How a Cancer Survivor Is Using AI to Disrupt the $6B Wellness Industry with Rob Rene

0:01John Lee Dumas:Boom, shake the room, Fire Nation, JLD here, and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. Today, we'll be breaking down how a cancer survivor is using AI to disrupt the$6 billion wellness industry. To drop these value bombs, I brought Rob Rene in the EO Fire studios. Rob spent 25 years in Fortune 500 enterprise tech before five near-death experiences, including cancer ignited a radical pivot to build Exodus Strong, a faith-based wellness company powered by AI. Today, we talk about rock bottom to reinvention, enterprise skills, startup game, AI chief of staff, riches in the niches, and oh, so much more.

0:40John Lee Dumas:The big thing of a sponsor in today's episode goes to Rob and our sponsors. Fire Nation, if you have a high-ticket offer and need more quality leads, Nexus Install is designed for you. We'll book you 8 to 20 qualified calls each month, then train you to run the system yourself. Email my team at john at eofire.com to learn more and see if Nexus is the right fit for you. Stop duct taping your business together. High Level runs your website, your funnels, email, automation, scheduling, payments, and memberships all in one place. And when you sign up at highlevelfire.com, you get a 30-day free trial plus my exclusive bonus stack that includes weekly office hours with me and much more.

1:20John Lee Dumas:Visit highlevelfire.com. Highlevelfire.com. Rob, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Hi, John. I'm so excited to be here, right? The thing I believe that most people disagree with is this. Your body is your business plan. Every entrepreneur I know obsesses over their product, right? Their funnel, their tech stack, their content strategy. almost none of them treat their physical body as the most important piece of the infrastructure in the company. They treat it like a rental car, something that they could beat on and neglect and then return at the end of the trip.

2:09I believed that for 25 years and it nearly killed me. Cancer finally forced me to look at it honestly. The contrarian truth is this. The fastest way to scale a business isn't to work harder. It's to build a body and a mind that can sustain that work. Everything downstream of that, right, your decisions, your stamina, your judgment, your ability to show up for your customers depends upon an operating system that nobody is investing in, your body. Most entrepreneurs, right, they won't agree with me until they get their own wake-up call. I've had five wake-up calls before I finally listened, right?

2:56So I want to help everybody else out. I'm trying to help people listen sooner than I did.

3:02John Lee Dumas:And I want to talk about that because you went from rock bottom to reinvention. I mean, a 25-year corporate career to multiple near-death experiences, of course, including cancer. How did that force you to walk away and start building something that truly mattered? Yeah, I spent 25 years in Fortune 500 sales, John. You know, successful by every metric the world measures. And, you know, big deals, bigger titles. You know, lifestyle looked great on LinkedIn. My body was keeping score. I literally nearly died, not once, but five times. Most people find that really hard to believe. When I was two years old, I wandered across a busy street in diapers.

3:46My mom found me at a convenience store across the street with my family dog standing by. Thank God for Honey, our dog. When I was seven, I slipped into a rushing creek, and I would have drowned if my brother hadn't pulled me upstream, because upstream there was a grate that would have pinned me and I would not have survived. And then in my teens, I ran through a glass door during a game of tag with our cousins. a sharp piece of glass penetrated my chest and stopped a quarter of an inch from my heart. It's just amazing. And then in college, at BYU, a four-ton truck hit me while I was out on a training run.

4:26That ended my Division I running career, which I thought I was going to do. That was my goal in life. But I would have suffocated on my own blood if my running partner hadn't cleared my airway. so God kept saving me every time people around me said the same thing God has a plan for this young man I just kept nodding politely and just going back to work for 25 years I did that and then my wake up call

4:56John Lee Dumas:the cancer came stage 3 malignant melanoma cancer on my ankle then spread into my lymph nodes And once melanoma gets into your lymph nodes, it's pretty dangerous. But as part of that process, I ended up on an operating table, and my heart literally stopped completely. But I was there for, you know, I was literally on that operating table by God's design. And the surgeon brought me back, and that was my fifth wake-up call. You know, that was the one that really finally, I finally just heard, right? I listened. I'm like, okay, I understand. I'm here for a reason. you know, because the first four had happened to me, you know, but the last one was I was an active participant in the fifth one.

5:43You know, I had one, I was the one who treated my body that way for so long I'd ignored it and it was giving out on me. So I walked away from the corporate job and I started Exodus Strong, you know, not because I wanted to run a company. You know, I was literally tired of companies. I started it because I couldn't find wellness products that actually matched what God was teaching me about health. and how he designed the human body to heal. So I just, I started building the solutions. And then other people started asking me, where could they buy them? And that's a short version of how I got here.

