How to Pivot Your Business During Unprecedented Times with Lauren Trenkle and Dr. Geoffrey Trenkle: An EOFire Classic from 2022

0:01Light that spark fire nation JLD here and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by high level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. On today's classic episode, we'll be breaking down how to pivot your business during unprecedented times. To drop these vibe bombs, I brought Lauren Trankel and Dr. Jeffrey Trankel into EO Fire Studios. Lauren and Dr. Jeffrey founded Total Testing Solutions and Total Health, which provide equitable access to comprehensive testing for all through the pandemic and beyond. And today we'll talk about virtual proctoring. We'll also talk about having to adapt and how to adapt and to look at it as an opportunity and to owe so much more.

0:42And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode. Go to our guests and their sponsors. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies? Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white label your own software. Say hello to our featured partner high level and visit That's highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today. Lauren, say what's up to Fire Nation and tell us about yourself and of course the origin of your business. Good morning. Hello. Well, the origin was, it's a long story, but you know, to keep it short, I'd say we started a medical practice, an ENT practice, seven years ago, my husband and I, with a single location and five employees that we learned very quickly that we needed to grow in an underserved community.

1:46And then we evolved that practice during a pandemic when we needed to make a quick change and it started mostly as an outreach for a need and a need not only for our employees but a need for a community of people who were seeking tests during a time when they were going to, I mean, go to work no matter what, especially in the LA area. I don't know if you want to touch or anything more? Yeah, absolutely. As Lauren said, obviously, we started as an ENT practice. And when I first came out of residency, we bought a practice. So we became entrepreneurs from the very beginning. Lauren graciously decided to leave her job as a physician assistant and come and help work the actual operations of the practice.

2:43That's kind of her expertise. And like she said, we were able to take a very small practice of about five employees. Well, with five employees and turn it pre-pan, right before the pandemic started, we were at about 65 to 70 employees at six different locations with multiple providers. So we scaled it up pretty quickly in a short time span. And it was almost like all of that work and effort was designed for us to be able to come in and help people during the pandemic. So Jeff, a lot of our listeners work with right now or have aspirations to work with their partner, their significant other. So can you talk about working together and relying on each other's strengths as well as each other's weaknesses?

3:24You have to tell the truth.

3:29Yeah, I'm going to tell the truth as best I can here without getting myself divorced. It's actually a lot of fun. We really, really enjoy it. And I think it helps that we're two completely different people and we have completely different strengths and weaknesses. and like I kind of touched on Lauren is very operationally sound she's an executor and I'm more of a vision person then I like to come up with ideas but then I like to leave them back behind me in the dust and she has to pick up the trail behind me so she really does all the heavy lifting and I think one of the important parts is understanding that and and being okay with each other, you know, doing those different types of things.

4:12We call him gas pedal Jeff for a reason. Gas pedal Jeff. But Lauren, before you jump in, I don't want to let him off that easy because he's been very nice about you and talked about your strengths, which is great. And, you know, of course, we're not leading to a divorce here, but what's what's a weakness? From an entrepreneurial standpoint, Lauren's biggest weakness is that she she really cares about perfection. So, you know, as many of your listeners know, a lot of times we have to sacrifice perfection in order to continue to grow and scale. And she has, she's not very good at leaving, leaving things that, that were her hers, uh, to someone else.

4:48And so my job is to constantly push her to say, Hey, you can't, you can't have your fingers in that anymore. You have to be okay with it being a little worse because we need you to do the next step. Okay. That's good. That's good. But I will say that's kind of like being at a job interview and saying, I'm just such a hard worker. I just work way too hard. Like that's my biggest weakness, but I do get it. You are right. You make a great point, Jeff. You do need to leave perfectionism aside if you're going to move forward with a speed that's needed to succeed. So Lauren passing the mic over to you.

