102: Hacking The Neuromuscular System To Recovery with Garrett Salpeter

Today, I’m hanging out with Garrett Salpeter, the founder of NeuFit, a leader in Direct Current therapy and neurological stimulation. Since 2017, NeuFit has helped thousands of patients more effectively rehabilitate, recover, and create neurological breakthroughs.

The company is best known for the Neubie – a neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) device that can influence the movement of cells within the body to speed up the healing and recovery process.

Over 90% of people notice progress, less pain, and improved function in their first session. I’ve personally worked with them to heal an injury of my own and saw phenomenal results.

In this episode, you’ll learn how a passion for neuroscience, combined with an intense focus on product development, has allowed Garrett to grow a business serving multiple verticals, including physical therapists, chiropractors, athletic trainers, pro sports teams, and other fitness experts.

We also dig into how he handled marketing/sales in a heavily regulated industry, why he decided to license his technology, his approach to hiring from within, and the major boost in retention that enterprise physical therapy companies are seeing as a result of using his product with their patients.

Inspiring Quotes

• “The best time to fire someone is right when you think you should because it rarely gets better.” – Garrett Salpeter

• “It’s really compelling when you see someone who looks like they could just go on stage at Mr. Olympia saying, ‘Dang, that thing just gave me the best workout.’” – Garrett Salpeter

• “Our muscles essentially just do what they’re told by the nervous system. They’re kind of like the soldiers. The nervous system is the general.” – Garrett Salpeter

• “We’ve done a lot of promoting from within. And I like that because we get to understand and get to know people. We can tell they’re a good cultural fit. We can tell they’re true believers in our mission and they live by our values.” – Garrett Salpeter

• What is NeuFit?
• The profitability of NeuFit
• General market approach vs. specificity
• Determining the right business model
• Monetizing educational modules
• How to choose the right verticals
• Hacking the brain to better the body
• Changing your role as your company grows
• Painful business lessons
• Finding great hires

Brad Weimert: Garrett Salpeter, it is awesome to see you. It has been years, my friend.

Garrett Salpeter: Far too long.

Brad Weimert: Indeed. So, NeuFit came into my life many, many years ago. I want to dive in hard on the product, but it has changed so much since I got introduced to it. You are now knocking on the door of eight figures. You have dozens of professional sports teams using it. You also are using it in a ton of different practical ways. I want to hear kind of the origin story but I want to start with how you describe the product. So, what is NeuFit?

Garrett Salpeter: So, at NeuFit, we’re best known for the Neubie device, which is an acronym. It stands for Neuro Bioelectric Stimulator. And it’s an electric modality but it’s in a world where it often gets confused with the TENS units or the things that we think of in this electrical space where you go to a physical therapy clinic or chiropractor’s office and they put these TENS units on you with an electrode and you feel that buzzing on your skin and it gets confused with that. And the way I like to describe it is to think of that traditional electrical technology, sort of like a rotary phone. And then ours is like an iPhone or a Samsung. They’re similar. So, there’s some overlap in what you can do because they’re both electrical, but you can just do so much more with this version with the Neubie than you can with virtually anything else that’s out there. And the reason for that is that it’s direct current instead of alternating current. And direct current has a couple of benefits or basically two categories.

One is when you get these direct current electric fields, it can influence the movement of cells within the body in a way that affects the healing process. But what we’re even better known for are these fast functional changes because of the effect on the nervous system and the process of what’s called neuromuscular re-education. So, like if you had a shoulder injury, for example, and I know obviously we had worked together years ago on a few different injuries, but if you had an injury right now, we would take that pad and we could scan around on your body and tell you exactly where your nervous system is guarding in response to an old injury or your recent injury or where your nervous system might be shutting down muscles where you might have the hypersensitivity and guarding that’s associated with pain. And not only can we find them, we can then use that same device to rapidly retrain, re-educate those patterns. So, over 90% of people notice progress, less pain, improvements in function in just their first session. So, people are often excited and motivated and want to continue.

And if physical therapy clinics or chiropractic offices are using it, that’s one of the big selling propositions for them because they can use it with their patients and their patients not only want to come back. There’s kind of a dirty little secret in physical therapy that a fair number of people drop out within the first three sessions because they think it’s not worth the time, it’s not worth the co-pay, it’s not going to help me, whatever they think, right?

Brad Weimert: Boring as hell.

Garrett Salpeter: And so, we did a pilot with a large enterprise physical therapy group, for example, and saw that when they used the Neubie with their patients, that one, two, three rate was cut in half. So, if you look at the greater retention and the amount of new sessions that’s generating for them, there’s a huge business value proposition beyond the patients are having a better experience and it’s helping people feel better. You know, it’s kind of a human and a business proposition, both.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. So, I want to get into the business proposition in a bit here because it’s super interesting the path that you’ve gone down. When I met you, I can’t remember what injury I had at the moment, but I’ve had lots of injuries in my life, most a product of some sort of endurance athletic thing. And I got introduced to you through the guys that own ARX, and so I walked into your office, and at the time, it was the first NeuFit location, I believe. And I got on the table. You scanned my body with this electrode. And the first time that I got out of there, I had a notable shift. And not only the first time did I have a notable shift in pain and also function in my body, I think I had some dysfunction, I’m remembering now, it’s a dysfunction in my lower back, which is brutal, right? Back injuries are awful. But every single time I ever went, I had a notable shift. There was a notable change. And one of the things that’s rough about most things related to physical well-being and fitness is almost nothing gives you acute benefit, acute relief, and also long-lasting relief.

