In business, as in life, you will face obstacles. Whether it be unexpected expenses, legal issues, or even a pandemic. it is your ability to get up again (or some may call it stubbornness) that can often gauge your success. My interview today is with Dr. Saya Nagori, an ophthalmologist and the founder of SimpleHealth who faced these challenges and more. You’ll discover her early businesses that were initially failures, as well as the lessons she learned to now become the architect of a thriving telemedicine company.
LINKS MENTIONED:
SimpleHealth.com – Birth Control Made Simple
www.FemHealthProject.com – or Women By Doctors
http://www.MedicineandTech.com
– Healthcare Entrepreneur Conference
https://bootstrapmd.com/telemedicinecourse –
Start a Virtual Practice (Save $100)
RAW TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Yeah, already. Okay, cool. Right, I’ll just do a quick intro and bio. I just kind of took stuff from your LinkedIn. So, but we just kind of wing it for the most part. That’s okay. All right, awesome. And it’s saya nagori. Is that how you pronounce it? Alright, got it. Good. Hey guys, it’s Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Welcome to another episode of BootstrapMD. I’m so excited. I’ve been trying to get this doctor onto my podcasts from many different months we’ve connected on email and texting and she’s putting on a conference so we got delayed and then there was kind of a some pandemic you may have heard about. That’s because she had a baby and I said, you know, so, you know these excuses? No, but I was able to get her on And I’m so excited if you’ve been following physician entrepreneurship you definitely know the name. Dr. Saya Nagori is an ophthalmologist from the DC area. She has her own practice. She hosts the Medicine Innovation and Entrepreneurship conference that she holds annually. And she is the founder of Simple Health formerly Simple Contacts, I believe, and a giant telemedicine company that’s blowing up. Not surprisingly, these days, and I wanted to get her information and her about her experience of being the being this crazy physician entrepreneur that what I call our little weirdo community that we all kind of belong to where we don’t really kind of fit well you know where we’re that we’re, that’s that square peg in the circle and I wanted to bring her along. So without further ado, Saya, so glad to finally get you on to the podcast today. Thank you so much.
Dr. Saya Nagori
Oh, thanks for having me. And yeah, I’ve been following you for awhile too, and it’s really nice to also just connect. Finally,
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
that’s, that’s so awesome. And first of all, I mean, we talk about startups and you have a new startup, but now but how many weeks? Is it?
Dr. Saya Nagori
Well, I started as an initiative about a year and a half ago…
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Oh…about the most recent…
Dr. Saya Nagori
my, my little baby boy, yeah, he is the hardest startup that I’ve had to produce.
And, yeah, it’s great. It’s amazing as a new mom, so it’s a lot of adjustment. But, I mean, something I’ve wanted for a long time. So very, thank you
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
any sleep?
Dr. Saya Nagori
You know, COVID is bad. It has as bad as it has been. You know, it has really forced us to have a lot of family time with all our, you know, my parents and my husband’s parents and so, because no one’s really going into the office. We have actually a lot of help, right? more help than we could have ever imagined. So,
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
yeah, so probably when we’ll talk about it probably your experience as an entrepreneur, and managing and and you know, delegating different activities probably kind of help suit you well as as a new mom, right?
Dr. Saya Nagori
Yeah, it’s definitely a different kind of time management.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
So let’s get into it. And so we’ll talk about your other startup as well.
Dr. Saya Nagori
Sure.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Also, also, maybe not as important, but we’ll talk about it as well. Also your baby, Simple Health. How did that get? How did it get started? You know, when you’re talking about your background and your decision to form this company?
