962)

Yeah, for sure. Now, if we, if we take the lab coat off for a second, cause you just took me back to, uh, you know, college classes in, uh, in the science fields, but if we take the lab coat off for a second and we just go to, uh, our normal brain folks out there in the universe, and we start to think about what these types of products actually do, I think of this as anti-aging metabolism. I think of it potentially as maybe immune system, hair and health. What about weight loss? Help us understand what are the outputs of having additional growth hormone in your body? What could somebody expect to see in a normalized case?

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Dustin (11:35.93)

So there is a lot of things actually. And we focus on the growth factor science because that is what a lot of the science is gonna relate to, because it's gonna speak to the end result of that specific hormone. And I think it's important for individuals to know, like we use the word growth hormone, that's the name of the hormone, but people get really worried when they hear the word growth. Totally understand. The reason the word growth hormone was used was years and years ago, decades ago, when this growth hormone science evolving, it started because of a very specific issue called growth hormone deficiency syndrome. And that would be diagnosed with children who lacked the hormone or lacked the ability to produce enough to actually grow as a human being, grow their bones, grow their skin. So you had people with, I mean, that would be an awful thing to live with, right? You literally cannot grow up. It's a big problem. So that was where the word growth kind of came from. So don't be scared by growth hormone, this isn't bodybuilding type stuff, this isn't like pro wrestler type stuff, which is, sometimes it gets looped into that for a bad, it's a bad name or something, but you shouldn't be scared about it. It's a natural hormone that exists already within your body. And to your point, it literally controls by use of these cellular triggers, your metabolic function, your skin, your hair, all of those things that you said, in fact, a low amount of remember we were talking about testing IGF-1, a too low amount can be tied to everything from diabetes, to erectile dysfunction, to Parkinson's, to ALS, to MLS, to all different types of other diseases. So there's definitely a happy middle ground here of making sure you're in an optimal range. That does not mean putting yourself into what's considered an abnormal range, which is beyond your body's human capability. What we do for a living is we just want to make sure you're optimized. We want to make sure your gas tank is full, not, um, you know, holding the, holding the handle down and spraying gasoline all over the car from outside. You know what I mean? Like we, we just want you to be full, have your tank full, feel good. Um, fill up kind of where your body's leaving off.

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Tom Finn (13:50.818)

So that was an interesting point that you made. You said fill up and feel good. I feel like you were leaning into energy a little bit and having the right amount of energy. Look, I think people, and I truly believe people want and need three things in their life. From everything around them, they want more money, more time, and more energy. And at various points in your life, you want those in different proportions for yourself and your family. So what I think I heard you say is more energy. So how does this help you with energy levels?

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Dustin (14:27.098)

So that's actually typically if you pull, and we do all the time, if you pull users or patients, as we call them, on what was the number one thing that you felt after utilizing our products first, it's always energy, and that's always the first 10 to 12 days, 100%. There's several reasons for that. One of them being insulin sensitivity issues. So your body has a hormone called insulin that it uses and releases when you eat, when you work out, when you do certain things, and it tells your body how to utilize the food that you're eating as an energy source. When you, I'll just use regular terms, when you mess up your body's ability to produce this hormone or to react to insulin, things like your body storing the food that you eat as fat start to happen. It triggers different issues of low energy of all different types of downstream effects. So when you're able to apply growth factor naturally, like IGF-1, like we just talked about, you're able to apply it and kind of fill up that gas tank. One of the number one studies that comes up is blood sugar utilization and improving things like insulin resistance and insulin sensitivity. So you're improving your body's ability to create energy or use energy from the food you're just eating. That's just one thing out of many. But the energy thing is energy, is directly related to things like mood, et cetera. I mean, when you are too low on things like growth hormone and metabolites of growth factors, you can directly tie things like anxiety, depression, mood swings, all different types of issues towards that as well.

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Tom Finn (16:01.142)

So that's the second time you've talked about being too low on IGF one. Uh, so help us understand. Well, help us. So if you're too low, our help us understand sort of the normalized range, knowing that, you know, we're not clinicians here and you need to see, uh, an integrative medical expert, but what are the normal ranges? And then, and then maybe the, the counter argument to being too low, what, what is too high look and feel like.