A massage is great in the moment, but it doesn’t last. Supplements may be great for your body, but most of the time you can’t tell anyway. You hope that over time they’re beneficial. PT over time certainly is beneficial but each independent session doesn’t seem positive. So, I get that and I love that. I want to get into the product a little bit more but tell me about the beginning of that business model and what you were doing then. Because when I met you, it was this one office. It was older technology that you were using and you were developing the Neubie. What was the makeup of that business then? How did you make money in it and what did you do there?

Garrett Salpeter: So, I’ll get into a little bit of the origin story that you alluded to earlier as well, just kind of create the context for that. So, my background is engineering and neuroscience, and I also played college hockey. I was an athlete growing up and I had this really interesting experience where I had an injury towards the end of my time in college. I was really bummed out, but it turned out to be one of the greatest blessings in my life because I had some strong ligaments. I was told I would need to have surgery, and based on my previous experiences with traditional physical therapy, traditional orthopedic medicine, I just kind of figured that would be the case. But fortunately, I met a doctor who was doing functional neurology and using older versions of direct current so like an analog more like a microcurrent type of thing at the time. But I saw how these two things, how functional neurology looking at the neurological response to injury and not just the damaged tissue, but looking at that neurological response and then using direct current, I saw how those literally helped me regrow my ligaments, avoid surgery.

And I was very pleased as a hockey player to be back on the ice faster but as a physics major, as a pre-engineering student, to find something that made sense scientifically from first principles like that, that was what really blew my mind. And that’s what really got me excited. And going through that experience, I felt called to share this work with as many people as I could. So, then I came here to Austin for graduate school in engineering at UT. I got to meet a few people in the local sports medicine world and ended up opening my first office. So, just before actually for several years before but one location before where you and I met, opened up out of the private practice of the chiropractor who was taking care of the UT Longhorns football team. And I started using these original versions of electrical stimulation. And over this period of about 7 or 8 years, I kind of call it my laboratory period, I opened up this first clinic, ended up, you know, the business grew. I learned a lot. I got so passionate about this field that I ended up going back to school here at UT for more graduate work in neuroscience.

And along the way, as the business grew, I started working locally with other people like me, athletes trying to recover faster from injuries. And then because it was a more neurological approach got referred in a few people with different neurological injuries, some spinal cord injury patients, different people with different neurodegenerative conditions, and things like that. And as the local business grew, I just kept looking for someone else to come out with better technology that would meet my needs, that could do the things that I kind of wished for. And I figured I would just open a few more locations around Austin and I’d be very happy with that. And then the next year passed. The next year passed. I realized that no one else was really coming out with what I wanted. And finally, through a whole series of circumstances, decided, gosh darn it, I’m just going to do it myself.

And one of the interesting catalysts for that was actually I was working with a guy, just a client of ours who is a patent attorney and helped him a lot with some chronic knee pain. And we started talking. I told him some of my ideas and he said, “You could probably patent that.” And that was what kind of really started to click for me. That was sort of the last domino where I said, “Okay. All right. I’ll do this.” So, at the time when we met, I think it was when we were developing the Neubie. So, at the time, it was a local business offering rehabilitation and fitness services to the community. And thankfully, it was a profitable business because I was able to reinvest a lot of the profits to fund the development of the device, which a lot of people in our position have not been able to fund that themselves organically and have to take on investors and things like that. So, that allowed me not only to get the 10,000 hours in to really learn this craft and the technology and everything but also to actually build up some funds that we could use to drive the development of the product.

Brad Weimert: So, when we met, it was a super interesting thing to watch and it’s been super interesting to watch over time because when we met, you had this local business and you just said it was focused on, I can’t remember the language, but what I heard was sort of rehab and physical fitness. And it was visible when I went in because I had this acute dysfunction but the other half of the place was full weight lifting equipment and some big dudes with electrodes on them doing some big movements. And those are two very different things. So, the first question there is and sometimes this is just out of necessity to make the business profitable, right? But first question is, in the beginning, you had two different things you were focused on, sort of rehab or let’s call it accelerated growth for people that want to be physically fit. Why were those both focuses and do you feel like that was the right path historically?

Garrett Salpeter: That’s a good question if it was the right path. So, the reason that we had that, I mean, part of it honestly, is it’s sort of the Venn diagram of all of my interests. I love it, honestly. And then part of it is it seems broad to think about helping athletes with sports medicine, helping people who have been through spinal cord injuries, and then helping other people with their fitness and muscle building and things like that. But there is a common thread, and that common thread is the nervous system and how the nervous system responds to injury and how the nervous system controls and coordinates muscles or doesn’t, and how the nervous system creates the environment within the body to heal or not. So, there is a common thread there. And our current office is now more of a showroom and even bigger. And we have all of those elements because it’s a testing ground and a showroom for the product. Essentially, it shows how it can be used with that neurological population, with the stroke patients, neuropathy patients, MS patients, with the athletes and sports medicine, and then with general fitness or elite athletic performance.

