Introduction
[00:00:00] Detective Ev: Hello my friends. Welcome back to another episode of the Health Detective Podcast by Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. My name is Evan Transue, aka Detective Ev. I will be your host for today’s show about hundreds of clients that have healthier lives now because of FDN and the work of a specific FDNP.
We are having with us once again, Dr. Kimberly Boehm. She was someone who had come on last year. But I needed to highlight her again cause Dr. Kim is going to give us some things today for practitioners, but also for potential clients of FDN practitioners, including herself.
Dr. Kim is almost 60 years old. She says this herself in the podcast. This has relevance. She has had multiple other careers. She was in health coaching for about a year and a half before ever doing FDN. She wasn’t finding success with just the health coaching.
She had clients, but what really happened is when she had the FDN system added on and she knew what to do consistently for each client when they came on board her business, that’s when things blew up for her. Now in the last two years since graduating, she has taken on hundreds of clients as an FDN practitioner. She’s making great money, she’s helping people, they’re sending her referrals. That’s the beauty of this work.
What’s crazy is Dr. Kim does not really do much social media. She has stuff on there, but that’s not even close to her main source of getting clients. I could be wrong, but based on what she’s told me I would pretty much guarantee that less than 5% of her clients come from social media. It doesn’t mean social media is bad, just saying that we obviously don’t need it.
Hundreds of Clients: Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
She did not reinvent the wheel; she is an advocate for doing FDN exactly as it is taught. And better yet, the majority of her clients, all these hundreds that have come in, have come from her doing the lecture packages that we offer to graduates of FDN. So that’s it. She’s literally doing exactly what Reed recommends and what Reed would go do himself if he were to start this all over from scratch and just learn about FDN. It’s working for her 15 years after this course started.
I don’t want to come across as harsh or anything like that, it’s the complete opposite. Many of our practitioners, brand new to this, are over complicating it sometimes, and they do figure it out eventually. But they’re like, worried, do I need to do this thing or hire this business coach, or do all that kind of stuff.
There are times and places for those things, and social media can be a great avenue. It can be something where you get a lot of clients from if you know what you’re doing. But you can go become an FDN, buy a $300 lecture package, and you’ll get a call with Reed Davis himself, you’ll get everything that you need, and go give a free talk in your town.
Oh, and by the way, there are guides in the lecture packages that show you who you should call. There are advertisements that you could print your business on, and then you could hang them in your local town or wherever it’s at. It wouldn’t really just be something that you hang in your local town, right? It might be at the library or church or something similar, whatever works for you.
Hundreds of Clients: A Little About Dr. Kim Boehm
We have all the stuff. You have the PowerPoint slides, a call with Reed. Just do the FDN course, do the lecture packages, and it’s working brilliantly for Kim. You don’t have to charge anyone to come to the lectures; just do them for free. This is proof that this can work for anyone, pretty much anywhere, even in today’s world.
A little bit about Dr. Kim, a very short bio here. She is an FDN that returned to college to earn a doctorate in naturopathic and original medicine, which is a DNOM. I’ve never seen those letters, actually. That’s interesting. She continues her FDN and naturopathic practice in Virginia and recently opened a drug/alcohol and DNA lab.
Oh yeah, by the way, when she’s not working with 18 to 20 clients every single month, or I think she said 15 to 20 clients, she also just opened up another lab. No excuses, man. Let’s get this done, let’s go help people, do what we gotta do.
Without further ado, let’s get to today’s episode. All right, Kim. Good morning and welcome back to the Health Detective Podcast. How are you?
[00:03:57] Dr. Kim Boehm: Good morning. I’m great. How are you doing?
[00:03:59] Detective Ev: I’m doing well. This is an earlier podcast for both of us. You’re East Coast, so it’s 8:00 AM for you as well, right?
Dr. Kim Boehm: Yes, it is.
Detective Ev: Cool. I actually have the podcast thing open for a lot of the day, but no one ever books in this early. I like this. It’s a good way to start the day, get inspired with another FDN out there, killing it.
Hundreds of Clients: Success with the Lecture Packages
I wanted to bring Kim back on for a couple reasons. One was the fact that when we had brought her on before she was actually doing an Instagram Live, and then I repurposed it. There are times that that’s appropriate. But I have seen in the numbers, I think people are just so used to a certain level of audio quality that when we repurpose Instagram Lives, I might not always give the guest the full justice that I would want them to have. So, it’s cool to have you back.