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Dustin (16:05.83)

Sure, that's my whole business, Tom. 100%. Yeah, I'm not a doctor. 100%. So that is, I'm not gonna be able to give you specifics directly related on that. You can go and you can, cause it's dependent upon the individual's gender and age. So you need to, you can ask any physician, you can Google it. There's a, it's a numerical value like any other type of blood panel of where am I at? Where should I be depending upon the decade of my life? So that's a very easy thing. You can Google it and put IGF-1 numbers and see kind of where you fall.

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Tom Finn (16:57.246)

We'll put Google in the show notes so that people can find that.

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Dustin (16:58.998)

Google, yeah. It's really not that complicated. It's a number ranging anywhere from zero to like 200, right? And then every decade falls in between. And you should find out, put your age in and where you should be at.

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Tom Finn (17:16.746)

Yeah, beautiful. So once we have that normalized range and we understand what that normalized range is, we want to live in that normalized range. And typically what I think I'm hearing is for most of us, we're going to be a little on the lower side, uh, if everything isn't functioning as it should.

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Dustin (17:34.798)

Yeah, I mean, so the direct, the things that you would wanna look at, and not everybody is at a low range, okay? Everybody's numbers are gonna decrease. It's typically one to 2% per year for a normal individual. All right, in extreme cases, it's 50% by the age 35. So there are ways to, outside of the blood panels, there are ways to kind of see if, you know, how do I feel? Your mood, your energy, how you feel during the day in that respect is gonna be a huge indicator.

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The second one is gonna be your libido. How do you feel, you know, how's your sexual performance? How do you feel? If you're a guy, are you experiencing any type of erectile dysfunction issues? Those are two huge things really quick. You can even have things like sleep disturbances, right? So if you're not sleeping effectively, that is a huge indicator of some sort of endocrine disruption going on. Not to mention it's a compounding effect because 70 to 90% of your hormones are also created during very specific times of your sleep cycle. So that's a whole nother thing on top of that. Of course, the idea is to always kind of mitigate those issues, mitigate the rate at which you're declining, and to stay in an optimal range. That's literally hormone science and the hormone business in a nutshell.

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Tom Finn (18:45.198)

So do you take your own product?

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Dustin (18:46.818)

A million percent. I was since 2014 and before I ever even bought this company, I was a user for years.

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Tom Finn (18:53.422)

Wow. So, so tell us the story of you finding this product and, uh, help us understand sort of your path on how you started using it and then how you, uh, got into owning the company.

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Dustin (19:04.29)

I will condense this story as best as I can. I will try and like fly through it, but because I think it's important to talk about kind of where I came from and stuff to understand why this is even important to me outside of just a business perspective. But I was a super unhealthy kid. I grew up in a single-parent household. It was just my mom and my grandma who raised us. And our whole entire existence was focusing on just getting to school, getting my mom to work and eating, right? We had whatever food we had and we had milk and water. And if we are super lucky, maybe we had a two-liter of soda here and there, it would last for all of 90 minutes if that. And we were just happy to get by. There was no education and there hardly isn't even to this day of parents in nutrition for their children. You have to have somebody who's a psychopath like me, who's like really into nutrition and really focused on like the family and what we're doing for my kids and stuff like that. But that's not normal because it wasn't in my house. And I know I've been to plenty of my other friend's houses and it was never normal that year. So I was a very unhealthy kid. That unhealthy kid grew up to an unhealthy adult and I had very poor habits, extremely poor. I was a 20-something who paid for college, never really went, but would rather party and smoke and do awful things. So that's how those things lead to that. Now, I was very lucky and I had somebody to come into my life and go, hey, why don't you stop acting like an idiot and took me into the gym, showed me some things and it really changed my life because I had nothing like that. At a point in my life, back then in my early 20s, I didn't have any path, I didn't have any direction, I had no purpose. I believe that gave me something purposeful, that gave me something to do, to learn about and I spent everything I could to learn about human physiology and nutrition.