And so, I think there’s a lot of good business advice around focusing and specializing. In our local business, we’ve been intentionally broad, but when we sell the device and train other people in how to use it, they’re often sometimes focused more on a specific population. And if that was the right question or not, or if it was the right strategy or not, it’s tough to say. Obviously, I don’t have the opposite to really tell but it has been cool to see how this technology has caught on in clinics and with people who focus on different populations there. And if we hadn’t had that breadth of that whole body of work, we may not have some of the relationships and making the impact in some of these different verticals where our product is now being used in a big way.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. So, in prep, and I want to bridge the gap, but in prep for this, I was digging into kind of current stats and I’m sure they’re updated more than what I read even or what’s on your site currently. Now, I looked at the map of just the country of how many of your devices are out there and there are now thousands of practitioners using them. They are in seemingly every major city, every state in the country, and then many in other parts of the world as well. When you initially started developing the product, so you’ve got R&D cost, you’ve got manufacturing costs, right, and then you’ve got to think about how the business model changes. So, you started with being a practitioner, which is exchanging time for money. And I remember the moment of working with you and then you pawning me off on somebody else and me saying, “No, no, I want to work with you,” and you ultimately saying, “Okay, but I’m doubling my rate.” And I was like, “I don’t care. I still want to do this.” And eventually, you said, “I’m just not doing it. Just I can’t do it. Like, I have to be focused on other things.”

This is a really relevant transitional path for entrepreneurs as they grow things because you cannot be spending your time on the same things after you’ve established sort of the unique value of the business and gotten to a certain point. When you made the device, how did you decide on what direction you were going to go, what the business model was going to look like? Because it’s not the same as it was, right? You did not choose to open up your own locations and have your own tech and have a whole bunch of practitioner offices doing this.

Garrett Salpeter: Right. So, one just extra point on that transition. So, I appreciate you mentioning that, and feels good to hear you say that but thinking back on it, it was hard, it was scary because I derive so much of my sense of self-worth and self-esteem and satisfaction from being the one in there doing sessions with people and creating those outcomes and helping people achieve those goals. And so, giving that up was actually scary and painful. And it was a bit of closed my eyes and just jump out and hope to land safely. So, there was definitely a component of that. In terms of choosing the business model, it was a few different things. So, options were we could franchise what we’re doing, franchise that clinic, probably I have to raise money if we did this but open up a bunch of more facilities and own them and run them ourselves or sell the device in essentially a licensing model, which is what we did.

And for me, there were a few reasons for that. One is it allowed me and our team to play to our strengths, which are, one, developing the technology and, two, training other people how to use it and just being able to laser focus on that. So, we talked about the breadth of applications, and that part of it is broad, but in terms of our day-to-day activities, we have been very focused on selling and marketing this device and training people on how to use it and leveraging all that experience that we had from all these years in this laboratory phase of having a practice where we’ve learned a lot about how to help people get good results and also how to build and grow that business. So, it allows us to stay focused there. Also, some of it is it allowed us to keep a lean and efficient team and be focused on that as opposed to going out and doing the facilities. And some of it also when I was really having that question about how to do it, some of it was sort of a personality thing. I try to let the business be its own entity, but I know I get infused in with it.

You know, there are different areas where there’s stuff to see where perhaps where Garrett starts and the business stops. There’s more separation now as we’ve grown, but especially back then. And some of that was sort of my personality like instead of going into a community where there’s already a lot of physical therapy clinics with well-meaning people who are doing good work and saying going in and saying, “F*ck them.” Sorry. Pardon my language. “Don’t go see them. Come see us instead.” I’m more of the personality of like, “Hey, let’s sell our thing to them. They have good relationships with their patients. They can just upgrade what they’re doing and we can all work together.” So, some of it was that personality. So, it’s kind of a blend of all those different influences or different thought processes.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love that. You said selling the devices. And you also in the same breath mentioned licensing. Where’s the division and is there one? Do you have a recurring element to this or is it just selling the independent units? How does that work?

Garrett Salpeter: So, when I say licensing, we’re licensing our intellectual property to people. They can use our names and logos in their marketing. We have controls around that. So, we can protect the trademarks where if someone is behaving illegally or unethically, we can rescind those rights and stuff like that. So, there’s a licensing component to it. Right now, the business model is to sell the product. So, some of that is influenced by my looking at and our teams looking at the industry and how there are people in this space or in adjacent spaces would have charge-per-use models or things like that. And I didn’t like that because it essentially incentivizes people to use the tool less. It’s like, “Well, I could use this, but I’m going to have to pay for it.” And in this case, we want people to be able to use it as much as they want. We want them using it on everybody when it’s appropriate but we want them using on everybody so they can get these homerun outcomes so they can make this an integral part of their business and basically establish us as the market leader.

So, we allow physical therapy clinics, chiropractic offices to buy the device. There’s options to buy additional education electrodes from us, extended warranties, and stuff like that, but there’s no required ongoing fees. And part of that is because we just want to make it a great value proposition. You buy this from us once and you can earn all that customer surplus. You can continue to earn profit on that year over year over year. And perhaps the model may change. You know, we’re looking at different ways to evolve. And if we can find ways through software, for example, to add ongoing value, perhaps there may be more of a recurring revenue model. But there’s a little bit now when people buy electrodes from us, we pass along most of our wholesale savings but we make a little bit on that. So, there is some but a big part of it in this stage of our business is just wanting to establish NeuFit as the gold standard and getting more people using it and getting people in clinics buying second, third, and fourth devices.

We looked at a stat a few years ago where within the first 18 months, the average physical therapy clinic had ended up buying somewhere between 2.7 and 3 devices so 1.7 to 2 additional devices because their staff is fighting over it, their patients are fighting over it. It’s become such an integral part of what they do.

Brad Weimert: That’s awesome. You mentioned monetization, I think, through education. Do you sell a course that goes with it to educate a certification that goes with it, to educate people on how to use it, the training itself? And if so, what percentage of revenue is that? How much of it is that?