Dr. Saya Nagori
Sure. So when I graduated fellowship, I moved back to New York and I was actually working in private practice and I’m just, you know, someone who knew that I always was going to do something else and I really couldn’t figure out what that was. I just had this edge and it just didn’t feel like going to into the office every day and coming home was just going Be my life. And so basically, I started hustling a lot like hitting the pavement, going to a lot of meetups and trying to just meet with other people to get ideas and learn about what entrepreneurship was. I didn’t even really know that what I was seeking was entrepreneurship. I just wanted to be involved in something. And I couldn’t, you know, now I can put a title on it that I’m an entrepreneur, but I didn’t really have that, you know, when I first started my journey after fellowship, and eventually, after going to enough meetups and starting enough things on my own, that didn’t really work out and a bunch of reasons they didn’t work out one time, you know, I’m still working full time trying to pay off my loans. And that was a really big priority for me, because I just was in so much debt and a lot of my loans were at like, really high interest like seven 8% interest. And so I just wanted to like really eliminate Some of those really painful loans. So still working, you know, 50-60 hours a week as a private practice physician. And then in my, you know, free time going to meetups and meeting people and starting these sort of businesses on my own, with very little experience, and you know, no help. And so a lot of them unfortunately, didn’t really work out for me. And eventually, I met my co founders, and that was truly through me doing a bunch of things and sort of being very public about it, and going to meetups and meeting different people. And I made a lot of friends that way, too. I just, you know, was like, Hey, I’m trying to do this and people were doing their own thing. And eventually, a friend that I had met through doing. I actually volunteered at a film festival for a couple years when I was a resident in New York just found it fascinating. And just, again, just trying to expand my horizons and and I met someone who was in the star A world and he also was not like a, like in the film world. He also was volunteering at that festival and so we kind of connected and we kept in touch and a few years later when I came back to New York, he actually connected me to my co founders and was you know, pretty critical part of my journey, just that one person who introduced me to my co founders for simple health and then we met and we basically were talking and my you know, the first CEO of Simple Contacts we now have a new CEO at Simple Health but basically he told me like, Hey, I get really frustrated because my contact lens prescription hasn’t changed in X amount of years and I just want to you know, renew it and I don’t understand why you know, someone can just renew it for me, it’s not like I have to go in to get my glasses renewed every year. If my glasses still work. I just keep using prove that. And so you know, of course with contact lenses, there is the element of putting it in your eye and your eye I can, you know, get irritated or read and have some issues. But for the most part, we did like a little survey of like 200 people. And we found out that about 80% of people don’t change their prescription year to year is a pretty high percentage, right? And they don’t change your prescription, they don’t change your brand. And so me and him got to talking and I thought, well, I can’t really just go around renewing prescriptions, it’s not safe or legal. So how can we formalize this process into a digital health process where we can just do it remotely? You know, we can definitely see the contact lens on the eye. If you have a really good camera and now with iPhones and you know, a lot of the smartphones, the cameras are amazing, you can really get really good definition and then create a vision chart and that’s really how the idea sort of evolved conversation after conversation and we didn’t really know that we were developing a digital house slash telemedicine tool, but we were Then, you know, we just sort of ran with that. You know, after many years, we ended up pivoting to women’s health. And just being able to serve a broader group of people through a woman, a birth control renewal service, which is what we do now, we actually don’t really do a ton of contact lenses anymore.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
And I can imagine with, you know, this pandemic, that businesses is booming or increasing, Correct,
Dr. Saya Nagori
yeah, actually, again, unfortunate about the pandemic. But we have seen a really, really huge growth in March and April, and we expect that to continue. And we actually have a lot of physicians as well that have invested in our company and invest in our company. And so we we’ve done really, really well in the early part of 2020. And we expect that to continue given the widespread adoption of telemedicine and people are now seeking these tools. I think before we would advertise and people would become aware of the tools, right, like, Oh, I didn’t know I could do that. And now people are like, well, how can I do that? And they they’re seeking out ways to, you know, for us renew birth control.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Well, that’s amazing. And as someone who, I have LASIK now, but I had glasses and contacts and maybe there may be some room here that I may have kind of fear try to figure out how to take my prescription and Is this the right contact lens and then like, I couldn’t figure out to then have to go back apologist. So I guess that nothing really was like that, right? I mean, we had to go and get her ophthalmologists to fill it out and wait, you know, by the time he finished it out to finally get it. And then you know, we find we finally get it, you know, or they have us come come back to you. They just really wasn’t anything like that before, correct?
Dr. Saya Nagori
No, there wasn’t. And to be honest, a lot of people meet telemedicine with hesitation. And I think the one myth that we can dispel, especially now with widespread adoption use is that, you know, with telemedicine, we’re not trying to replace the doctor, we’re not trying to replace, you know, people with automation, I mean, in some ways, when it makes things easier, and we can do it with really great reliability, I can see the value in that, but telemedicine really is about just being able to do something safely and efficiently. But sort of with the doctor seal of approval, right so each one of our patients was evaluated by a doctor just about evaluated virtually. And there are some things that you can’t do and there’s some things that you can do. And that’s what we did you know, no one was doing a retinal exam virtually without you know, some kind of appropriate fundus camera or device And there’s always going to be people that don’t fit into a telemedicine appropriate exam. That’s an eye care and women’s health. But then there’s gonna be a lot of people that really are appropriate for a telehealth visit. And so now it’s much easier obviously to have that conversation but I’ve been in the space for over five years and I will tell you that you know, when I would go to I would go state by state to lobby for telemedicine and then hustle is just like a big part of my story in my journey because I’d get like, like red in the face, you know, trying to explain to legislators and people that telemedicine is safe in certain use case scenarios. It’s not, you know, just a computer is going to, you know, replace a doctor, that’s really not what it is.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Well, and you know how medicine is and how antiquated we are at times. I mean, we still have fax machines. This is, you know, our main mode. It’s like, I have a fax machine and my practice, simply because I was told I needed to get one. Mm hmm. And and so sometimes you have to drag them kicking and screaming, but we see how technology has dramatically changed, you know, other industries. I mean, look, we’re getting into people in cars with strangers because of our app. Right? Yeah. Ubers of the world. So, and a lot of times too, is with that technology. And and I think we kind of talked about it just before we got on the call is, is people are scared, right? You’re going to be entrenched into their, you know, their, their little niche or whatever. You’re going to be taking some money away from us. And maybe the Yeah, we need to do the right thing as a doctor. Maybe that’s kind of what they’re saying. But oftentimes, it’s really, money does play a part in it.