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And one thing leads to another and you end up with a mentor and then you're working somewhere and I ended up, you know, working for a gym for a, uh, an ex-Olympic to Catholic who taught me all kinds of cool stuff. And that started a snowball effect. And, um, it started my love for fitness and human performance, which led me into other gyms and, um, operating other human, like other guys facilities did very well, got picked up by a national franchise, what are their locations here? And Tampa, Florida to run their sales and marketing departments. And we sold training for collegiate athletes, professional athletes, we worked in football. So I worked with agents and combine prep and all kinds of crazy stuff. And then that led to another venture of mine where I ended up opening my own facilities. And the reason why I'm telling you all this and kind of cramming this on here is because even from the jump of me taking over my first facility, I found this lab here in Florida of these very specific formulas that I used and that a lot of the gym population used. And then I brought them with me to my career in professional athletics and collegiate training and use it with the athletes and those guys. And then I brought them along with me when I opened up my first gym. And all of those different populations were different human beings of different ages, different physical outputs, different goals realistically, and different lifestyles and they worked congruently through them all. So like I knew that there was something here and I loved them and I took them and I knew basics about them back then, but as time progresses and you have wins, you have successes and failures in business and different business ventures, I was exiting one of them at a certain time, it wasn't working out. And I was looking for my next project. I have a list of

mentors and much guys that are way more successful than I am, that I've garnered along the way who were interested in the projects that I would be participating in. And I went to the number one on the list and said, hey, I have this idea. I think if we really wanted to, we could go in here and buy this company. And that's exactly what I did. I kind of had a mole within the organization that we wanted to purchase to identify their operations how things were going from an internal perspective on their end, if there were any opportunities available, and there absolutely were. And so I'm just a guy that, if I want something, I'll figure it out. And I kind of walked in, and we had a deal done within three weeks, inked, transferred some cash, and that was in 2018. And it's been about five years, and now we've taken it from a very small regional company, and now we're in probably over… I think we're in over 40 countries in the world and we have physicians internationally who provide our products and it's been a pretty wild ride with everything in between. I said I was gonna make it condensed. That's my condensed version. Imagine if I continued. Continued.

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Tom Finn (24:11.374)

I think that's a pretty good condensed version. I, what I'm hearing in there is, um, number one, that you figured out your purpose, which is so important for people to do, because if you can't figure out your purpose, you just waffle and bounce from job to job bounce from relationships, relationship. And what I think I heard you say is I found my purpose. I knew that it was in fitness, health, overall human wellbeing. And I wanted to figure out how to use that tool to make other people's lives better.

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Dustin (24:39.798)

A million percent. I mean, I was unemployable, Tom, before I had this kind of paradigm change. And I was very lucky, by the way, because I was young, and so when this change happened, remember, I'm pretty much unemployable. So I had plenty of time, I had plenty of time on my hands to do everything I could to learn gradually and to identify individuals who I could learn from, I think was more important.

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Tom Finn (24:41.483)

Yeah. So how do you rank mentorship as an impact in your life?

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Dustin (25:11.586)