Garrett Salpeter: Exactly. That is how we do it. We sell a course. So, the one interesting thing about this is that it’s not just a device. Some physical therapists and different clinicians see this and say, “Oh, that’s just a modality. I don’t like modalities. I don’t use modalities.” And part of why they think that is because it’s sort of like something that any high school kid who you hire as a tech could do. He just put the pads here and just leave it. This is, I mean, yes, it’s a technology, but it’s also a methodology and there’s some sophistication to it. So, we absolutely do have a continuing education around it. We have a whole curriculum. We have our basic accelerated course on how to use a device and applying the 80/20 principle using the basics and that comes with the unit. For one seat, people have to buy extras, additional trainings on that. And then we have a full curriculum of continuing education courses that he goes into our level two, which is looking at some other higher-level applications.

We have a neurological course with information on how to address that population. We have a sports performance course. We have a hypertrophy course, hypertrophy being the technical term for muscle building and we have some really cool published articles on how this technology can help with that, so these other courses. As a percentage of revenue, that is still 5%. I mean, it’s relatively low but it’s still not zero. It’s still something. And it also enables people to use the machine better so that they want to buy more and that led to that statistic of why the average physical therapy clinic is buying additional units. And another cool value proposition for PTs and chiropractors and athletic trainers, other licensed practitioners is that they need continuing education credits every year or 2 or 3 towards license renewal so it depends on the state, but we’ve gotten our courses accredited so that they can get those credits. And so, it’s something that a lot of times they’ll just sit through a course, and be like, “Ho-hum. I’m just doing this because I need to check the box.”

And then they can take our courses and a lot of times they’ll tell us, like, “I’m so glad I did this. This is way better than anything. This is so exciting. It’s going to change the way I practice or it already has changed our practice.” So, it’s something they have to do anyway. And to have some of that really adds value that they can really enjoy too is part of the value proposition there.

Brad Weimert: It’s a good lesson for many, many, many, many different types of businesses to think about where education fits in. As somebody that sold insurance in a past life, I can tell you that the continuing education courses are terrible and what you just said is 100% accurate where you’re just sitting through it because you have to. But if you can create something that actually presents a way to make more money in your business and that is the continuing ed which you have to do anyway, that’s the win-win, right? But for almost all businesses, I think it’s worth reflecting on where that comes into play, what is the educational overlay that makes sense, where it actually helps them use your product more actually helps them make more money. And if you can fit the CE thing in, that’s awesome. Okay. So, you went down the path of selling the devices. When I was there and in the beginning what you talked about were these two paths that you did your testing on, right, which is hypertrophy, meatheads, and recovery for injury, really injury.

Now, when I look at the business model, fast forward, and you alluded to this just now, there are a bunch of different verticals that are using the product. And physical therapy was the initial one that I remember talking about. So, if you started and said, “Hey, we’re going to sell the device and the education and the pads a tiny recurring portion, presumably you started and you just targeted physical therapists. And that was the beginning thing. Is that how that went down? Or as you expanded, did you add verticals deliberately over time? How did you end up with seven different verticals that you’re pushing?

Garrett Salpeter: Some of it happened organically. And like if you had asked me six years ago when we launched the Neubie where I thought we’d have the most success, I initially probably would have said chiropractic, whereas we ended up catching on more in physical therapy. And there’s a lot of overlap but just statistically that is true, that we’ve had more traction in physical therapy. And some of that has to do with timing, relationships, just how things evolved organically in the sense that we had a couple of physical therapists in our first certification course that I ever led in 2017. Through them, we met a guy who’s a practice consultant who trains hundreds of physical therapy practices on how to run better businesses operationally marketing-wise, compliance-wise, billing-wise, all these different things. And he had an experience with the Neubie and loved it and referred maybe 30 out of the first 50 physical therapy practices that bought it. I mean, really amazing. And so, of course, we’re very grateful to him and grateful for that relationship and how he helped us get started. But that sort of created this snowball effect within the physical therapy, within that vertical, within that community. And that’s part of how it happened to catch on there just because of that snowball effect and that momentum and the good relationship building and good work in that space.

And we had started to gain more traction in the chiropractic space, similarly, because we’ve gotten some relationships with some other people and that’s led to more word of mouth. Of course, we’ve sprinkled in some paid advertising campaigns along the way. We’ve done a ton of work in terms of going to conferences and there are more industry-specific conferences. There are chiropractic conferences, there’s physical therapy conferences, there’s biohacking conferences. So, going and trying anything that might be good at first and then kind of narrowing down to go to more of the ones that are better for us that just seem like a better fit. And so, we still now having narrowed it down, we go to an average of two a month. We go to about 25 conferences a year and those are in different verticals. And as it’s happened organically now, we have people on our team who specialize in sports medicine, orthopedic. We have people on our team that specialize in neurological, stroke, spinal cord injury, MS population. And then we have a director of fitness and performance who specializes in those types of applications.

So, we’ve been able to kind of create those verticals within our teams so that people can have the educational and sales conversations and do the support work after the sale to help those people really thrive in their applications in those areas. So, I want to make sure I actually answer the question but some of it was essentially just how it sort of caught momentum in the physical therapy world and also in the bodybuilding world and people who take care of bodybuilders. So, the Neubie is a class II medical device. So, people using it either themselves have to be like a medical professional, some sort of licensed practitioner, or it’s someone unlicensed using it in the office or under the supervision of someone who’s a licensed practitioner. So, when I say in the bodybuilding space, a lot of times it’s physical therapists who work with that population or it’s trainers who work under the supervision of someone who’s a medical. So, just that caveat in there.