Dr. Saya Nagori
Sure,
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
for sure. So But if you do it smartly, and that’s why, you know, we both encouraged more physicians to be entrepreneurs to make help make those decisions, not other people, non doctors trying to make medical decisions for us. Right. Exactly experience.
Dr. Saya Nagori
Yeah, totally. So, I think I was met with a lot of resistance when I started on this journey. Luckily, ophthalmologists supported me a lot. You know, they saw the value in converting some things to telemedicine. And, you know, for an ophthalmologist, and this is sort of my feeling as well, is that we really need that chair time for our most serious patients, right, we really, I’m a glaucoma specialist. That’s what I did. I did my fellowship in glaucoma and my glaucoma patients are very serious, you know, a lot of them require a lot of time with me and I versus a young patient who needs a contact lens renewed. They don’t really require a A lot of time with me many times they’ve already had a dilated eye exam according to appropriate guidelines. And so they’re really just there for a specific purpose. And it can be overwhelming as a physician to to get these 15 minute time slots for two completely different patients, you know, one who might require 30 minutes and one who really only needs like, eight minutes, and the patient, even that young patient, they don’t even want to be there, right. They don’t feel like they need to be there. They’re they’re out of obligation because they have to get something renewed. And so I think we need to start accommodating for that. And so unfortunately, when I started this company with my colleagues, I had the Michigan the Michigan Optometric Association came after me pretty hard, you know, they started making complaints about me personally sued the Michigan Medical Board, most of them you know, Just were completely false. And then some more misinformation, but then just saying things like, you know, this is very dangerous for patients even though you know, at that point I had seen thousands of patients through the system and we didn’t have one adverse patient outcome, you know, zero adverse patient outcomes, you know, for the actually the entirety of the of the app’s existence. And so I fought those battles with the Michigan Optometric Association, you know, and they came after me pretty hard. They came after me on social media, I got bullied online, like there was just a lot of negativity and you know, you’re always gonna have haters, you’re always gonna have people that don’t believe in innovation that don’t like what you’re doing because maybe it harms their bottom line. And I actually I was telling you earlier, I got the decision this week that the case was settled in my favor, and that was just a huge win. I think it would be really hard at this point. In the middle of a pandemic, to say that telemedicine isn’t a good, you know, use of medicine. And so, you know that cases settle my favor. And it’s just, it’s a huge relief, obviously. But it’s also a an important thing for any entrepreneur to remember that it’s not going to be easy. You’re going to have a lot of people that either are going to laugh at what you’re doing, or they’re going to try to, you know, stop you from what you’re doing. And, and you just have to if you think that what you’re doing is in the right and is correct, and is the appropriate, and you really believe in it. You just have to have the, I guess where with all this really continue forward and fight it and, you know, it was rough, it was rough, because like, you know, when someone accuses you of harming patients, especially as a doctor, you’re like, you take that personally, right? You’re like, what I would never do that. Like, no, like, I’m not doing that at all, you know, and it was hard. At the compliance hearings that I had to attend, and that my attorney was at, I was like, this is just, this is not about patients. This is about money. It’s about a turf war. It’s about things that have nothing to do with medicine. You know, and, you know, fortunately, although it took a while, the medical board recognized that, that that is, in fact, what it was. And that decision was basically made in my favor that
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Well, that’s good and sorry that you had to go through it. But I think you know, because of that doctors are gonna benefit and of course, your patients are going to benefit from it. And I think if we always go by what’s the best for the patient? I don’t think we can really go wrong in truth. You know, honestly, what you were doing was going to be best for the patient and in in future patients. So I want to talk about that, too. So you were bit by the entrepreneurship bug. And you’ve always been very open about, you know, failures and things that happen, but what kind of drove you to uh, did you have have family members who are entrepreneurs or friends who are in this? Where’d you get your drive in your determination?
