A cancer diagnosis causes a trauma so powerful, it splits your life around that single point in time: the Before-Why, and the After-Why. Breast cancer survivor Diane Simard was the classic type A, small business owner, charging at 100 miles an hour when she received the diagnosis. She shaved her head before the hair fell out because she needed to be in control. Imagine spending $200 every six weeks to have your hair colored and cut for years – and now it’s on the floor. But Diane held her chin up and said to herself: “I’m going to save probably about $1,000 this year.”

Diane Simard seed-funded the Center for Oncology Psychology (COPE), an organization that continues to change lives for the better. She hopes that with her efforts, more women would not have to go through the humiliation of feeling raw and naked in front of random passersby.

We’re incredibly fortunate. We’ve been welcomed into the home of Diane Simard. We’re going to have a bit of a different podcast in that we’re going to talk about before-why and after-why experience. Diane, thanks for taking the time and extending the hospitality of your home.

My pleasure, Bob. Thank you for being here.

For the folks, if you would thumbnail sketch a little bit of background and then we’ll dig in.

I wear many hats. I’m part Angel investor, businesswoman, philanthropist, a breast cancer survivor, and I’m also very passionate about bringing attention to the psychological impact that a cancer diagnosis can have on an individual.

It’s interesting when we were talking before we started the episode at the various directions we could go. You were the classic type A, hard-charging, small business owner, development person, 100 miles an hour, and you had an event. I don’t know if it was a routine exam or what, but take us to that experience for you.

I was 49 and a half years old and maybe it’s this way from men too, but certainly for women, turning 50 is a big deal. There are a lot of changes that happen to our body during that time. At 49 and a half years old in January 2015, I had my mind set that the next phase of my life was going to be a lot more peaceful. The previous decade had been very challenging business-wise. I had invested in a lot of startup companies and had not had much success. The success that I’ve had came from those companies that I was not involved with.

My ego had been hurt, but I was ready to live peacefully for things to be a lot calmer. I served on the boards of directors of several of the companies that I invested in. I was on the board of a bank that failed, and so the stress level had been monumental. I did what I was told to do, I’d had annual mammograms since I was 40 because I’d had a benign cyst when I was 40. It was routine and I didn’t expect anything would be different that year, but I got a phone call finally saying that the results were concerning.

I was called back for what’s called a diagnostic mammogram and also an ultrasound test. It was during that ultrasound test that the ultrasound technician let it slip. I’m an inquisitive person. I have a journalism degree. I’m always asking “Why,” the questions. She sat me up and she pointed it out and to me it looks like snow on an ultrasound screen. I said, “How can you even tell what that means?” She said “I’m not supposed to say anything but it doesn’t look good.” That was the day that I likely suspected something was wrong. The radiologist came in, he didn’t even want to look at anything, and he said, “We’re going to have to have a biopsy to determine that.” All of a sudden my morning went from, “Got to get to the office. We got to do these things now” to saying, “I might have breast cancer.” I didn’t mentally prepare

There is a move towards probiotics that has resulted in a so-called yogurt craze: people are stocking their fridges with pints of yogurt and with bottles of Yakult, a Japanese probiotic drink. But isn’t probiotic food just traveling through your system without sticking to the wall of your gut? How do we know that probiotics is even doing anything? These are logical questions that microbio research is trying to answer. Martha Carlin, CEO of The Biocollective and Biocollective Research, says that we’re actually more microbial than we are human. The ratio now is about two to one cell count of microbes versus human cells. They focus on gut health and the human microbiome composed of trillions of bacteria, fungi, viruses and archaea living in and on our body. The Biocollective connects their membership and the collected sample with the research world in order to accelerate discovery in the microbiome space and create solutions for gut health overall.

We’re incredibly fortunate we have Martha Carlin on the show. She’s the CEO of the BioCollective and the BioCollective Research. Martha, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Tell me a little bit about your company and who you serve?