But it kind of caught on in that space also because of just some early relationships, some bigger names in that industry talking about it. And it’s really compelling when you see someone who looks like they could just go on stage at Mr. Olympia, someone who has so much muscle talking about how, “Dang, that thing just gave me the best workout.”

Brad Weimert: Yeah.

Garrett Salpeter: Or, “Wow. I’ve been trying to activate my left lat or I’ve been trying to activate my right glute for the last however many months or years, and that thing finally got me to do it. Now, I can feel my lat engaging.” So, when these people who have more muscle than you know what to do with, when you can see how this is actually helping them because it fills in that missing link because for them they obviously have the muscle, they have the tissue but it’s the neurological activation, the underlying activation that tells them what to do or not what to do with that muscle. And so, being able to fill in that missing link and make a big impact on someone like that, that really hits home, too. So, I think that’s sort of why I cut on that vertical because there were some bigger names in that industry also just talking about like, “Wow. This thing is the real deal. This thing helped me with this injury with that.” There’s a guy named Brad Rowe who we’ve collaborated with on one of these continuing education courses, who’s really wonderful, become a good friend now over the last few years.

He tore his bicep. He was competing as a professional bodybuilder. Yeah, he was Olympia level. And so, he was competing and he tore his bicep tendon. They told him it was going to be 16 weeks before he’s going to be able to train again. He started using the Neubie right away, day one after surgery. He was training again 7 or 8 weeks after surgery. At 15 weeks, remember, they said 16 weeks to start training. And at 15 weeks, he went on stage at a pro bodybuilding show and won third place.

Brad Johnson: Awesome.

Garrett Salpeter: And so, that was one of those major catalysts where it just started to catch a lot of momentum in the bodybuilding world after that happened.

Brad Weimert: That’s awesome. Well, I want to talk about some of the other verticals because basically, what I heard there was a lot of it was organic. And as things popped up, you leaned in. But I also want to clarify, if we haven’t drilled this point in because your excitement is contagious and your enthusiasm around the product, but the practical application of it and how it works is relevant to so many people.

And you mentioned sort of neurologically reconditioning the activation of certain muscles. And we’ve jumped around it a few times with recovery. And then, in this case, you just mentioned, I haven’t been able to get my lat to fire. A lot of dysfunctions for me, in life, both in trying to grow muscle and also in recovery, this is my experience and I might butcher this, you may have to correct me, but in my experience is that other muscles in my body are trying to protect an injury that’s happened at some point, and that’s what’s preventing me from activating what I should be, right?

So I could do a lat pulldown and my traps are firing and preventing my lats from activating the way they should. And my experience with the Neubie was that it locked up a certain muscle and that only allowed the other muscle to fire because I could not use my traps anymore. Is that how that works? Or what’s the mechanism that allows it to work?

Garrett Salpeter: So, there’s a few different foundational pieces that we have to understand. The first is that our muscles essentially just do what they’re told by the nervous system. They’re kind of like the soldiers. The nervous system is the general or whatever the right metaphor is. But the nervous system sends signals to muscles to either contract or not contract. So, that’s one part of it, the underlying neurological control. And other part of it is that understanding when we have excess tightness, right? So, there’s some people that are too mobile. That’s more rare. A lot more people are just too tight, the hypermobility, right?

Brad Weimert: I do, yeah.

Garrett Salpeter: So, the ligaments that hold your joints together, those joint capsules can be hypermobile. That’s a different set of issues, too. But there’s some overlap. When we talk about more people have too much tension or even you had that experience where like your traps would turn on and be excessively tight or active when you want to engage other muscles. And so, let’s look at why that is.

Our brains are oriented towards survival and protection. And so, one of the things our brains actually want us to do is less, not more. Our brains want us to conserve energy in case there’s a famine tomorrow because we evolve. And it’s only been the last couple of hundred years where we have such plentiful food, right? So, we evolved in times where there literally could be a famine. And conserving energy is very important. And so, our brains would never just contract a muscle, hold a muscle contracted just for sh*ts and giggles. It’s because there’s some protective survival benefit to doing that.

And so, what that has to do with is essentially different injuries, different bad habits that we develop over time, causing areas to become unstable and not work. And then the brain and nervous system in its wisdom to protect us causing other muscles to kick in. And then we adopt these different patterns over time. But it comes from either in response to injury. If I come and punch you in the leg right there or something like that, if you have that sort of immediate trauma, you are going to have a few different reactions to that, that neurological reaction. You’re going to create some tension in some areas, probably be bracing where I just hit you because you might be thinking, “Oh my gosh, we could get hit again at any moment.”

And then if you have pain in the leg, you’re actually going to try to shut down some other muscles to reduce movement in the leg so you don’t aggravate it and develop a little bit of a pattern where you might lean under the other leg a little bit more, put more weight on the other leg. So, there’s these different things. And so, that can happen from small injuries and big injuries and then bad habits over time where we spend a lot of time sitting in this kind of 90-degree angle as opposed to squatting down full, like in some Asian countries, right? People squat down to use the toilet and sit on the floor for meals and stuff like that.

And so, some of it is, if we don’t use those areas, yes, the connective tissue will actually shorten as well because it’s not worth the energy and resources to build those longer proteins and keep those tissues working through such a greater length. And neurologically, if we don’t see those ranges of motion over time, our brain starts to believe that it’s unsafe, that we can’t do it because it’s become so foreign. And so, the brain keeps us in this more narrow pattern and so, develops these habits. So, it’s sort of a long way of saying that someone, Brad comes into the office at NeuFit. We start working with him and we find all these different areas where some are tight, some are weak, some are guarded, some are hypersensitive and creating that sensation of pain.