Dr. Saya Nagori
So I’ve always been sort of a starting something person, and I really don’t know where I got it from. But I know I’ve been like that my whole life. And I didn’t realize again that I was an entrepreneur. You know, I just thought I was someone who enjoyed leading things and starting things. And I will say, every single person, every single cousin of mine, on my mom’s side is a physician. So I, I really don’t know maybe it’s my dad’s side has more entrepreneurs. But, so basically, when I was in high school, I used to teach dance classes out of my basement. When I was, you know, in college, I just always was doing something like starting a club and I used to love to dance and so in college, I started a dance troupe with with a South Asian community and, you know, wrote up by laws and we You know, got funding. And so that was like a little startup, you know, to get university to go and participate in different events and shows and things like that. And again, I didn’t realize it was entrepreneurial. I just thought, well, I want to do this and doesn’t exist. So I’m going to create it. And, you know, obviously, then med school happened, and then residency happened, and then fellowship happened. And then, you know, 10 years later, I kind of felt like, maybe this wasn’t my only calling. And luckily for me, I was in New York, where startups were a very popular thing, and it was not, you know, and I think I credit New York to a lot of my journey because it, it being in that space, fostered a lot of that energy that I had, and there was no shortage of opportunities and events to go to and people to meet. And it was just so in your face, the whole startup world and so I think that helped me to help push Forward.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Yeah, it’s certainly helpful to be around, you know, different entrepreneurs. I’m probably no surprise to people who are listening or watching. I’m a little bit older than you. But I remember back in the days of, I was kind of in the startup back in the.com days. And in San Diego, we’ve got a little bit of a tech background, but then they flew, flew us out to New York at the Javits Center and there was this whole healthcare, entrepreneurs, everybody wanted to be at that time, the next WebMD, there’s so many that that could go out there and do that. But being around other entrepreneurs, I think is very helpful because as you know, entrepreneurship can be very lonely. Yeah. You know, when you were going through all these battles, you know, it’s sure you can talk to your friends but you know, sometimes they don’t get it you know, in families works or some someone else. But I think you know, with that camaraderie that really kind of really helped you get through this.
Dr. Saya Nagori
Yeah, definitely. And I agree with that, because, you know, when this investigation was going on, I wasn’t very public about it except for with the people that I really whose help I needed to get through it. And I am very thankful to the ophthalmology community, who really took a stand for me and said, This is ridiculous. You know, we’ll we’ll write support letters on your behalf. But the thing is, is I’m, I’m grateful and I am very happy that it ended in my favor. But you know, there’s a lot of things that may not end in your favor. And so, as an entrepreneur, you’re kind of nervous to share until you sort of have a result because, you know, if it didn’t end in my favor, I think there could have been a lot of people that said, Well, you know, yeah, or, well, why did you do that? Why’d you do that to begin with? You know, now it ended in my favorites. I call You’re so smart. You were you were doing smart. Yeah, you were doing telemedicine before anyone was doing telemedicine, but if COVID never happened, and this didn’t And in my favor. I mean, it could have been like, Well, you know, you just don’t know until sort of you have that result and Syou know, any starting any company you don’t really know if it’s gonna do well until it does, you know?
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
And I’ve mentioned this on past podcasts, you know, I’m, you know, son of immigrant parents as yourself. My dad was a pediatrician, my mom was an RN, you say they’re in the medical field, all your relatives, so I get that story. Like when I started my business, I didn’t tell my mom for years. And I and I recently saw like, I’m on I think it was an Instagram you put a video of your mom I guess. And you telling all the costume is your mom’s a surgeon. I own a health company telemedicine company. And she’s like now and then. Well, you want to want to share what you predicting individuals.
Dr. Saya Nagori
Yeah, I was I had just gotten into using Tik Tok. And I was home for Thanksgiving. And I just created a video about, you know, what South Asian parents think when their kids become doctors, which a lot of South Asian parents want their kids to become doctors, but especially women, once they’re actually doctors. All they want is for them to get married. And so, you know, anytime I’d come home with this, like, Oh, you know, simple health just raised, you know, 20 million in funding. She’s like, what are you dating? Like, Did you not hear me?
And she’s like, Yeah, I don’t care.
And then when I met my now husband, she was like, you know, couldn’t get enough of conversations about him.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
That’s hilarious. So when I actually was in, you know, when I was, I was, you know, seeing patients I left medicine for time because I couldn’t do both. I couldn’t work on my businesses and got you You’re still, as I understand you’re still seeing patients, correct?
Dr. Saya Nagori
Yeah, yeah, I am. And I don’t know how long.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
How’s that working out for you? How’s that going?