Man, huge. I don't know how to give it a quantifiable metric, but I would say that it has, I've been really lucky with mentorship. I have had really good mentors. I didn't have a strong father figure in my life. My dad is not a bad guy. He didn't do anything crazy. He just wasn't around, right? I grew up very separate. I grew up 2000 miles away from the guy. So, you know, we weren't hanging out all the time. And other than a few phone calls and some visitation here and there, that's, that's what our relationship was. So I didn't have any of that. So when I had my first mentor, who was the gentleman who was the Olympic to Catholic, um, you know, just having a guy that was willing to invest in me. And teach me things. I mean, the guy taught me how to like, well, I didn't have any of that, right? I, I didn't have any of those things. I was willing to, and I did, I, I worked for him for free for a long time. I would clean his garbage cans and clean the gym. And he taught me to fix stuff. And that's what I did. And I invested all my time with him. So I learned a lot from him. And frankly, if you're an entrepreneur and you're in this quote-unquote business journey, you're gonna have probably more failures than you have successes. And I've had a few. And the first thing I did, I'll be honest with you, I had a massive one in, which was great. Cause honestly it set me up for a to know everything I should never do again. And I think it really helped in my existing enterprise. But the, you know, I had a huge blowout and a huge failure of a facility that I opened up, which was my first monster project, too big if I should say, it started way too big. And I walked out of that building one day after a meeting and the first person I did was call my mentor. And yo, what do I do? What do I do? What should I do? What do I say? How do I get out of this without destroying my entire life? That was the first call that I made So that my attorney who's one of my mentors now? So if that tells you anything, it's a it's a huge thing. I think it's a massive advantage because If you look online and I'm in my late 30s But you know I hire guys that are a lot younger than me and I am very active on social media we have a very social media dominant business the is these people are conning individuals on setting up mentorships and like charging them crazy amounts of monies and people are flying all over these place for different masterminds or coaching things because that's how important they are to people. And I think the organic ones are probably a lot better than the ones you're gonna buy on the internet, but I think they're massively important. And I can't imagine that I would have a level of success if you wanna call it that of whatever I am today without having a very key list of gentlemen that have pulled me through a lot of my failures and helped me probably avoid a lot of failures as well.

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Tom Finn (28:18.526)

Yeah, look, training, coaching, mentorship, all have places in our lives and all have different points in which we need to utilize them. And quite frankly, it speeds up the time horizon to success. The more people that you can put around you that have carved this path before you or a similar path, the more that you can speed up your timeline to success. You're going to fail. Like you said, you're going to fail, but you're going to fail a little easier and land a little softer when your buddy's done it before and he's showing you the way and your lawyer's a mentor, right? I mean, it just, it just makes life a little bit easier when you've got mentor relationships as for the coaching thing, there are, um, some fabulous coaches out there and executive coaching has been around for 40 years. The problem with executive coaching is the price point is too high and there's too many copycats that don't actually know what they're doing. Um, that are great, very slick salespeople.

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Dustin (28:51.45)

Million percent. Agreed.

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Tom Finn (29:16.406)

Um, that, that put people into masterminds, as you said, and charge an arm and a leg or one-on-one coaching that charges an arm and a leg. It doesn't actually get you any results. So that could be said really though, about any industry I would imagine in yours as well.

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Dustin (29:27.426)

No, I agree with you. I would agree with you. It's a million percent. I should have prefaced that with saying, um, coaching is extremely important. I mean, I made a lot of money in my coaching early in my career and it's. Doing a little bit of, of research on the individual that you're going to get coaching from and making sure they've actually accomplished something that you're trying to accomplish or have the credibility to do. So I should have prefaced to that prior to my statement, but, um, no, I listen.

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I'm always in the market for new coaching and new mentorship because sometimes your mentors end up turning out to be your business partners. I have one right now. And we're learning, now we're learning things together. Right? And so it's kind of like, okay, who's next? Who can, you know, I need to learn about this stuff that we have yet to experience before, right? So I'm always on the lookout actually. I spoke to one of my attorneys about that two weeks ago and he's like, you have a great business coach you should wanna talk about. And his first thing he says is, you're gonna have to pay for it. So I agree with you, Tom.

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Tom Finn (30:37.07)

So tell me about a time that you really stubbed your toe and what were the steps that you took to swim out of a real downfall or failure as you put it earlier.

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Dustin (30:49.53)

Um, okay. So I'll speak on one of the. My most expensive failure. I'll do that one. So I opened up a facility after I left the, the performance athletics space. After I left the football and the training space, I was going to open up my own concept and facility. And the idea is I had run gyms for other individuals before my methods did very well for them. I didn't own them. I made them a lot of money. I did it repeatedly. So I wanted to, I was like, okay, cool. Well, I want to do this on my own. Now I can do this for myself or my own brand. And so that's what I was going to do. And I wanted to skip the brick by brick building mentality of, yeah.

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Tom Finn (31:45.11)

Steps. You wanted to skip steps. Yeah.