And it’s because of that whole history, some recent, some older and what we want to do is actually scan around on the body with the machine here. And what we’re doing is essentially mimicking the same signals that happen when you’re under load, when you’re stretching or if you’re lifting weights or using your muscles as you normally would. And the interesting thing about that is that you should be able to handle that signal everywhere in your body. You should be able to move through all the ranges of motion, activate all your muscles. And so, when we go over areas that are working well, your brain sees that and says, “Oh, yeah, that’s just Brad being Brad. No big deal, no problem.”

But if we stimulate any areas where you are actively guarding or limiting function in that area or it’s an area where you just haven’t done that recently and, therefore, it’s new and different and that novelty to your brain is actually threatening, if the brain sees something new, it doesn’t recognize, it says, “Oh sh*t, alarm, pay attention to this.” So, if we stimulate any of those areas, we get that reaction within your brain, within your nervous system saying, “Hey, hey, hold on a second. We don’t do that.”

And it’s essentially the process of sending that same signal, then this is some of the benefits that we talked about briefly, some of the benefits of direct current sending that signal to teach your brain, give your brain a chance to recalibrate. This is that neuromuscular reeducation. Give your brain a chance to understand, hey, it actually is safe to go in. You know that dark room that we don’t want to walk in because we thought there were ghosts and tigers and snakes. It actually was fine, right? We turned on the light and we could see that it was no big deal.

So, it gives your brain a chance to understand that you can start to explore these edges and go into these greater ranges and activate these new muscles or activate them in new ways and to greater levels of strength, output, whatever it might be. And then as you get that opportunity, you start to open up these new avenues for more range of motion, more strength, less pain, etc. And then, of course, you want to just maintain it and use that more so that your brain doesn’t forget that you have that range.

Brad Weimert: So, my experience with it is once you find those areas, you are targeting those areas and then moving through them. And that is the process that you use to recondition neurologically. Is that accurate?

Garrett Salpeter: Yeah.

Brad Johnson: Awesome. So, there are so many things we talk about on that front, but it’s been a huge, huge thing in my life for lots of different injuries. But I want to talk about, go back to these different paths as you grew. The choice for, and there’s never a right answer. I actually fundamentally don’t believe in the notions of right or wrong. Those are relative concepts to whatever outcome you’re after.

So, you gain traction in professional sports and elite athletics, physical therapy, chiropractic, bodybuilding. What are the other areas that you have now grown into? And how do you think about the energy that you put into targeting each independent vertical? Do you go heavy in some direction and you’re kind of exploring others? Because there are some others on your site that I was like, “Oh, that’s okay, I can see that, but that’s interesting.”

Garrett Salpeter: So, there’s some limitation for what marketing we’re able to do because we have an FDA-cleared product and the FDA, so it’s a regulated industry. And of course, we stay within and operate within those regulations. And so, we’re only able to market and promote uses of the product that are on label that are cleared by the FDA. To be clear, if any clinicians are listening to this or people who are practicing medical professionals, they can use things off-label based on their discretion and their interaction with their own patients and things like that. So, we don’t necessarily control. We educate them on the cleared uses of our product and they can go in different direction.

So, some of our marketing is limited in that regard. And so, for us, I don’t know that we necessarily are pursuing any new verticals right now so much as we are going deeper. I liken our journey to something you’re very familiar with, like climbing Mount Everest, for example, right? I think, if the top of Mount Everest would be getting into 30% or 50% or more of all the physical therapy and chiropractic clinics just in this country alone, we’ve made it part of the way up the mountain and we can look back and say, “Hey, great view. Hey, great progress.” But we can also look up the mountain and say, “We’ve got a long way to go.”

So, I think for us, we’ve had this element of breadth in our business. So, I think we’re not necessarily trying to broaden it anymore now as we are trying to go deeper in those existing verticals. And so, for us, it’s finding more ways through different marketing channels, through different referral and affiliate relationships, through finding different events and things like that, finding new ways to go deeper into those same verticals. A little bit of broadening would be, like, for instance, we’re going to go to our first PM&R conference, which is physical medicine and rehabilitation. So, it’s doctors like physiatrists who are doing more pain treatments where we’ve worked with a few of them and it’s been amazing, but we haven’t really formally introduced ourselves in that market.

So, we’ll go to our first annual conference for their trade group or their society. We’ll do that in the next month actually. So, there’s a little bit of that, but mostly, it’s trying to go deeper in those same verticals and just reaching more people because it’s awesome to see the impact it’s having and the ones we’re working with, and there’s just still so many more out there.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, deeper, not wider, is a common trend for entrepreneurs as they grow and trying to stay, trying being the operative word here, to stay focused. What has changed with you as an operator as you’ve grown? So, you go from a practitioner to now overseeing the education and marketing initiatives to push the product out, go deeper into these verticals. How has your role changed?

Garrett Salpeter: There’s been a few of those and each time, it is a little bit of a– not quite as scary as that first one of going from the practitioner type to the business CEO type. But it’s been just iterations of that same or different flavors of that same sort of dish of being able to do something and then hand it off to someone who can really focus on that. So, for a period of time, I was interacting with and was the primary person supporting people who are doing research with the product.

And then we hired a PhD neuroscientist who runs our research and clinical affairs program. And she’s not only better at it than I would have been anyway, but she’s especially better at it because she can focus her full time on that, whereas I’m being pulled in a bunch of different directions. So, now, there’s this notion that I know you’re obviously familiar with and other people have talked about on the show about like Who Not How, right?