6:19John Lee Dumas:It's very powerful. And I know a lot of people are listening right now and they're maybe in corporate America, maybe they're an enterprise of some sorts and they just don't think they can become an entrepreneur. They don't think they can get into the startup game. So I wanna talk about enterprise skills and the startup game. So how did your Fortune 500 sales experience, Rob, translate into building a startup? And what advantages did that give you early on? Yeah, there were three specific advantages, in my opinion. You know, the first is, you know, I'd already failed at selling things nobody wanted, right?

6:53After 25 years in enterprise sales, it teaches you pretty quickly, right? Product market fit is isn't something you just talk yourself into or somebody else. You know, either the customers want what you have or they don't. I'd lost enough deals to know the difference. That was important. So when I started Exodus Strong, I didn't waste time trying to convince people my products were great. I built products that solved a real problem for a specific person, me. And then I let the market validate the rest. And the second advantage is, I just understood how to build systems before I need them, right?

7:32Fortune 500 sales, you don't just scale on hustle. You scale on process. You have to have the CRM. You have to have great territory management. You have a great pipeline discipline, so on and so forth. When I started my company, I built the operational infrastructure first. That's actually how I ended up with an AI chief of staff. It's super amazing what we can do nowadays, but we'll talk about that in a few minutes. Most of the time, founders build on hustle. And then they scramble after the fact to add systems. You know, I did that kind of backwards, and it gave me a huge head start. And the third one, the advantage is, and I think most of the founders really missed this one, is I knew how to have hard conversations with customers without flinching.

8:18I was confident in my shoes, right? Enterprise sales trained you to be in, you know, uncomfortable negotiations and then pushing back when it's warranted. So in telling customers no when they keep asking for the wrong thing, most DTC founders, you know, they're terrified, you know, disappointing their customers. And I'm really not. So that protects my brand in ways that a younger founder is constantly vulnerable to. And the myth that a corporate experience gives you, you know, makes you soft for startup life. I just totally disagree with. The truth is that 25 years of the enterprise grind is the best founder school money can buy.

8:58As long as you're willing to admit you don't know everything and to learn the parts that aren't part of that Fortune 500 playbook.

9:07John Lee Dumas:I want to talk about an AI chief of staff. I mean, that's what I'm really impressed with what you're doing, Rob. I mean, it's so cool to see how you're running your company literally with a team of AI agents. So what does that look like day to day? And how has it changed the way that you operate? Immensely. Everything I do is different. Day to day, it looks like this. You know, I wake up, I do my morning protocol, right? I get my red light, I get molecular hydrants in, I do my gratitude and I do my scripture and I do coffee. I still love my coffee. But, you know, then the first thing I do from a business perspective is I open up my dashboard.

9:47I call it the hall of judgment. You know, the dashboards shows me what my AI chief of staff did overnight and what I've got planned for the day. I call him Solomon. He's my chief of staff. He's the Solomon who's the wisest and wealthiest person in the Bible. So I thought I'd follow after him. But, you know, because Solomon literally ran the Hall of Judgment in the Old Testament and Solomon coordinates what I call the 12 tribes. There's actually 24 different agents that I that I run. I have most of them have biblical names and a scripture reference just because I'm a Bible geek and lover. And they each have a specific job.

10:26Right. The Levite, which is really super important, handles compliance review on every piece of content we publish. That's the most important agent in the system because wellness is one of the most heavily regulated categories on the Internet. And, you know, the last thing I want to do is go to jail for trying to help somebody. right? So the Levi's really, really important. But then I have the scribe. He writes all my email sequences. The watchman runs competitive intelligence. What is everybody else doing, and what should I be doing differently or better than them? And the shepherd, he manages my community.

11:00And the builder, he obviously builds things, right? He builds my funnels and other things that I need. So what did that do, and how did that change me before the 12 tribes existed, and before I was able to create those with these amazing solutions, I was bottlenecked. Every single piece of content, every email, every ad, every compliance decision is like I was working 70-plus hours a week and still falling behind. It was just excruciatingly painful. But now the agents literally handle the first 80 % of everything I need to do. So instead of me creating it all, I just review it, and I approve it, and I redirect it.

11:41and it's so much fast, so much more efficient. It's pretty awesome. It turned me from being a content operator to an editor-in-chief. And I can do it in so, so much less expensive than I used to be able to do that. The biggest shift is this. I used to check my email and be on my computer three, four hours a day. Now I check it in 30 minutes and the rest of the time, I can think about strategy, talking to real customers, real human beings and doing the one thing that nobody else in my company can do, which is be me, right? Be Rob Renee. So that's the leverage. Now ADI is doing all the behind-the-scenes things, and I can be the face of the brand, and I can be the person out talking to real human beings.