The BioCollective is a company that’s focused on gut health and the human microbiome. For people who don’t know what the human microbiome is, that’s the trillions of bacteria, fungi, viruses and archaea that live in and on our body. We’re actually more microbial than we are human. The ratio now that they’ve agreed on is about two to one cell count of microbes versus human cells. The BioCollective connects our membership and the sample that we collect with the research world to try to accelerate discovery in the microbiome space and solutions to gut health overall. We have both a business to consumer side of the business and a business to business side.

I did a bit of homework before we did the show and for the audience that go, “Tell me more so I understand,” but before we go into the why of understand about the BioCollective, how did you get started? Are you a biologist by training?

I am not a biologist by training. I’m actually an accountant by training, but accounting is one of the original systems and I’m a systems thinker. In 2002, my young, 44-year-old husband was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and I looked at how science and medicine was approaching that problem. I said, “That’s never going to solve the problem or understand why. This is a complex problem and you have to take a systems approach.” I started teaching myself science on the side and over thirteen years, I started with the food supply, how we grow our food, nutrition, and then I moved into the human systems and got back into chemistry and biology and molecular biology and genetics and epigenetics. In 2014, I read a book by Dr. Martin Blaser of NYU called Missing Microbes and that was a big light bulb for me. He was talking about the age of antibiotics and how we have seen this rise in chronic diseases since antibiotics have been ubiquitous in the environment either from human prescribing or through use in animal feed and animal husbandry.

About two or three months after that, I met a young man who was looking for an investor in a company called Pure Cultures. His background was fermentation chemistry. I thought, “I’ll invest in that and I can learn a little bit about fermentation

Greyledge Technology is a biotech company that works with the patient’s own tissue samples. They take a tissue from you, typically blood or bone marrow tissue, and they manipulate that into a sample in a therapeutic that’s placed back either via injection, or as part of the surgical technique where our surgeon implants it. There are therapeutic cells within these preparations that can be used to promote and support natural healing.

We’re incredibly fortunate to have Dr. Dave Karli on the show. He is the CEO of Greyledge. Greyledge is located out of Vail, Colorado in Denver. Dave is responsible for all aspects of the company development, including the integration of a strong team of professionals to support Greyledge’s innovative approach to regenerative medicine. A bit of background about Dave; after attending med school at the University of Maryland, Dr. Karli, completed his residency at Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School. Subsequently, he joined the facility at Harvard serving as an attending physician with the Department of PM&R at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital as well as working in the department of Orthopedic Surgery at Mass General Hospital.

After joining the Steadman Clinic in Vail, Colorado in 2003, Dr. Karli began to adopt the use of autologous-based therapies that were emerging in the field of regenerative medicine. He has continued to lead the effort required to refine the practice of regenerative medicine. He has published pivotal clinical results and lectured extensively. His practice has grown substantially and includes treating elite-level and professional athletes. As a result, Dr. Karli has been featured in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, ESPN Magazine and the Denver Magazine. Dr. Karli recognized early on that understanding the composition of regenerative biologic preparations used in treating his patients would be critical to refining his practice of medicine. He also realized that a one size fits all approach to creating the therapeutic preparations wouldn’t meet the need for an evidence-based precision medicine approach. In support of his concept for regenerative medicine, he completed the COLA Laboratory Director training course and obtained his MBA at Daniels College of Business, University of Denver. Greyledge has achieved sustained profitability ready for scalable expansion. Dr. Karli is positioning the company to maintain its unique technology platform offering by tracking regulatory activity, advancing biologic sample analytics and quality measures, and creating protocols that allow for customization of patient biologic preparations.

Dave, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor to be here.

What is Greyledge Technology?