One of my biggest, biggest responsibilities becomes finding and supporting the leaders who are then going to lead the rest of the people on the team and make things happen. And so, on our leadership team now, we have wonderful people overseeing sales and operations and research and clinical affairs and clinical education. And then, separately, wonderful people overseeing our clinic here in Austin. So, that was one of the biggest, biggest transitions.

First transition was kind of pulling myself out of the clinic and then going through a couple of iterations of finding the right mix of people to lead that business. And I’m grateful to say we have an excellent team there now. And same thing on the device side of the business. We have an excellent team there. So, a big part of what I do is have my one-on-one meetings with them every week, support them in different things. They come up, work together on different challenges and different opportunities. And then also, run our podcast, right? I wrote my book, The NeuFit Method, kind of be the face of the company, go out and do things like this, hanging out with my friend Brad on his podcast here, right?

Brad Johnson: Love it.

Garrett Salpeter: So, doing stuff like that. And then also, kind of keeping an eye on everything, kind of trying to get out of the day to day and then get that 20,000 or 30,000-foot view, not only on where we are now, but on where we’re going, looking at the next generation of technology like we talked about possibly in the future, if we can find ways to add ongoing value and it makes sense, possibly having recurring revenue models, but having recurring value models where we can have software that can allow clinics to interact with their patients and possibly, personal use versions of the product, and different things like that, that I’m exploring right now. So, the role has definitely evolved into more leadership, but that’s dependent on having excellent, effective people, which it took a few iterations to get there. And I’m grateful to say that we have that now, and then, just really trying to look forward on where we’re going.

Brad Weimert: What is one of the biggest mistakes that you’ve made through the process of pushing out the product and getting to the point where there are thousands of people using it now?

Garrett Salpeter: There’s a few that come to mind. The biggest is probably holding on to the wrong person for too long. I’d say that’s probably the biggest thing, probably the biggest, which also means most painful, most difficult lesson to learn along the way was letting when it becomes clear that there’s an issue with somebody. So, I heard someone say, the best time to fire someone is right when you think you should because it rarely gets better. But I made a mistake of letting one issue compound over the span of multiple years. And honestly, it came from a place of some of it was scarcity mindset, thinking like, can I find other people to work with me? I mean, I actually learned a lot.

And one particular business relationship, I’m grateful to say I’ve never really had like a toxic or emotionally abusive romantic relationship. But I had a relationship like that with someone that I worked with. And people listening to this may have friends or know people, or it’s like, why don’t you break up with that guy or that girl? But in their relationship, they feel like either they’re responsible for the person or they can change or whatever excuses they have. I went through all that in a business relationship. So, that was one of the biggest learnings.

And then another one was I paid to have some software developed. And at the time, it was a significant investment and it was basically for me, in the clinic, and how I like to do things, I didn’t get enough input from other people and actually have the real users test it out and provide input along the way. And that was another big lesson is that it’s okay for us as entrepreneurs, as leaders to have the idea and someone had to have the idea, like Henry Ford talked about, if I asked people what they wanted, they would have just said better horse and buggies, right? Whereas I gave them the car. So, it’s okay to have that idea. But then, at some point, it’s good to get input from the people who are actually going be driving the car. So, that was another lesson I learned several years ago that was painful because it was just money lost. But fortunately, you can make more.

Brad Weimert: How did that manifest when you said, you should have gotten feedback from users? Because that dynamic pops up a lot, specifically in software where you need to know how somebody is using the product and have a really thorough understanding. But you also need to know when you know more than them, right? And when you should guide them, i.e., create a car instead of give them a faster horse. So, how did that shake out for you and who should you have been listening to?

Garrett Salpeter: So, some of it was a function of the fact that we were using it in our clinic, which was…

Brad Weimert: The software or the Neubie?

Garrett Salpeter: Well, this I’m talking about the software.

Brad Johnson: Got it.

Garrett Salpeter: So, we developed software that essentially was our version of an EMR, electronic medical record system for tracking treatments. And there’s a lot of specific things that we do with the Neubie, like mapping around and finding these spots on the body in different ways that we have the settings on the machine and different exercise progressions that we do. So, it was essentially a customized EMR for the Neubie that would allow us in our clinic to be able to just very easily and seamlessly track the sessions that we do, so anyone could look at the notes from the previous session, know exactly what was done, know exactly where that patient is in their progressions. And it was very robust and good for us, but we didn’t necessarily want to build it for us.

So, one of the biggest issues, for example, was that in PT clinics, they already have EMRs. And they typically, at the time, we were doing no insurance. Now, we do some, but at the time, we were doing none. So, our documentation requirements were just a lot less than what other clinics are doing. So, they’re already using the EMR. So, if they were going to use our product, they might look at it and say, I mean, several of them did, they looked at it and said, “Hey, that’s cool, but it’s basically an extra step. And for us, taking notes is already the most burdensome part of our job. This documentation stuff sucks. We don’t want to have to spend time using that and then transferring into this or some of that.” So, finding ways to actually build modules that interface with their EMR is stuff that we’re actually exploring now and stuff like that. But that’s part of the reason why it was cool, but it wouldn’t fit into their day-to-day way of doing things.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. So, I think it’s a great lesson. We are currently going through, so we have a full-time development team in-house. We have our custom software that we use live in on, I mean everybody in our team interacts with it routinely and we are now going through a development phase with an external party to scope another segment of software we’re building. And it has been an incredibly insightful process because they are so much more deliberate about the scoping process. And part of the scoping process in this case is getting the stakeholders to give feedback, and that is everything from internal staff to clients to contractors that we work with, etc.