But then two, I love, that we can go to both sides of this today. We can go to the practitioner side and then we’ll move into the client side and successes that you’re having there. Because you kind of came into FDN and challenged in a very positive way, a lot of the common misconceptions that people need to be social media gurus to make their business work, they need to do some crazy cool strategy.
You literally came in, did FDN, got the lecture packages that Reed has recommended since FDN has been in existence, the stuff that he was doing all the way back then. They’ve been updated and stuff, but still fundamentally it’s the same. You just went and did it and it’s been leading to a lot of great things in business.
Roughly speaking, how many clients are you working with right now? How many have you acquired since you graduated from the course?
[00:05:17] Dr. Kim Boehm: I’ve probably had hundreds since I graduated. I tend to have anywhere from 18 to 20 at one time that are in the cycle. They migrate in and then they migrate out. But typically, there’s about 18 to 20 at a time right now.
Hundreds of Clients: Spending Time with the Clients
[00:05:30] Detective Ev: Awesome. So, let’s say if it was even a hundred, and that’s like a low estimate, because that’s still really good. When did you graduate the FDN course?
[00:05:38] Dr. Kim Boehm: It’s been I think two years ago now.
[00:05:40] Detective Ev: If it was only 102 clients with the kind of work that we do and how in depth we work with our clients and the amount we’re able to charge because of how in depth we work with them and the results that we get, that’s still pretty good.
So, you’re someone out there that’s just kind of rolling with it, making it work. And you were doing very well last year in June at the Biohacking Congress in Boston. You were already doing well.
So, when you graduated the FDN course, did you immediately go with the lecture packages? Was that your first route?
[00:06:10] Dr. Kim Boehm: No. I had actually been a health coach for a year or so prior to doing FDN. So, I had already hung out my shingle and was already working with folks.
This is part of my story really; I had been in nursing, and I loved it. I didn’t love the business model of it. I found that to be a little bit lacking. So, I thought, you know, what do I want to do? I want to be a health coach. Because I want to be able to spend the time with people that a physician is not able to because of the business model, not because he doesn’t want to.
Hundreds of Clients: Functional Labs Were the Missing Piece
Then I went to Duke Integrative Medicine Department there. They had a phenomenal program. I hung up my shingle, I was getting people. But they weren’t all reaching the clinical outcome that they wanted, even though they were following the coaching program.
The missing piece for me was the functional labs, right? Because we were letting clients just decide where they wanted to go. Sadly, they didn’t really know either, they were guessing. So, we were leading them perfectly, but sometimes to the wrong place, if that makes sense. The labs were the missing piece.
That’s how I came to FDN, was to learn the functional labs, learn how to clinically correlate that to assessments. And then everything changed, game changer. People started hitting their clinical objectives. Then they started telling other people that, you won’t believe it, here’s what I did. It just blew up from there.
[00:07:34] Detective Ev: That’s awesome. And this is the biggest thing for FDNs out there. I always think the first, and it’s a different number for everyone, but it’s the first few handfuls of clients. If you can figure that out, and do FDN the way that it’s taught, you are going to get these people results.
Half the time they’re walking billboards cause they’re going to look different. Even if that’s not what they came to you for, they’re going to look different. The skin gets clear, there’s more vibrancy, the weight is at a healthier level. They can’t hide it. So, people are complimenting them. What did you do? Oh, I worked with Kim. Right? That’s kind of how it goes. It’s not that simple, but it really is kind of how it manifests itself.
Hundreds of Clients: Health Coaching & Objective Data
Let’s be clear about something with this health coaching. This isn’t anyone’s fault, but the industry that we’re in, it’s very hard for us from a marketing perspective to, on a Facebook ad, say, become a Functional Diagnostic Nutrition practitioner, because that might not mean anything to someone inherently. We almost overlap with the health coaching stuff.
But from what it sounds like, you were a, by definition, health coach, right? Just helping people set and achieve health goals, is that correct?
[00:08:34] Dr. Kim Boehm: Right. So, we were identifying what optimum health looked like to that person, why they wanted that, what they were going to do with it, let’s set some goals around it.
And I still use it, to be honest with you. I still use the program. But I now have objective data, not just subjective data. I have objective data to go with it. Now we know where we’re going. We found the healing opportunities; we weren’t just guessing at them. And that made all the difference in the world when I put it all together.