5:18Same question. I'll give him a little bit more credit. I will get put back into the weeds and that would slow us down as a company if we didn't have gas pedal, Jeff pushing us forward. So that is 100 % my biggest, biggest weakness. No, we're talking about Jeff though. Now we know about your weakness from Jeff. What's, Jeff's biggest strength above and beyond the gas pedal-ness and then also add a weakness. His biggest strength is his ability to resource. He's very good at saying yes to things that maybe sometimes will give me a panic attack and a full body rash. And finding a solution to those things that he said yes to.

6:00too. And his biggest weakness is full execution. It's like top to bottom execution. Sometimes he just will assume that people that don't have the skill set to put all the pieces in place will do that for him and they don't. And that's usually where I have to come in and pick up the pieces. Picking up the pieces. Did you hear that, Jeff? I'm not even gonna give you a chance to rebuttal to that, but I want to stay with Lauren here. Share the story of the transition that you made during the pandemic from one business to the next. Because a lot of our listeners found themselves in that quandary. You know, life was one way before the pandemic, and then life was another way after the pandemic.

6:49You guys made a transition. Talk to us about that. Yeah, so I still remember the day we were sitting in our office downtown, and it was slow. It was so slow, and nobody wanted to come in and be seen, understandably so. We had staff sitting around. We had staff getting sick. It was all over the news that people, the hospitals were starting to fill up, and it was that period where you had to wait two weeks to get a swab. um and so I started having our staff call our like you know quest lab corp just to get swabs in so we could start swabbing and they would give us five five swabs and I thought that was kind of insane so I said well let's try to resource more like let's get our our other friends who are doctors let's see how many we can pool together and it seemed almost impossible so it kind of turned into this spiral where now it became one of those, like a mountain that I wanted to climb.

7:54And the next thing you knew is we were resourcing a way to make a website where we were going to do a whole testing location. We had closed down an entire office because we just didn't have patients or staff to even be there. So great. Now we have a place to start testing people. I started calling other physicians and other people kind of in our network and asking them if they wanted to be part of it. A lot of people told me no. They thought I was crazy. We said it was either a temporary thing or it was too dangerous. And then our first real big hurdle was finding just somebody who could get us tests in bulk.

8:40and we reached out to a friend of ours who is a physician in New York City that was getting hit harder than us at the time. And we were doing more of a wellness check on him and seeing what the climate was for him. And he put us in contact with a lab that had a saliva test. And they had us buying these saliva tests at$100. So Jeff and I were paying for them ourselves up front. We set up shop at our Huntington Park office. We bought in bulk. We paid out of pocket. And we just started testing people. And it was just Jeff and I in a parking lot in PPE. And during a time when we didn't know how dangerous it really was, we actually used to change down to our underwear on the side of the building because we didn't really know how contagious things really were.

9:39So we would take all of our clothes off outside after we were wearing these full marshmallow suits and put them in Ziploc bags and wash them separately when we get home. And we just evolved from this very basic model of paying for tests out of pocket just to service a community. Fully in the red. Fully in the red. You know, the transition was definitely quick. We really started it to keep jobs at our current one to make sure our physicians and people had employment. But as everyone now knows, there was such a huge need that we ended up filling a huge gap. And Fire Nation, at the end of the day, that's where you need to keep your eyes open, your ears open, because there's opportunities that are going to come with every single situation, whether it's a fortunate situation in the world or a pleasant situation in the world, there's still going to be problems that are left unsolved.

10:35There's still going to be voids in the marketplace. There's going to be areas where people are not being served at the levels they want to be served. There's going to be problems that aren't having great solutions delved out. And we're going to be having a lot more conversations about this and so much more when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Okay, let's talk about a platform that's completely changing how entrepreneurs are running their business. and they are also our featured partner, HighLevel. If you're an entrepreneur, coach, agency, or course creator looking to grow faster and smarter, HighLevel is the all-in-one platform that replaces your entire tech stack.