And even through the initial phases of this where we’re maybe a month into doing it and it will be a longer process, both sides of this have shown through. One is I listen to some of these stakeholder interviews and think, that’s a really dumb thought. That’s not relevant to me, right? But then there are other parts of it, and sort of I get stuck in this trap of I know better than that. And I have more data points, just period. I’ve seen thousands and thousands and thousands of use cases and data points. You haven’t.

But that doesn’t mean that I’m going to be able to cover all thoughts through the process, right? It is a very egocentric and ignorant and short-sighted approach to things if you shut down all opinions just because you feel like you’re an expert. Something is going to pop up. You can learn but only if you’re open to learning, and taking the time to listen to the practitioners certainly would be an opportunity for that, I would think.

Garrett Salpeter: Yeah, 100%. And we have seen some of this, thankfully have learned those lessons. And so, like I mentioned, working on a personal use version of our product, as we were kind of exploring early iterations around that. And there are certain things that I come up with or how I would just like to see things done or by default, would think they’d be done. And then other people on our team will come in and say, “Well, I’d rather do this, or how about that?” And there’s been a lot of times now where I’m like, “Sh*t, that’s a good idea.”

Brad Weimert: Well, that’s good.

Garrett Salpeter: I know.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, that’s good. Well, I think that that’s an ongoing thing, an ongoing challenge for lots of entrepreneurs is trying to figure out the balance there. And you mentioned it, but I can’t remember the language that you used, but you mentioned that you had, I think, wonderful people leading all of the different departments of the business now, elements of the business. And if you fail to find the wonderful people or you fail to look at them as wonderful people, it’s much harder to reconcile the notion of they had a really good idea, right? If you don’t first see that you have brought on great people, it’s hard to value their opinions.

Garrett Salpeter: 100%. That’s a great insight, yeah.

Brad Weimert: So, before we wrap, how do you find those people?

Garrett Salpeter: For us, some of the people on our team that are now really key contributors either came in first as clients or started at our front desk. And we’ve done a lot of promoting from within. And I like that because we get to understand, get to know people. We can tell they’re a good cultural fit. We can tell they’re true believers in our mission and they live by our values. And I think we’ve had a lot of success. Where we’ve had success, a lot of it has been because we got to know people in that and sort of promoted from within. And a couple of the failures we’ve had have been bringing people from the outside.

But that said, there are a couple of people that we have brought from the outside successfully. And now, a big part of it is actually just piggybacking off of the same theme of getting feedback is that it’s been having the other, instead of me just picking a person where I’ve picked wrong, there’s an element of having them meet the other people on the leadership team or the other people that they will be working with and getting more opinions from the team, especially from the people who they would be working with on a regular basis. And I think, collectively, we’re a lot better at picking people than I or than any one individual would be together because someone could say something that just really resonates with someone and someone else might see that and say, “Wait a second, did you consider this angle,” whatever it might be. So, I think for us, definitely promoting from within when we can is still based on the successes we’ve had there, our first choice, and making sure that we get the right people on our team looking when we hire new people from the outside.

Brad Weimert: Do you follow a specific framework for hiring?

Garrett Salpeter: We do a version of Who, that top-grading or smart in the street, that book, I think that’s a great resource with the different interview stages and questions to ask and stuff like that. Essentially, I’ve just copied from the book, virtually all those interview questions for the first round of interviews and then subsequent ones and stuff like that. So, is it just called Who, that book?

Brad Weimert: Yeah, it is. And we’ll link to it in the show notes. But I love the hesitation on the front end, a version of, because I think everybody does a version of. Nobody I know snaps to grid entirely, and nor should they, I think. I think, especially you figured this out with some experience, but the frameworks are super valuable because not having a framework is utter chaos. But it doesn’t mean that you have to stick to it all the time. Iterations and deliberate testing of the framework is going to yield improvement.

Garrett Salpeter: Yeah, for sure. And I’d say the similar thing for our kind of internal operating system. We use a version of EOS, which I’m sure a lot of people listening to this do also or at least familiar with. But there’s things that are different, sometimes in a good way, but sometimes in a way where I go back and read the book a year or two later and I’m like, “Oh, hey, that actually would be better if we did it the way they recommended there.” So, we try it. So, there’s pros and cons to going off script.

Brad Weimert: Yes, for sure. Well, and as you mentioned, with the practitioners using or evaluating the software that you created, it created an extra step. Sometimes, when you overlay a framework onto the business model that you have, you realize that it’s cumbersome because you have addressed a certain element in the framework somewhere else in the business, right? There is something that you’ve done already that would streamline it or if you change the framework. And sometimes, you’re just being stubborn.

Garrett Salpeter: Yes, both are true.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, Garrett, I love seeing you, man. What I’m going to ask you if you have a Neubie in your car to help me, but I also want to know where you want to point people. Where do people find out more about you, about NeuFit, about whatever you’re interested in pushing people towards?

Garrett Salpeter: So, definitely, our website www.Neu.Fit, it’s N-E-U, like neurological. Social media-wise, we’re most active on Instagram which is @neufitrfp, N-E-U-F-I-T-R-F-P for rehab, fitness, and performance. And then also my book, if people are interested, there’s paperback and hardcover on Amazon, also Audible audiobook. It’s on Audible, Spotify, Apple Books, Google Play, and all those different, wherever you like to find your audiobooks.

Brad Weimert: I love it, man. I love it. Well, I appreciate you coming out.

Garrett Salpeter: Thank you. It’s great to see you, get to catch up. And thanks for having me on the show.

Brad Weimert: Absolutely.