Greyledge is an early-phase biotech company that works with the patient’s own tissue samples. You mentioned the word autologous earlier, a lot of people may not know what that word means. Autologous means from the self. It’s your tissues that are put back into you. We’ll take a tissue from you, typically blood or bone marrow tissue, and we manipulate that into a sample, a therapeutic, that’s placed back either via injection or as a part of a surgical technique where our surgeon implants it. I hesitate to use the word stem cell. There are stem cells in these preparations. That’s not a very accurate term to be using anymore, it’s been antiquated, but there are therapeutic cells within these preparations that we can use to promote and support natural healing. Our company promotes healing at the end of the day. We apply it towards orthopedic...

When you’re running an organization, you’re obviously going to face challenges that you’d rather delegate to an expert solutions third party. One such company is Online Advisor, which specializes in providing immediate solutions to your problems. For example, advanced bookkeeping or accounting is not a forte for many small business owners. John Harris, CEO of Online Advisor, runs the site like a streamlined online resource where folks can quickly retrieve what they need and focus on higher-level concerns. Online Advisor is an excellent website that serves entrepreneurs, business owners, business leaders, and organizational leaders, helping them boost their professional lives.

We’re incredibly fortunate to have John Harris of Online Advisor on the show. John, welcome to the show. 

Thank you.

Tell me a little bit about your business and who you serve. 

Online Advisor is a website and it’s OnlineAdvisor.com. It’s a website that’s a serves entrepreneurs, business owners, business leaders, organizational leaders. It provides them all kinds of resources to grow their professional lives, as well as our personal lives and also to help grow their organizations.

Let’s drill down a little bit and get specific about some of the applications that the business owner is looking for help with that you provide solutions for. 

We’re providing solutions for a lot of challenges when you’re running an organization. What we’re working on is providing the solutions that will grow business. For example, it may be a bookkeeping question or a bookkeeping issue, we work on some of that. There’s folks that don’t understand bookkeeping or don’t understand accounting and so we answer someone’s questions. We also point them in the direction where they can get the answers through other sources or other advisers. We work on that. For me, I specialize in building systems and refining things and making things streamlined so that folks can get where they need to go quickly and efficiently so they can focus on what’s important for the organization.

For a lot of folks who are looking at starting a business and you have your dream and you have your core competencies, but maybe accounting’s not it or maybe marketing is not your thing or some of those areas. Looking at your site, it’s menu-driven is all were demand-driven, if you need a certain piece of help. Tell us a little bit about the genesis, the why you put this together. 

In 1998, I was able to start my own business and that business was a graphic design company. We did brochures and catalogs. The internet was starting to come into play and so we were looking at websites and building websites. When I started my business, I went to a financial advisor and asked him and said, “How do you start a business?” He said, “I can help you.” As it turned out he could help me, but it was in a limited sense because what he knew was investing and insurance and all that stuff, but a lot of the other questions I had, he couldn’t answer. It was at times challenging for me to find what I needed to find. After that point, after I talked to him, I learned some good lessons but I learned some hard lessons. What I thought I could do is depend on him to answer my questions and to get the information I needed. It turned out there were questions he couldn’t answer.

For example, I had some great business ideas and I want investors and I wanted to do all this great stuff, but what ended up happening was although he thought he could do it, he didn’t know how to do it because that wasn’t part of his core competency....

People know about MRI, CT, SPECT and PET: all acronyms of machines that kick out imaging that makes it possible to examine what’s wrong inside the brain. And when patients do receive the bad news, they deserve no less than CereScan’s advanced brain imaging software for predictive diagnoses – arguably the best in the US. John Kelley, CEO of CereScan, leads his company in taking patient information regarding certain brain disorders and combining that with other factors in their life. With this data, CereScan can quickly come up with a good, predictive diagnosis for whatever their problem could be. Patients then have the ability to start correlating diagnostic data to life events, pharmaceutical and genetic predisposition for certain conditions. CereScan sheds a new light into how we might be able to treat brain diseases: conditions once considered taboo and incurable.