Dr. Saya Nagori
Well, honestly, if it wasn’t for the pandemic, it was going really well. And I think that is because I opened up my own practice. My husband is also an entrepreneur, and he has a lot of experience in a lot of different fields. He has experience in the medical world, he has, you know, scaled an EMT practice before he has, he himself owns a few sleep centers. And then, you know, he has expertise in real estate and a few other sort of different fields. And he’s, he’s truly a an entrepreneur of multiple things. And so when I moved to DC, I did look around for different jobs initially, but unfortunately, none of the practices that I interviewed with were really hopped up on telemedicine, they didn’t really and that’s what I wanted to do. I said, I want to make this a telemedicine ready practice. And I even offered them I said, Listen, just give me you know, an admin day a week, and I’ll do it for you, I will get you there. But most people weren’t interested. I think when you’re already making a good living, you don’t really want to change the way you do things. And so I don’t blame them. But I just had this very specific vision for what I wanted my practice to be and where I thought the future was. And so my husband at one day was just like, why don’t we just start our own? You know, I’ll help you on the business side and on the execution side, and, you know, you obviously can set up all the telemedicine stuff and, and so we, we did it on our own and we’re, you know, I was practicing three days a week, and I was when I was there, I was hustling. I was seeing a lot of patients, basically enough patients during those three days to sort of make up for not being completely full time and then Honestly, I scaled back what I do, so I stopped operating About a year and a half ago, so I you know it, I’m trained glaucoma surgery and I was at NYU for over four years and did a lot of cases at NYU, a lot of tough cases, sort of had to, I guess, prove to myself that I was a good surgeon, I was capable of doing all these things that I had trained to do for so long. But then I made the decision to stop and that was basically because I think when you’re a surgical ophthalmologists, you just can’t it’s really hard to practice part time. You know, you really have to be available for any kind of post operative emergencies and things like that. Then it also adds a level of cost to your practice, like doing surgery would then involve a surgical coordinator. It would be a day where it wasn’t seeing patients in the office. So you know, just sort of managing all that. And so, over time, it took me a while to decide to stop and It was about like, eight months ago that I decided that I wasn’t going to go back to operating. And so that was just, you know, we still see surgical patients. It’s just I’m not the doctor that does it. We have a, an ophthalmologist that does our surgeries and, and supports us in that way. But yeah, it wasn’t easy to set that up. And I still, you know, plan to see patients in the office until we can really hire someone and you know, I can decrease my clinical time.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
That’s it. That’s great. And with Simple Health you’ve got how many employees or how many people are working? Yeah, sounds a lot to manage. It sounds like
Dr. Saya Nagori
Yeah, so it started off with just three people. And then in the first year, it was like, maybe six. I’ve always been just a part time was my role there. So that was one of my sort of requirements up front was I wanted to keep practice. in clinical medicine, it just, I think that was one. I don’t think that startup could have paid me what I thought I, you know, should be getting paid as a physician full time. And two. I don’t really think there was a full time role in that, in that in those beginning stages. So I’ve always been sort of part time there. And we were Yeah, three people, then six people, and 20 people for a little while. And now we’re, we’re a little over 50 now. So Wow. And that’s not including the doctor. So we have, you know, 30-40 doctors that are across the country that we have on independent contractor relationships.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Now what we’ll need to include them too, I think so. Yeah. So there’s a lot of people who are listening now who are physicians, they may be working in their own practice. Looks like they’re working for somebody else. You know. I’ve talked about entrepreneurs. I’ve also talked about why entrepreneurs you know, who always you know, the dream of becoming your own boss, of course. is very appealing. But for many, there is difficulty to actually go and do that, you know? What do you think drove you versus others who may be thinking about it? And can you offer any advice for someone who’s like, it’s got these ideas, but something is holding them back, whether it be self beliefs, whether it be putting my name out there into the world, you know, I’m sure you’ve gone through those things yourself and advice you can give for that for those folks.
Dr. Saya Nagori
Yeah, I think one thing would definitely be you have to just commit nights and weekends to it you have to because if you’re not willing to take the full time plunge, which I don’t blame anybody, I mean, I still am not willing to do it. Right. I still I just consider myself to have a six day work week. I do three days clinical, and then I do three days on my other projects. And then I have one day, you know, Sunday usually to just chill out. But, but I don’t consider those three days work because I know love doing entrepreneurial things like they don’t feel like work to me and, and like it or not, you know, the three days of clinical work. It’s not 100% joy, it’s, you know, probably 50% because then 50%, as you know, is like we’re charting and we’re doing things that are not medical at all, you know, just wasn’t, you know, so that’s a little harder to get through my day. Because it’s not that I’m just interacting with my patients and doing clinical things. It’s a lot of call this insurance company and get this approval and this got denied and blah, blah, blah, you know, so I would say you have to commit nights and weekends if you’re not, you know, if you’re not willing to go in. I would say self limiting beliefs are definitely exist. And I think that for me, I just read a lot of books do a lot of, I do a lot of audiobooks. I do a lot of mindset, my mind shift, excuse me. I do a lot of mindset, shifting.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Any, any authors you want to share? You know that you could recommend her books?