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Dustin (31:47.382)

Right, I wanted to immediately, and I thought I could, all right, but I was convinced I could actually, that I could skip all of the, not that, not hard work, but skip years of kind of building what works and what doesn't and take right on, take on the top names in the business, right? So this was in the group fitness space. I had created a concept, it was great, incredible branding and I had help in these areas too. I'm not saying I'm taking credit for all this stuff, but a very scalable, great concept, because we built this business from the ground up to know that we were, because we were gonna try and take on the big guys right from the jump, right? So everything had to be perfectly scaled. I mean, I drew out everything from the gym floor to the equipment. Everything could be copy and pasted. Give me the right, you know, I know exactly what type of real estate I need to find, exactly the type of square footage, how we build this. I mean, everything was built to spec for that.

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Now that was a great idea. However, when we were thinking about taking on these big guys, it was like, okay, well, we have to play the same way they play and we're gonna spend tons of cash. I mean, every dollar I could get my hand on, on build outs and we definitely got out of control and really I'm trying to use, people probably can't, I'm not gonna be able to see any, but I'm trying to really use the appropriate terminology here. But we got really out of control with spending on everything from the tiles on the floor to the ceiling tiles, to the toilets, to the showers. I mean, the toilets, I mean, this is a startup, right? But somehow that word kind of like completely escaped our brains. I was spending $2,000 on toilets, I spent $14,000 on a front desk. I spent, I mean, I think we spent 10 grand just on lighting consultations. I… Man, I don't even remember with the tile floor cost, but it had to be too special and slip coefficient, like all of this crazy stuff. The entire buildup from the ground up as a complete disaster from the sense of um, permitting and city issues and all kinds of stuff. I mean, I was in way over my head. We spent every dollar we possibly could. We did not have any money coming in and you know, I should have spent. 90% of that money on marketing, how I know how to market now and not leaving it to the quote-unquote experts who was a whole nother thing. And the marketing approach was awful and terrible. And the concept was great. I still know and I still know it would work to this day. It was the execution was absolutely backwards. And it cost me that business. I was very fortunate in the sense of being able to escape that without massive financial ruin or paying that off for the rest of my life, but it taught me everything to not do again. And that is exactly what I applied to the existing business that we're in. When we bought that company, when we bought this company was to start small, have, think big, build small, always remain profitable and never out-kick your coverage. And man, what a way to live of completely two different opposites. The other one, I think we went into debt like $690,000. Okay. The like starting off, I think we, I think that was the total losses. I mean, which is, it might not be a lot of money to some people, but I was 32 years old, 33. I mean, I had to sell all my furniture. I mean, the only thing I was late, I'd never been late on rent. I was late on my rent for three months. The only thing I paid was my car payment. I faked my way through the whole thing, right? Nobody knew, but I mean, that was, yeah.

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Tom Finn (35:30.838)

Yeah, but hold on a second. You could talk to a billionaire, Dustin, and a billionaire would say, yeah, losing 700 grand, that's a lot of money. I mean, so for a regular guy, I mean, that's a heck of a lot of money.

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Dustin (35:37.986)

Yeah. I mean, and I didn't have it. So yeah, no, I know. And that, um, you know, that was a tough one. That was, that was tough cause I, I put my heart and soul into that and every idea. I mean, it was literally a splash. It was just a, an explosion of my entire training methodology and brain and braining all on this, you know, this physical piece of canvas. And it was, it was a huge blow to my ego. It was a huge blow to, you know, financially. I mean, it was, it sucked. But I will tell you, I wouldn't change one thing about it because man, going through that the hard way and going through that the wrong way, we did it, we pretty much did it the exact opposite with the acquisition of this company. And I will tell you, like, I tell people this now, the rate of growth, if you just grow slow actually, and you just stack that brick, and I know you're gonna like nod and stuff, but it's very important, like the… The brick-by-brick mentality of stacking each win on top of themselves small and just letting it compound is so powerful. I mean, we made, we did very well very quickly actually, once we kind of figured out those, those things and uh, you know, I was always a, a swing for the fences type guy. My attorney would call me, I'm a, I'm a big score type of guy. Like I always, and we've had some big wins, but switching that mentality of trying to like always step up to the plate and swing for the fences. Your batting average is going to be trash doing that. But the guy who can hit base hits every single game all the time and can be counted on his career. He's going to have a 30-year-long career in, in baseball, not swinging for the fences, come in as a big draft pick. And then he disappears, uh, you know, gets cut from the team, disappears, and no one ever hears from him again. So switching up that mentality and focusing on how to build a business around the brick-by-brick mentality, one sale at a time, and then learning the systems, how to create that, and then scaling that, it's just a way better way to live. I don't lose sleep every night. The bank accounts are solid. We're always operating profitably. I mean, it's been a big change and it's been great. I love it, to be honest with you.