12:29So that's what the AI is doing for me.

12:31John Lee Dumas:And Fire Nation, this is not pie-in-the-sky stuff. I mean, this is absolutely possible. This is absolutely happening every single day, and it's so much simpler than you think. And we're going to be talking about riches in the niches, the light code system, and more when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Fire Nation, if you have a high ticket offer but you are not getting enough quality sales calls on the calendar, Nexus Install is exactly what you need. This is a custom LinkedIn client acquisition system built to help you connect with the right prospects, start real conversations, and turn those conversations into booked calls.

13:05John Lee Dumas:Here is what makes it different. We do not just hand you a bunch of theory and tell you, good luck, we build the system with you. Dial in your audience, sharpen the messaging, run the outreach, and aim to book you eight to 20 qualified calls each month. Then once the system is proven and installed, we train you on how to run it yourself so you are not dependent on another agency forever. If you have a strong offer, a clear result, and are ready for more quality conversations with real prospects, email my team at john at eofire.com and then we'll set up a call to see if Nexus install is the right fit for you.

13:40Simple, focused, and built for predictable, long-term, quality lead flow.

13:46John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, ideas are exciting, but systems will allow you to create freedom. That is where High Level comes in. High Level allows you to build and run your entire business from one platform. Website builder and hosting, funnel and landing pages, email marketing, automation and workflows, calendar booking, payments and subscriptions, even course and membership hosting. everything works together seamlessly plus award-winning 24 7 support so you are never stuck and when you go through my link at high level fire.com you unlock my full bonus stack a 30-day free trial of high level with full access a private 50-minute coaching call with me weekly live office hours with me a digital copy of my book the common path to uncommon success my 50 days to something execution roadmap and more stop piecing tools together start building momentum Visit highlevelfire.com and start building your something today.

14:41John Lee Dumas:Rob, we're back and I want to talk about riches in the niches. You focus on a market most people overlook. We're talking faith-oriented women underserved by traditional medicine. How did you identify that opportunity and turn it into a category of one? Yeah, that's really a fun question because that's where we started, John. I want to give you a real honest answer. You know, the faith oriented woman is the buyer in this category, not just for my products, but for wellness products generally for the family. Right. She's the household health decision maker. Right. She's the one who does all the research.

15:18She reads the ingredients. She to ask her friends. She makes the calls. Men typically don't buy wellness products for themselves until a woman in their life tells them to do so. So so when I was thinking about who to build for, I had to choose. and pretend that it wasn't true or just build for it. And so the women who matter most to me are the ones who've been burned by the pharmaceutical industry or just aware and awake of what's happened in our world from a health perspective. And then who doesn't trust what's happening in traditional medicine? So that's really important for me to differentiate that.

15:57And the women typically are, you know, who's important to me You're the people who are turning towards faith and natural wellness for her family. And there's a lot of them now, which is super exciting. And she's finding products that respect her values instead of disrespecting her. She wants clean ingredients. She wants transparent sourcing. She wants products that don't contradict with her worldview, like with every marketing email that she gets. But really what I found is they're really underserved because most wellness companies either mock her faith, right, or they exploit it. And I'm trying to do just the opposite.

16:35So I billed for her first. But what's really fun for me now is that she rises the products and the men in her life, right, her husband, her adult sons, her father, they all end up using them as well. My red light mat was originally bought by women for themselves, and now half of my repeat customers are men whose wives got them on the same protocol because the category of one isn't really just wellness for women. That's not it. It's wellness that the family can adopt together. So without anyone having to violate their values to use it. That's the niche. And the riches are in the fact that when you serve that woman authentically, then she brings her entire household and guess what?

17:17She loves her friends as well, right? They talk a lot and they work together. And that's what most founders I think miss is they think the niche means small. But in my case, niche means it's just concentrated. You know, in a concentrated underserved market with a built-in household multiplier, that's just beautiful. It's much better business than a generic wellness play that just tries to appeal to everybody.

17:44John Lee Dumas:So let's dive into the light code system. I want you to break this down for us. What is your four pillar framework and how does a bridge faith, science, and modern wellness? Well, that's what's so amazing is these are the things that God taught me. The light code system is four pillars. Like you mentioned, it's light, frequencies, fuel, and faith. Each one of those corresponds to something that your body was designed to receive and something that modern life literally is systematically depriving you of. Light, for example. Your body is built to absorb specific wavelengths of sunlight, red and near-infrared light specifically.