Dr. Saya Nagori
Yeah, I personally really loved the book letting go. It’s by David Hawking’s it’s he’s actually an MD PhD. And it’s not a business book, it is about you and your emotions, and how you sort of react to things. And it goes through every human emotion like the feeling of love or fear or courage. And it sort of goes through how you react in situations. And I think it’s very applicable to personal life. But I have applied a lot of those principles to business as well. So, you know, in business, you’re going to hear the word know a lot and reacting to the word know, in a way that’s healthy and not self destructive, which is, you know, not wanting to persist and not wanting to continue the journey. So I think for me, that book was really critical because it just made me accustomed to learning that when people say no to me, or I don’t get an opportunity, or I get rejected from a job or whatever, it’s not personal. It’s not something that I need to say, Oh, well, I’m not worth this position, or I’m not worthy of this collaboration. You know, it’s just it is what it is. People are their reasons and who cares, move on. And so I think that was really a great book. And I also liked it. It was written by an MD. I don’t know just something Personally, I was like, yeah, doctor. And I like mindset by Carol Dweck. I read that, I think, gets a little repetitive. But it’s a good book. I’ve also read Amy Cuddy’s presence, which I thought is it talks about like power posturing. She has a TED talk to someone doesn’t want to you know, listen to the whole book. And then the 10 x rule Grant Cardone Really good one. And you
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
And you either love him or you hate him but yeah,
Dr. Saya Nagori
yeah, I’ve only read that Well, I’ve only listened to that one you know haven’t read it. But yeah, those are some of the things that I really did was just and I still listen to a lot of books because I think they’re really really interesting I just read Gary Vee’s (Vaynerchuk) one of his books as well.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
And so I love him or hate him.
Dr. Saya Nagori
Yeah, I love him you know cuz that’s kind of like I’m very much
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
You’re “New York”, right?
Dr. Saya Nagori
Yeah, I need to be I need to be told like you’re doing this wrong like Don’t beat around the bush and I kind of I’m kind of that way with a lot of people to a little tough love like this is you know, as I could be wrong, but I think you’re doing this the wrong way. So yes, I think you know, you can’t doubt yourself, you got to just keep pushing forward. Books are a great way to shift your mindset. Commit your nights and weekends. And, and and seek help you know, sometimes Your that helps going to be free help, sometimes it might be paid help. So, you know, whatever it is that you can find, I took a lot of I take a lot of online classes, and I really enjoy them. I watch a lot of YouTube, I learned how to do a lot of stuff on YouTube. I try to network a lot. And I always try to give what I’m asking. And I think that’s helped me a lot as an entrepreneur, because there are certain things that you’re just not going to learn on your own because they’re so nuanced. And you really need to learn from someone that’s done it before. So, you know, it’s, when I’m asking for help, I really, really do my best to try to give back if, if I can, or at least offer it in some way, you know, whether it’s promoting one of my mentors products or, you know, just sending good things their way. As much as I can.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Yeah, yeah, that’s really what it what it’s all about. It’s just it’s just, you know, the more that you give it You know, whether you’re spiritual or wherever you want to think, you know, it comes back a hundredfold, you know, full to it, you know, we know people who is like, Oh, this is just my, my audience, nobody should hear anything about my audience. And my thing is, like, I’m all about, what can we do to put everybody up? Right. And that’s, that’s really where it is. And, you know, it opens up more doors. And as someone who has been, you know, an entrepreneur for for a while, you know, at the beginning, it was crickets in the medical field. And now, we’ve got 10,000 people showing up for virtual summit. So this is really an amazing time, I think and, you know, going in and becoming innovative and not what you said about, you know, six days a week or two nights a week and doing it and so many times when I talk with physicians, they want to start a business. They’re not willing to do that, for whatever reason, I know for myself is you know, what helped me say it was having people on payroll responsible for payroll, it’s gonna make you think twice that, you know, oh, maybe I can just like blow it off. Right? Right. Because it’s not your business, not just you, it’s your employees, it’s, it’s the patients that you’re helping, you know, it’s all your partners, obviously, all of that are alright for to become one I need to become successful.