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Tom Finn (37:49.71)

Well, I appreciate you sharing that story so much because most people look at venture capital money and the big bang and swinging for the fences and think that that's the way to go. The problem with funding with a loss on your P&L month over month over month is you set yourself up for a timeline. You know, if you've got 10 million or 20 million or a hundred million, it doesn't matter what your number is. If you are building, you got a fuse and you are running against the clock.

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Dustin (38:15.31)

You have a fuse.

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Tom Finn (38:19.634)

Every night and that is what causes entrepreneurs to like you said lose sleep, build stress levels that are high.

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Dustin (38:25.722)

Desperation is a stinky cologne, Tom. Nobody wants to buy if it's called sales breath. Nobody wants to buy from the stinky guy. Ha ha ha.

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Tom Finn (38:32.459)

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And people can see it a mile away. But the problem is, it's not sexy, as you said, to build brick by brick, or in our society, we haven't made it sexy to build brick by brick. It's an old-school way of thinking about business. But the reality is you're 100% right. We have to build businesses that have strong core fundamentals. And that comes through time and effort and energy and tweaking your organizational structure little by little by little so you can grow revenue and then of course grow your EBITDA at the bottom line. So I'm with you man, this is one of the most important lessons I've personally learned as well along my path. I used to wanna be the guy with the $100 million raise. No more, I don't even wanna talk to that guy. I wanna be strong in my fundamentals, I wanna grow clients every month and I want a sustainable model so that Tom and Dustin can sleep it.

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Dustin (39:28.002)

Listen, I hear you. I mean when you take on not that taking on VC money is bad I mean if that's if that's your play and that's when you go for it. I am I never I'm not exactly a And I'm not saying I wouldn't ever you know, sell any of my brands. We do build brands specifically with the intent to sell them bio protein not necessarily being one of them, but You know the I didn't always my business partner will say, you know, Dustin you've never really played well with others You're not exactly the corporate type

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Tom Finn (39:35.746)

Yeah, for sure.

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Dustin (39:57.674)

And he's not wrong. When you take on a VC or that type of infusion of cash, you now have a boss. I've had plenty of bosses, right? I'm not with them now, so it is what it is.

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Tom Finn (40:06.318)

That's right. I love it, man. So, uh, when you think about sort of bioprotein technology, um, the, the next steps kind of leave us with the vision of, of the future for this company and, and where you'd like to see it go.

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Dustin (40:28.674)

Well, I have two different visions. I have a vision of a personal vision of what I want the company to stand for and who do I want it to be, which I believe that it is just on a much larger scale. And then I have a fiduciary responsibility to my team. Um, I do have a, you know, a partner and in from the business aspect of what those goals are. So the, I'll do the, the last fun one first. And that's, um, you know, my intent and purpose of this company is to build it to a nine figure valuation with the type of business that we do.

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It's not terribly hard. Well, I'm saying this, but it's not terribly hard to do. These companies trade at about 10 to 13 X of net income. So it's, you know, if you have a net, if you have a net income of a million dollars a year, you're a $10 million valuation. So that's how a lot of these companies are building, you know, $30 million net income companies and they're selling for a hundred million dollars. Those acquisitions take place every day. Customer, consumer product groups. Then the, so my intent and purpose is to grow this company to a hundred million dollar valuation. That is what we are attempting to do from a business standpoint. And I do believe we can do that with inside of a decade. The more personal growth of the company is, I'm a 38 year old guy. I got a kid, I got a wife. I'm a user, I get high on my own supply, if you will. And I do know what it feels like to feel like trash.