[00:09:05] Detective Ev: Yeah. Again, there’s nothing wrong with it, like you just said, you actually use it yourself. But it’s unfortunate cause people will call me, like, I’m doing the course enrollment stuff now. When they call me, they’re like, oh, well what kind of health coaching is this? Or like, is this a health coaching program? I’m like, yeah, but not in the way that you’ve probably been taught.
Because the traditional definition of health coaching has been kind of, I don’t want to say tainted, that’s the wrong word, but it’s been misrepresented. It used to mean something else and now it’s like 25 different programs that call themselves health coaching.
Hundreds of Clients: The Life Changing Conversation
Really there’s one definition, and it’s a good one. But you almost always want to add that into something else if you’re going to be working with complicated clients. Like, if you have someone with Hashimoto’s, they either need to be working with another professional or you need to have more resources if you’re just going to do health coaching. Cause usually those people aren’t going to just magically get better from setting goals. We gotta have some things to actually do that we know are going to produce positive clinical outcomes like you talked about.
How did you hear about FDN and then make that leap into it?
[00:10:03] Dr. Kim Boehm: I actually heard about FDN when I was getting my certifications for health coaching. One of the ladies in my cohort, as we were practicing together to get our accreditation, I had a conversation with her. I said, Elise, something’s not working. I am working this program perfectly with clients and we’re getting to the end. They have followed it perfectly, but they’re not having the clinical outcome.
And I’ll never forget. She said to me just as casually as she could, she said, well, you know, you really ought to look into FDN. You get the functional labs; it makes all the difference. And I thought, I have no idea what she just said. FDN? What is that?
She gave me the link and I went and looked. It was one of those things where I knew it when I saw it, that’s the missing piece. And she’s a thriving, successful FDN herself. But she is the one that introduced me to it and got me into it. And it changed my entire practice. Took me to a whole new level.
Hundreds of Clients: Advanced Care Card
[00:10:59] Detective Ev: That’s awesome. Unfortunately, I don’t think everyone has the same exact experience with FDN with that aha moment, but a lot of us do. That’s what happened to me. I mean, I told you I drove to California. I heard Jenn Malecha talk, and I’m like, all right. This wasn’t a crazy trip. That’s why I came out here.
You just find that missing link. You don’t even necessarily know how to verbalize it sometimes. But I was looking for objective data and didn’t necessarily realize that. I was in the cycle of trial and error and didn’t necessarily realize that at the time.
So, you’re working with tons of people. One of the things that you and I were talking about on the phone is one of the biggest things, and I share this in a podcast. I gave you the credit for it cause I didn’t know anyone else who was talking about this. You introduced me to the idea that FDNs actually get approved now for this Advanced Care Card, which is revolutionary for not only our practitioners, but our clients as well.
So, what does this mean basically, in terms of how we can structure and finance our packages with our clients?
[00:11:56] Dr. Kim Boehm: Yeah, that’s another game changer. When I look back over the big bullets of things that changed my entire trajectory, having the Advanced Care Card was one of them.
Because for a lot of folks, we were in the middle of some pandemics and other things. People were losing their jobs and couldn’t go to work. Money just became a real barrier to people being able to do one of our programs that was not covered under insurance.
Hundreds of Clients: Get Paid & Get Started
So, I did some digging around. And yes, there’s a company called Advanced Care Card. They will finance programs like ours that are considered out of network, if you will. They’ll do it 15 months interest free.
So, depending on the package that someone purchases from you, they can really get that price point to fit in their budget. And they can go longer than 15 months if they want to. Interest does start accruing on month 16, but you can go out, I think, up to 60 months. I mean, you can really get it down pretty low.
But they pay me up front. I get all my money. My client then pays them back in monthly installments. It works beautifully. I have a lot of people that use that.
[00:13:01] Detective Ev: When I was talking to a gentleman named Bo or something, he was doing the demo for me. I went over all this stuff cause I couldn’t believe this.
So, correct me if any of this is wrong. As the practitioner, we get all the money upfront. They can only spend it really at our business because it’s tracking the card. So, it’s not like they could go screw up. If they don’t pay in the monthly payments, we’re not punished for that. We don’t owe a fee as the practitioner. There’s really no risk to us whatsoever.
[00:13:24] Dr. Kim Boehm: Right, exactly. I don’t know whether my clients ever pay their card balance or whether they don’t. I just know that I got my money upfront, and it allowed us to jump off and start going. Yep.