We’re incredibly fortunate to have John Kelley, CEO of CereScan. You’re going to be fascinated by the story. John, welcome to the show. 

Bob, thank you for having us on. It’s an honor to be on here and be able to talk to your audience. It’s a terrific opportunity for us.

For the folks that don’t know what CereScan is, could you give them a thumbnail sketch of your company and who you serve? 

In the United States, we’re arguably the best company in the country that takes patient information regarding certain brain disorders and combining that with other factors in their life to be able to come up with something that’s predictive or a good diagnosis for whatever their problem is. We are the best at doing that.

For the folks that are interested in the technology space, what are the tools that you bring to the table to arrive at the data that you collect?

We’re an imaging company. People know about MRI, CT, SPECT and PET. All of those acronyms are about machines. Those machines kick out information in the form of imaging, things people might call X-rays. When you have the imaging side of things to be able to look and see what’s wrong inside of the brain, you then have the ability to start correlating that to life events, to pharmaceutical things, to genetic predisposition for certain conditions. We start combining all that information and it’s been available for a number of years in each of those categories.

There’s a notion of what you guys do and there’s the machinery like we’ve all seen on TV, it looks like a big doughnut that they put you through on a table. The part that was not apparent to me was the quantity of data that’s produced. You had an analogy from the data produced versus some of the other data that’s collected around on the planet. Can you draw the parallel between the data that you collect on the PET or the SPECT?

Yes. The information we will get out of cameras start approaching millions of data points per brain. We’re able to combine that with data around pharmaceutical usage, around blood types, proteins that might be in the blood, genetic information. Testing data, we’re combining millions of pieces of information and on the fly or instantaneously being able to correlate all that to see if there’s commonality across all of those data elements. It’s truly a super computing capability that we possess today.

You were talking about the Hubble telescope as an analogy. The Hubble collects not images. We all see the fantastic pictures that it had come up with, but that’s a result of data collection, is it not?

That’s correct. Hubble is a phenomenal piece of technology that’s taking invisible...

Nowadays, getting your idea to IRS-approved 501(c)(3) is a pain in the a**. The unyielding bureaucratic obstacles can test the limits of those looking to process their IRS compliant non-profit. In the midst of red tape, we’re lucky to have companies like Yippiekiyay, whose mission is to ease the inconvenience as much as possible. Christian Lefer, CEO of Yippiekiyay, describes it as an attitude of empowering non-profits by fighting the bad guys. The way that translates is whether you’re starting a nonprofit or getting fundraising compliant, which is a difficult process as well, Yippikiyay will get you from idea to IRS-approved 501(c)(3) in less than an hour for under a thousand dollars – and you’ll never talk to a government agent or lawyer!

We’re incredibly fortunate to have Christian LeFer. He’s from Yippiekiyay. He’s the CEO and he’s going to tell us about his company and what it does. Christian, it’s all yours.

Yippiekiyay is an attitude of empowering people and shedding light in the darkness, fighting the bad guys, making the world a better place by helping people get past all of the bureaucratic obstacles to changing their community through a non-profit. The way that translates is whether you’re starting a nonprofit or getting fundraising compliant, which is a difficult process as well, we’ll get you from idea to IRS-approved 501(c)(3) in less than an hour for under $1,000 and you’ll never talk to a government agent or lawyer.

I think about the folks that are out there that have intent that want to go and help the planet, and a great deal of those ideas, like many others, die on the kitchen table. They die because they can’t figure out how to get from A to B. You basically take out that barrier to entry for a budding 501(c)(3).