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I know what it feels like to not look like how you want to look in the mirror. I know what it feels like to, to kind of feel down in the dumps of when you, you know, when you look at yourself either from introspection, you know, from the inside or from the outside. And I started my career early on in the fitness space, even when I ran other people's gyms of training individuals. And that individual was always the same. I knew my niche market when I was 28 years old, 29 years old, they are 44 years old. They are.

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I would say they're on the affluent side of at least they are gainfully employed. They got a family. They have a marriage that is, you know, a lot of times is no longer existent, right? It's, it's a crumbling marriage and a lot of the reasons being they've spent their whole life, you know, building their companies, building their teams, working, providing, um, take care of their kids, trying to keep their marriage together, not taking care of themselves. And I don't want guys or gals for that matter to feel that way. Like,

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Dustin (42:50.134)

You should be able to feel really great about yourself. You should be able to be optimized You should be able to look in the mirror and like who you're looking back at You should enjoy that and it sucks when you don't have that whether it's a physical thing or an emotional or mental thing And one of the things that I was able to get through to a lot of people years ago When I was doing personal training in my 20s was They enjoyed coming and training with me. They enjoyed when they started losing weight, they enjoy the way they felt. It ended up going away from being how they looked. And they just really liked being capable human beings and at least have something to do that they were, it was building themselves again. And now we're able to do that with BioPro Plus, but we're able to scale not, you know, my eight hours a day or eight clients a week to, I mean, all over the world. And, and it's fun to talk about professional athletes and it's fun to talk about.

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You know, all these cool advances in medicine, but the best testimonials we get are guys, I'll use one very specifically. He's a world champion combat sports athlete, a jujitsu guy. And you would think his testimonial would be about, oh man, I won this title or this medal. It was zero of that. His wife goes, hey man, since you've been taking that, you're a better father. And the reason being is not because he's a better parent but just from being able to increase his energy levels outside of running his jujitsu academy and his training and all these things he has to do to maintain his business and his life, he now can come home and he still has the energy to play with his kids and watch them while his wife goes and does what she's got to do or together as a family. And like that's life changing stuff, man. Who cares about the medals and the podiums and whatever you're doing. This guy, I mean, this guy looks, you know, can look at you and say, it makes me a better father. That's a, I mean, that's a monster win. I want to be able to help guys like that. And again, women as well, all over the earth, not just, you know, a few people here and there. And that's what we've been able to do with this company and that's what we wanna continue to do.

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Tom Finn (44:53.762)

Dustin, I love it, man. I love the vision, I love the heart, I love the energy. You are truly empowering people locally and across the globe to live better lives, feel healthier. You're focused on physical and mental health, which is such a huge part and so critical for all of us to remain focused on in our overall wellbeing. So thank you for the work that you're doing and much success getting to the $100 million exit. I know you're gonna get there.

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Dustin (45:23.674)

Thanks, Tom. I'm just a lucky guy in the right place at the right time.

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Tom Finn (45:27.943)

Well, look, if somebody wants to track down this lucky guy at the right place at the right time, how are they going to find you?

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Dustin (45:34.098)

Uh, why I always point people to our social media pages. The, um, the Instagram is kind of really where we live and you can see the brand, what it looks like, what it feels like. And we don't do any like hard pushes or sales or gimmicky stuff. It's just, these are guys that just use the product and education and stuff like that, and you can DM us, you can, whatever, if you're looking for a physician in your area, send us your zip code, we'll point you in the right direction, or you can go and get it yourself or check us out online on our website, which is bioproteintech.com. B-I- The Instagram handles the exact same bioproteintech. B-I- And we look forward to hearing from you.

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Tom Finn (46:12.258)

Gorgeous, my man. We'll leave it right there. We'll put everything in the show notes. Can't thank you enough for being on the show today. Thanks for doing what you do.

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Dustin (46:18.702)

Thanks, Tom. Appreciate your time.