18:26And these wavelengths support your cellular energy production. This is where your energy comes from. But in modern life today, how many people are out in the sun? You're usually indoors under fluorescent lights for 14 hours a day. And then you're wondering why you're exhausted. So we reintroduce light through a red light mat or a face mask just 15 minutes in the morning. You know, the same wavelength your body already knows how to use. So that's the first one. The second one is frequencies. This one's deeper, but the principle is the same. What I did through my research is your body is electrical.

19:05Every cell in it runs on measurable frequencies. So there's a growing body of research on how modern environments that we're in, right, the air, just everything that we, the food that we eat is just destroying our bodies. And there's growing evidence that these frequencies can help. And so the natural ones, the natural frequencies can restore, which is exciting. So this pillar is where we're doing most of our scientific work right now because it's really hard to understand and hard to explain, but it's a really important part of what we do. The third one is fuel. This one's super important to me because as a young runner, I learned what I eat.

19:48We are what we eat, literally. And so this is the nutrition builder. But what I found and God taught me was this molecular hydrogen product is so amazing. It literally helps act as a master antioxidant in the bloodstream. So it gets rid of the bad stuff and helps the mitochondria, your energy system and your bloodstream work better. Then we add biblical botanicals that you're just missing. You're missing a lot of things in your diet. Like, you know, there's frankincense and myrrh and saffron and cumin. And these aren't new ingredients. They're in scripture. They've been in existence for thousands of years.

20:25We just have forgotten how to use them. And so the most modern supplements have replaced them with things that the human body doesn't even recognize. And so that's it. Faith is my fourth pillar and one that I absolutely love. But it's the one that most wellness companies just literally ignore and they skip. But the whole mind, body, spirit thing is real. And the Bible specifically calls out that body is a temple in 1 Corinthians 6, 19, right? We only have one of these, so we need to take care of it. And I, like earlier we talked about, I almost destroyed mine. And now I've learned. And so I'm trying to take care of that.

21:04So if you believe that taking care of your body isn't vanity and it's really stewardship, that's where you can build a sustainable wellness practice without the stewardship motivation. Because diets end up failing, workout plans, they fail. But a practice grounded in this body is a gift that I'm responsible for. It doesn't fail the same way. You know, the other ones, people will stop the diet, right? They'll stop this. But if they realize that this is a gift that God gave them, then they need to take care of it. Then they continue to work on it. So that's it. The four pillars, right? Light, frequencies, fuel, and faith.

21:45That's the light code system. And it's really not a checklist. It's an architecture. Each pillar addresses a specific input. but your body was already designed to receive in a specific way in modern life is withholding it. So I want to give you that back. So individually, none of these pillars are new, but together they multiply. And as a unified daily protocol, it's something nobody else has built. And then I use my 12 tribes to give me an operating system for the business. But the light code system is operating system for the body. And, you know, once you're running on the full stack, you know, it's like going back and downgrading from, you know, fiber to dial up.

22:31You remember those days, right? Oh, big time. So that's it. That's the light code system. It's the architecture for your body.

22:37John Lee Dumas:Rob, you crushed it. You dropped so many value bombs here today. Fire Nation, a lot of them are like, how do I learn more? How do I connect with this guy? So break it down for us. What is your call to action for Fire Nation today? It's pretty simple. It's, you know, I have a one mindset shift is that I think is really important for people is to get out of, you know, where you were and now where you need to be. Right. Because a lot of people are stuck and I want to I want to help them. And so that's what we've built. Right. I've got a page. It's called Exodus Strong dot com slash fire. So go to Exodus Strong dot com slash fire.

23:18It's really super easy to remember, you know, like this show is. and on that page you'll find two things the first is the the same protocol i use every morning we call it the total body reset kit it's a full red light mat a frequency card and the exodus supplement and then as a free bonus for the eofire you know listeners a complete radiant system with the red light face mask and the women love that it's the same kit i built for my wife and myself the same one my customers are out buying for their households the total stated value that is over eleven hundred dollars but i put it together for the the listeners at a five hundred ninety seven dollar opportunity and then if you act within the first 72 hours of this episode airing it drops down to five hundred and forty seven you know just as a thank you to your listeners so i'm super excited about that and the second thing on the page if you know we the 12 tribe things we talked about if ai tribes really hit home with you and you're running a seven-figure business in a regulated industry then uh you know i've got an opt-in form there that you can for founders who want to know more about how to run those ai agents as an operating system for your business but it's just one url to make it really simple exodusstrong.com forward slash fire right and uh you get you can get to both of those and so john you know thank you for having me what a gift