Dr. Saya Nagori
Yeah. And staying mission focus is really important too. I think it’s really easy to start to want to get a quick return on some things. And if you stay mission focus, and that’s, that’s hard when you’re in debt, it’s hard when you are struggling between two careers. But you have to you have to stay mission focused. And I think it’s something that all of us have to remind ourselves even the most seasoned entrepreneurs want, you know, remind themselves to say mission focus when they’re starting something new.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
So I could talk to you for days just like talking because you know, so very easy to talk to you. You know, you got some war stories. I know that we didn’t dig into but I do want to come in touching a couple things to understand you also do consulting on the side as well?
Dr. Saya Nagori
Yeah, yeah. So I do consulting in all sorts of different areas. I’ve worked for pharmaceutical companies. I have done, you know, individual consulting and business coaching for fellow physicians and fellow entrepreneurs. And
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
I don’t think you really talk about it that much?
Dr. Saya Nagori
No, I want to, but it’s a it’s something that I’ve done on a one off if someone reaches out to me, but I have really thought about formalizing it maybe actually doing, you know, like a course or some kind of weekly group. So definitely still on my to do list. But I think one of the things that I am trying to do is hone in on things a little bit more. So I’m trying not to, you know, sort of scatter myself.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
You’re bit by that… you know, that To Do List. It’s like 25 pages, right? Yeah.
Dr. Saya Nagori
Yeah. consulting is great though, because it really is nice to do something and get paid for it and sort of be done with it. You know, rather than when you’re an entrepreneur and you’re in business, you’re never done with your business. It goes on forever, right? So when I do a consulting job, I do something, I get my check, and it gets deposited and I kind of know the agreement. Or, or if it’s equity, then I kind of, I’m not the leader in that situation. So I respond to something, I do my job, whatever it is, they need me to do. And then again, I can put it away for a little while. And so I think I really enjoy having that mixed. I don’t think I could do 100% Consulting, because it’s just, you know, I like having my own…
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
right. You know, sometimes you gotta build your own business to go ahead and not always help other people’s business but I do enjoy it. Working with startups to I’m sure you can relate that to working with other entrepreneurs I’m sure
Dr. Saya Nagori
Yes.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Well, and, and speak about that because you got so many other things. You’re also introducing a women’s initiative. Tell me more about that.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah. So FEM health is basically my brainchild and love to help I guess, because I…
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
How many startups do you want? (laughing)
Dr. Saya Nagori
Humans…three. Businesses. I don’t know yet.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Serial entrepreneurs. Yeah.
Dr. Saya Nagori
Well, I so I went through this personal experience that I was in my mid 30s in New York, and I hadn’t, you know, met my husband yet. And I felt very pressured to meet someone and date and that was because of, you know, my desire to have children. And so I decided to freeze my eggs sort of before. I don’t see before it was cool, but like before it became very wide, widespread in terms of, you know, there being ads all over Instagram and a lot of people talking about it was kind of something that I didn’t really tell a lot of people and I’m a very vocal person about what I’m going through. And so I just kind of did it. I think I made like one Instagram post about it. And I had a really tough time understanding the nuances of the process. So I got the general concept, I was gonna have my eggs frozen, they were going to be put on ice. But I, a lot of the nuances confused me and I guess at that point, I thought to myself, this was like three, four or four years ago. You know, if I have this much trouble as a physician who has, you know, I have like nine friends who are ob gyn that I can text anytime of the day. I can’t even imagine what a you know, a woman who’s not a physician, you know, is goes through when she has to do some of these female health things and so on. That’s sort of where it was the idea came about. And obviously, I was doing a lot of other things, and then simple health one into women’s health as well. And so I thought, you know, I really want to create this physician community that can deliver really good evidence based information in a palatable format. And really two reasons for that. One is I want the public to get really good information. That’s not fake news, so to speak, right? Because there’s a lot of garbage out there. And women, you know, there’s a lot of things that have changed in women’s health, from things like policy around birth control to all the new things that are happening in fertility, and all the new awareness about mental health and a lot of the, you know, postpartum issues. So, that’s one but also to bring together these physicians and give them a voice because, you know, again, there’s so much fake news and I feel like so many physicians spend half our time on social media trying to correct people. And that’s kind of silly. You know, why do we have to prove that we’re right? Why do we have to prove that vaccines work? Like we already proved that that’s why vaccines exist, because we already did, you know, our predecessors already done the heavy lifting on that. And so it just I saw a lot of people on Twitter and on Instagram and on social media and Facebook, you know, fighting to prove what is already fact. And so that just sort of inspired me to bring these female physicians together and start and create a platform for evidence based women’s health information and parenting information as well. Because we know you know, women tend to be the healthcare leaders of their purse of their families.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Yeah, because it can get kind of vicious, right. And these are …You’re putting yourself out there and just saying, hey, the world is round. Yeah, you’re getting attacked. Right? Yeah. Yeah, it’s crazy. So I guess we’ll have more about that and we’ll leave a link to it on our show notes when that becomes available.