If you look at all the great movements in history, there’s been a little bit of moral outrage to power them. With this one back in 2009 or 2010, I volunteered to help start a 501(c)(3), and you know how difficult can that be, give me that paperwork. I welcomed the challenge. When I got a letter from the IRS and called in, they said, “Don’t worry, it’ll take about a year for 501(c)(3) to get approved. I questioned, “What in the world? If I wanted to start a used car lot, it would be twenty minutes at the Secretary of State’s website, $50 or $100.” I couldn’t imagine why even attorneys were looking at an eight, ten, or twelve-month cycle to get approved. I took that letter and I called about ten or fifteen extensions north and south of that phone number and I begged, cajoled, bribed. I promised to send chocolates, whatever I could get out of that person on the other end of the line who is processing the files because it was reaching somewhere into that exempt organizations department. At the end of the day, I put together all my research and tried it out and we started getting approvals in 30 days for people long before there was even a company or a process or software conceived, and I thought this is something people could use.

In the midst of Hurricane Harvey and the effects down in South Texas, I think about all the outreach. You’ve got athletes and luminaries raising funds and all I can think of is the bureaucratic nightmare. Somebody raised $4 million or $5 million on donations and gone. How’s that working in the 501(c)(3) space?

What many nonprofits aren’t even unaware of, let alone people who want to start them, is that say you have a little local neighborhood nonprofit and you’re providing some school lunches and maybe some support to people in the neighborhood. You’re in Beaumont or you’re in Port...

Contractor’s Guide to Success Start It, Build It, Grow It with Randy Brothers, the CEO of CJ and Elite Roofing as well as head coach of The Roofing Academy.

He’s a third-generation contractor and business owner with over 15 years of contracting experience.

A natural born entrepreneur. Even as a little kid, I did various entrepreneurial endeavors from, you know, buying popsicles and Blow Pops in bulk, selling them to my friends on the school bus, to landscaping, doing lawn mowing, to a window cleaning company I started in college.

I mowed lawns to buy my first PlayStation. And then all the friends came over and played my PlayStation for two years. And then I ended up hiring them and having them help me mow lawns

I worked three jobs in college. I worked full-time and went to school full-time. I actually started…early on, as soon as I kinda knew I wanted to do business, I correlated, you know, my kinda natural ability to build things, and, you know, third generation contractor. I grew up kinda watching my grandpa and my dad, everything they wanted to fix or do around the house, they did it themselves. They built it themselves.

I basically went in blindly to this construction company and sat there for three hours with no experience, just trying to convince this owner of this company to hire me. And I basically offered my services for free just because I wanted to learn how to build a house.

I bought a boat. I had a house at age 23. I had two trucks at the time. And I was living on cloud nine.

I was all about myself and, you know, chasing girls, and doing whatever I can to just live it up and live the dream. But all the while, I wasn’t able to, one, pay attention to the market, which was gradually starting to turn and things were starting to change in overall construction, and real estate, and mortgage markets.

The whole bottom fell out and I was kinda caught holding the bag. I had a couple projects I had already started and working on, and I just was scrounging just to get through those. I was able to make it through there, but ultimately, I ended up losing everything.

You know, I kinda got right with the Lord, so to speak, if you will, and realized that, you know, faith and family trump everything. You know, so once I got to a place where I mentally was able to, “You know what? Like, it’s not about me. It’s about the other people in my life: faith, family and other people.”

So this hailstorm came, hit Denver. I was in Austin, Texas and my friend had called me, out of the blue, and was saying, “Hey, man. I remember you saying something about being in insurance and, you know, as an insurance adjuster. You still doing that?”

I was like, “Yeah, but I’m just in between assignments right now.” So he was like, “Hey, man. I...

Rope manufacturing and lesson learned from working safely at height with Loui McCurley, CEO Pigeon Mountain Industries

Coolest company on Earth

How Pigeon Mountain Industries started

What we do

How in the world did you get involved with a rope company?

Having a little bit of fear is not necessarily a bad thing

Traveling  around the world, stopping at different rescue organizations along the way, lessons learned.

Sitting on that standards committees for rope manufacturing, why?

The foundations of rope access

Definitely a growing industry

Transformation you see from the person pre-course(PMI), and the person that comes in here after they’ve graduated? What do you see?