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14:07You'll also have access to a team of licensed agents who will walk you through the process step by step. Not to mention, PolicyGenius is the country's leading online insurance marketplace with thousands of five-star reviews on Google and Trustpilots. Secure your family's future with PolicyGenius. Head to PolicyGenius.com to compare free life insurance quotes from top companies and see how much you could save. That's PolicyGenius.com. So Jeff, you have a phrase, say yes and figure it out. Can you expound upon that and maybe give an example or two? I think the very first one we had was a large construction company we took on and helped get, you know, a bunch of their workers tested on site, said, hey, can can we can you guys fly up to San Francisco and do this every week for like a thousand people?

14:57I said, sure, why not? And that was a great say yes moment for both me and Lauren. She actually also was very involved in that say yes. But we had no means of getting up there, no means of sourcing any labs, no means of really any boots on the ground there. So we just said yes, and then we figured it out. And they've been one of our biggest clients ever since and a pillar of our company. That's a main example. And I mean, honestly, the testing company has adapted significantly. You know, we do public testing on the ground. We do private testing for companies. We've built a software since then and become a software company, both SaaS as well as support.

15:43We're now in e-commerce. I mean, realistically, every time something changes in the testing economy, we just say yes and adapt to it. And I think, you know, that's been a big part of our success. And the vaccination efforts as well. Talk more about that, Lauren. I know you guys had third and even second waves of vaccination because of deliveries and verifications. Like, what's coming up for you while just talking about this say yes and figure it out? As soon as vaccines were available, we tried to, you know, become part of that effort. we partnered with the Department of Public Health. We are part of their mobile vaccination team.

16:22We are at their metro sites. So we partnered with LA Metro to be at a few of the metro locations in LA as well as Union Station. It's not as easy of a thing to do as testing because there's so much administrative work that's involved for sure. But it's just another part of the practice that we just want to make sure that we're a part of. And it also adds to what we can offer in terms of our knowledge base to the software that Jeff's discussed. So Lauren, I want to stay with you here because I want you to talk about your pivot to adding in virtual proctoring and scaling up to nationwide coverage.

17:10Talk about that pivot, why you implemented it, how it worked out, some struggles you may have had. Break it down for us. Speaking as a mother who thinks about putting two children into a car and going to a site and doesn't want to wait in line. That's, you know, thinking practically. We've discussed this several times and also with, you know, some of the things that have come out from the president and what they all, you know, we're going to have people require. where we kind of got together as a team decided, how are we going to solve this problem? Virtual proctoring seems to be like the easiest way to get people tests with results where they don't even have to leave their home.

17:52Issues we've run into, software, it's not necessarily issues, I should say, things we have to solve. Having the software, having the scheduling, and having a 24-hour team of, you know, professionals that can monitor somebody and also deliver those results and having that all linked together. And the biggest thing that we always run into with medicine is just having that all linked together and have it be one cohesive unit so that somebody can receive that test, take that test or schedule that exam, I should say, with a professional, take that test and get those results delivered to them at home.

18:40And I am not a software person. I'll let Jeff talk on that. But I think half the time my software team gets annoyed with me because I ask like 50 different questions because I don't understand it and I make them talk to me until I do. Obviously, from a virtual proctoring standpoint, The idea behind that, it started when the OSHA ETS was going to apply to hundreds of millions of people. So we had to come up with a solution for these businesses. We were getting 100 inquiries a day from businesses of 100 plus employees. And in order to solve the problem of how to get their unvaccinated employees tested, we started a virtual proctoring piece.

19:23And what that means really is that the employee can get the test over the counter, usually from us, and bring it to their home. And we can have a virtual proctor watching them use the test, make sure they do it correctly, and then we use our software to deliver their results. So now that the OSHA ETS has stayed nationwide, it still will probably apply in many blue states going forward. and we've been able to solve that problem, we're also launching that virtual proctoring piece, you know, B2C, to allow the rest of the community to use it. So if you're traveling out of the country and you want to bring a test with you to get back into the country or, you know, your school is requiring that or your workplace wants to make sure that it's done correctly or you need a result in general from the antigen test you're taking at home, we now have the ability to proctor you 24-7, 365.