Dr. Saya Nagori
Okay, awesome. Yeah. And it’s up and running now. It’s just FemHealthProject.com. There’s any if there’s any physicians that you know, want to participate and it’s not just limited to ob gyn, we have all sorts of physicians that are contributors, contributors to our, our site and our and now I’m doing a virtual summit hopefully, you know, we have getting together about 35 speakers and we should be launching that this summer.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Like you don’t have anything else going on.
Dr. Saya Nagori
It’s my baby. Awesome.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Also, I wanted to make sure that we highlight your telemedicine course can you want to tell some folks about that?
Dr. Saya Nagori
Yeah, so the telemedicine course is something that I created basically because my bandwidth ran out to sort of one on one help doctors launch telemedicine practices. I was getting questions on Facebook, on LinkedIn, Instagram on, you know, how do I do this? And unfortunately, you know, I’ve got a lot of stuff going on. So I can’t really jump on the phone with everybody and so but I still wanted to obviously help them get started and, you know, I’m always available for questions via email, you know, once they’re enrolled in my course. And basically what it does is it teaches you how to take a start a virtual practice, you know, get it up and running off the ground, some background information, then goes into platforms and then billing coding, some nuances and then, you know, just some tips for success in telemedicine and I run my own virtual practice and obviously, I helped to start a telemedicine company. So if anyone wants to do any of those things, it would be, you know, a useful resource for them.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Yeah, it’s not just theory, guys. She’s in the trenches actually doing it every single day and night. So yeah, it’s been wonderful. I don’t want to take Too much of your time. If people want to reach out to you what’s the best way for that?
Dr. Saya Nagori
They can just email me to be honest. It’s just saya@simplehealth.com.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Perfect. Well,
Dr. Saya Nagori
or Sorry, I also have a email list which is at medicineandtech.com if they want to.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Okay, so we’ll have all that available. Saya thank you so much for your time, go back to your baby thank your in laws for, for watching them All the best to you. Where do you see Simple Health in five years?
Dr. Saya Nagori
I think we’re gonna really start dominating the women’s health space. And we’re bringing in more and more physicians, which again, is something I’m super passionate about, like I like when healthcare companies are led by physicians. So, you know, we have many physicians that are actively involved right now, but I would have to pride myself on saying that we’re probably one of the smaller companies that has probably more physicians and some of the larger companies were really driven by making sure that The protocols that we use, and everything that we’re doing is sort of got the, you know, gold seal of approval from from doctors, so more women’s health, maybe even some other other avenues but definitely expanding more into women’s health beyond birth control.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Okay, are you hiring now? Or is it are you for those who are interested?
Dr. Saya Nagori
So if they if anyone’s interested in telemedicine position with my company or any other companies that I’m associated with, they can just enter their email into medicineandtech.com. And if I see an opportunity either again, at my company or someone else’s, I usually will send it out through that email list.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Awesome, awesome stuff again. So again, thank you so much for your time. I know you don’t have a lot of it, get some sleep, you know, maybe even the next week. Think about it, put it in your to do list. Bullet Journa,l sleep. This is wonderful. And thanks for having me, thank you so much. And any, just before we end here, I always like to ask, you know, one advice you want to give to the entrepreneurs and wantrepreneurs in our audience.
Dr. Saya Nagori
So this is a piece of advice that I get pretty often because I think it’s happened to me so many times is that you know, you have to be resilient when you fail, and you’re probably gonna fail a lot. Just try to learn it, learn from it, you know, fail forward, we hear that a lot, but you really have to fail forward and realize that it’s okay to feel bad, you’re gonna feel bad, that’s natural, but just shift that thinking so that you can learn from from, from the experience that didn’t work out and, and just keep going because eventually something will work out. And even when something works out, even that’s gonna have bumps in the road, you know, so I think that like, my practice was doing great. But who could have predicted a pandemic, right? I thought that was, you know, it’s like, wow, you know, in just a year it’s doing really, really well and then boom, March. You know how to close our doors. Go virtual. So, you know, you never really know, even when things are going well, and you’ve done everything right, you’re gonna hit a bump in the road and you just, it’s, it’s how you react to that.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
I know, it’s hard to say that you have a silver lining. But, you know, we know that in times of turbulence, that’s where entrepreneurs step up in when there is opportunity. And now you’re seeing that with your other company, too. So, yeah, hard to say. But But again, thank you again, so much. Thank you guys for listening. And as always, keep moving forward.