Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in health and wellness but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Freddie Ulan, founder of Ulan Nutritional Systems Inc. (UNS Inc.), located in Clearwater, FL, USA.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

Ulan Nutritional Systems is in the business of training nutrition-oriented health care providers in a highly effective, workable, duplicatable, non-invasive system of body health analysis in order to assist in identifying probable nutritional deficiencies or imbalances as well as toxicities and other barriers to self-healing which, once handled with all-natural means, will enable maximal health restoration using personalized health improvement programs.

Tell us about yourself

What got me started working on my business dates back to the late 1980s when I suddenly started "losing my health." After several years of seriously declining health, and finally reaching a point where I was bedridden for over a year, unable to sleep, and with double pneumonia and body pain whenever I tried to move, despite many attempts to reverse my worsening situation through natural and finally conventional means, I was forced to take desperate measures. It started with a trip to an alternative medicine hospital in Mexico which gave me ten days of treatment that stopped my body's decline and fully cleaned up my lungs so that I no longer had pneumonia. But now, I had a 48-year-old body that was no longer dying but was still not functioning well. I literally had about 3 hours of "up-time" a day before I had to return to bed to rest.

This started me on a quest to answer the question: how do you rebuild a body that you have literally worn out through a fast and hardworking lifestyle, with too much travel and often living on fast foods and hotel and airline foods. This led me to the discovery of the earliest roots of clinical nutrition in this country, led by Dr. Royal Lee starting in the 1920s (he went on to found the world's first nutritional supplement company, which he called "The Vitamin Company" and which later evolved into what is known as Standard Process Products Inc.).

Dr. Lee was an amazing and brilliant scientist who made multiple discoveries about the role of nutrition and human health and became part of a small group of similarly minded geniuses who collaborated to determine not only the ultimate diet for man but also creating a substantial armory of whole food concentrate based dietary supplements that could be used to support a body throughout its healing process and beyond, into years and decades of health maintenance.

Once I started applying the principles I was learning from this research to myself with the first success in years, I began paying it forward by helping others. In working with others and working on myself, I discovered the five most common barriers to healing (and over a dozen additional ones that can have the same effect) and worked out how to handle these naturally. Over the ensuing ten years, this evolved into what is now known as "Nutrition Response Testing(R)." I built an extremely successful nutritional healing practice in upstate NY, and as a result of word of mouth, I started being invited to teach weekend seminars to several thousand like-minded health care providers around the country.

After teaching these seminars for almost ten years, I realized that it would take more than what I could teach in one weekend to ensure that every attendee could gain the same level of skill that I had developed and which gave me a consistent stream of what could only be described as "daily miracles" when compared to the results from the conventional pharmaceutical model. So I decided to open my own teaching facility here in Clearwater in 2004. We have been going like gangbusters ever since. Many hundreds of nutrition and natural-oriented healthcare providers have been through our courses, including not only beginning level (for those with no prior experience with my method) through Intermediate, Professional Level, and Advanced Clinical Training.

The number of classroom hours this represents is approximately 150 hours, often done in 3-day seminars and workshops spaced out monthly or more. Although every level from the beginning on up gives practitioners tools and skills they can apply in their office, then next easy to start getting improved results on their toughest cases. My goal for this business became "pass my hat" to create an army of equally competent and effective health care providers who routinely produced the same level of results we routinely produced in our practice.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

Being able to assemble and train a core team of staff and executives that consistently deliver quality services that exceed our clients' expectations (primarily natural and nutrition-oriented health care providers. I have been able to step out of operations and focus on the management aspects of health care practices.

Along the way, I realized that most health care practitioners - despite high purpose, good education, and high levels of technical and clinical skill - often know next to nothing about their practice as a business. They tend to think that "clinical" solves everything. And that is not true. An effective health coach or any other natural health care provider who doesn't know this will never be able to expand their practice to a level where they can make a real difference in their community. A small health care practice that remains small will, despite great clinical successes, sooner than later sadly become extinct.

What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?

Trying to operate long term without formulated goals and purposes and policy. Any business owner must have clearly stated goals and purposes and workable policies so that administrative support will benefit the practitioner's healing purposes and not be a distraction. You have to put those in place to act as a constant reminder of why you are there and what you are working to achieve and provide a framework that will ensure financial viability while expanding the practice to meet the growing demands for your services. That can be a daunting task at times.

The last thing any of us in natural healing want is to have any attention at all on money. We didn't go into this business because we were money motivated. We did it out of a sense of caring and duty to share our knowledge and help with others. Therefore one must ensure their practice remains viable to expand and persist through good times and hard times and always be there for those who need us the most.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

  1. Have a strategic plan for the actual attainment of your goals for this "business" in place, written and made known to all senior team members.
  2. The strategic plan requires tactical plans (who is going to do what and when). This keeps everything moving in a straight line.
  3. These things may sound fancy and highfalutin’ but can be easily learned. It is at the core of good management.

Is there anything else you'd like to share?

The key to my success has always been "results." Results produce good word of mouth, which is the secret to a stress-free self-regenerating viable practice. After a while, every new patient or client is someone who knows they are in the right place because of what others have told them. To achieve this success, you must have certain elements in place, which consist of,

  1. A proven workable system of analyzing the body, so you know what it needs and what sequence its health challenges need to be addressed when there is more than one health challenge. The system needs to include a method of determining whether or not the body is responding and how to correct and fine-tune the program to ensure success.
  2. You must have access to time-tested and proven products you can count (batch to batch and which not only help the patient over the hump initially but which can be used in lesser amounts for as long as needed as part of a health maintenance program.
  3. You need a "patient management program" that gets the patient fully on board and fully committed to doing their personalized health improvement program before starting them on a program.
  4. You need proven practice management or administration system that ensures smooth and lowest possible costs of operation and the potential for unlimited expansion that aligns with your goals for the practice/business. These will produce in each patient/client: a) commitment, b) compliance and follow-through, and therefore c) retention and d) results.

This is the key to automatic referral generation that makes your practice a joyful business activity for years to come, adding health and joy to your life in geometric proportion to the hope, health, and joy you are providing to others.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://unsinc.info/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/UlanNutritionalSystems/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ulannutritionalsystems/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/UlanNutritional
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ulan-nutritional-systems-inc./

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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