20:13So Jeff, let's stay with you because I want to talk now about the post-pandemic future for Total Testing Solutions. Talk to us about that. What are you excited about? What do you see? What are you and Lauren prepping right now? What does that look like? Right now, what's really in front of us is obviously some continued pandemic issues. Like she's mentioned, developed the software, so we are constantly developing that out. We're working on an app that ties into the web app, a native app as well that will help with vaccine verification on an individual level. You know, we're pushing hard on this virtual proctoring piece as well as kind of a COVID urgent care, so to speak, in a telehealth space.

20:55And all of that will move forward to Lauren's, you know, ultimate vision, which has always been to enter into the occupational health space and try and disrupt the space a bit. You know, it's a large business out there, occupational health, But when we started really researching it, because we had no reason to before, but now that we've researched a lot of it, we've noticed that a lot of it is very antiquated, just as is much of medicine. And we feel that there's a real need for kind of software disruption, as well as just, you know, disruption in general of that industry to the point where we can make it much more convenient.

21:32And yeah, that's kind of what we're really excited about post-pandemic. But these waves keep us involved in COVID testing for the time being. Lauren, take us home. What do you really want Fire Nation to know about what you see for the future of TTS? And maybe just take off maybe your TTS hat for a second after that as well. and just share something that you think our listeners, Fire Nation, need to hear about the world today. I think there is a lot of room for growth in a lot of areas of medicine. I think we're still stuck in the fax machine and pager era of medicine and that keeps us moving really slow in medicine and it stifles us.

22:27And we want to be able to expand what we can offer people, not only in terms of the type of health care we give people, but the amount of health care we can give people. And the longer that medicine stays antiquated, the more we will stay in the past instead of being able to move into the future. From a non-TTS perspective, I think we just need to offer everybody a little bit more kindness. I think I've known everyone's COVID exhausted. This pandemic has really exhausted everybody's nerves. It's really taken a toll on everybody's patients and I've seen it from all aspects. Everyone's, everyone's a thin, thin line.

23:22And I think we need to start offering it, giving everybody a little bit more grace. I feel like I've seen everybody, I've, we've seen people at their worst in all aspects, whether they're in the hospital and they're sick or whether they're just, you know, trying to get a test so that they can go on vacation and get a break. And we just need to, to offer up a little bit of ease. Jeff, bring it home for us. Be clear, be concise. What do you want Fire Nation to hear as we close things down here? You know, I think especially for the listeners and everybody who is wondering about, you know, how to pivot a business, especially in a in a pandemic or in a challenging time, because there will be different ones in the future.

24:03From our perspective, one thing that we really found to help lead us in success was that we just had to be able to adapt. And honestly, every time we saw a challenge, we looked at that as an opportunity. And that worked out very, very well for us, because if it's a challenging thing to accomplish and the barrier to entry is high, that probably means that other people aren't going to be able to do it. So take advantage of those opportunities. And this applies to every field, not just medicine. Jeff, anything you want to give Fire Nation for a call to action, if they want to learn more about Total Testing Solutions, anything you have going on, and then we'll say goodbye.

24:42Absolutely. We just started our e-commerce page to try and bring over-the-counter antigen tests to the general public. It's obviously very hard to find them, especially in certain places, parts of the country. So we're trying to procure as many as we can to get them up onto the website. So we do have our website, which is shoptts.co, so.co. And for all the listeners, we have a coupon code FIRE, which gives you free shipping on all orders. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And you've been hanging out with LT, GT, and JLD today. So keep up the heat.

25:25head over to eofire.com type Lauren or Jeffrey in the search bar and the show notes page will pop up with everything we've talked about here today Jeff one more time what's that URL and coupon code? www.shopts.co and the coupon code is FIRE Lauren, Jeffrey thank you both for sharing your truth your knowledge your value with FIRE Nation today for that we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side thank you thank you Hey, Fire Nation. Today's value bomb content was brought to you by Lauren and Jeffrey. And Fire Nation, are you ready to rock your very own podcast? Check out our free podcasting course where I will teach you how to create and launch your podcast for free.

26:10Freepodcastcourse.com. That is freepodcastcourse.com. I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies? Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white label your own software. Say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today.