[00:13:37] Detective Ev: It has changed the conversation completely in even my own practice.
Hundreds of Clients: Removing a Hindrance to Healthy Results
I instantly got on that. I’m like, there’s no way this is real. And they got us approved almost instantly.
Now when we did one of the lecture talks, which we’ll mention in a moment, the conversations I was able to have with people, cause like our three-month program, personally at my place, is like, $4,500 with the labs. I believe in what we do. We give exceptional service. People come in and have very serious conditions. And they will walk out sometimes in the four months and either at least be 80% better. Some of them don’t have these things anymore, they’re in a remission state. So, I feel very comfortable charging the amount that we charge, given what we’re doing.
But it was always a tough conversation, no matter how much money you have, to say, oh, it’s three-monthly payments. It’s going to be like $2000 up upfront, you know $1250 here, $1250 there, or whatever. Now it’s like, okay, well you can do that if you’d like. Or for interest free, if you have good, excellent credit, because they’re actually very fair even with the good credit, I think it’s like a high 600 they’ll accept for this, 0%, 15 months. I get all the money up front and now it’s $300 a month for the person. And three or four months in, they feel the best that they’ve ever had.
If they only had paid those three to four months to me, that wouldn’t even cover the cost of the labs. So, I think they’re happy to pay these things. And let’s be honest, when you feel good, you’re able to make money easier. It’s a lot easier to work when you feel like a 10 out of 10, rather than a two.
Hundreds of Clients: Neglect is Not an Option
[00:14:56] Dr. Kim Boehm: Absolutely. And I love that.
To me, all of the promotional materials are free as well. So, I always have the pamphlet sitting out when I do a lecture, with my own material, so that it’s not just, here’s my program, but here’s how you can pay for that program.
But the other thing too, anytime you start having conversations about money with a client, that can be a little bit hard to wear both hats, right? I’m going to help you, but I also want money for helping you. So, you really have to understand how to have those conversations and remind them that there’s a cost to doing nothing as well. Like you were saying, there’s missed time from work. There is any number of things that also cost them by just ignoring their problem.
[00:15:37] Detective Ev: Yeah. And there’s a certain level of conviction that comes for us as practitioners, having spent money ourselves to get results for our own stuff, or seeing it in clients, right?
Like my parents say this publicly and they’re willing to do it. But they spent over a hundred thousand dollars on my mom’s health. My parents do okay; they did not have a hundred thousand dollars. So, you know what I mean by that, right? They’re getting this from credit and other things that we shouldn’t have been getting it from, but there was no other option.
Then I saw what my mom paid, a little over $5,000, to work with an FDN that I referred her to for a set period of time, and that was the thing that got her better.
Hundreds of Clients: Confidence from Experiencing Great Results
In my head, there’s just a certain conviction on the phone. I’m like, I know I can stop them from going down the rabbit hole and spending a hundred thousand dollars on BS and nothing, and just getting organs removed. At the same time, if you’re willing to spend the money here, yeah, you give us a few months and we’ll get you the best results you’ve got in 20 years, most likely.
When you could say that with conviction, because you’ve seen it in yourself and you’ve seen it in other clients, people would actually pay a lot more than that amount if they knew that you were going to get the results that you were going to get. Right? That’s the thing.
[00:16:34] Dr. Kim Boehm: Yeah. I had a client that just concluded her program on Monday. She came to me about ready to have to have her gallbladder out. She was told that she was going to have to have her gallbladder out.
We went through our program for three months. She went back to the doctor. He said to her, I don’t know what you’re doing. But yeah, we’re not going to do that now. So, she even said to me, how much is my gallbladder worth monetarily? Here’s what I paid for your program. Here’s what I would’ve paid to have my gallbladder removed from my body. Now I get to keep it and I’m fine. And here’s what I spent. So yeah, it’s all relative, isn’t it?
[00:17:11] Detective Ev: Yes, it is.
One, this last little part here, I guess more for the practitioners, but it does connect to practitioners and clients alike. And then we’ll talk about more of the actual coaching side and what this looks like.
Hundreds of Clients: Happy to Pay for Good Results
I do the podcast obviously, so I interact with a lot of FDNs. And this is not a condemnation of anyone that comes through. But you can start to see, as someone who interviews people, that your mindset is a lot of what has to do with people’s success here, or lack thereof.
There are people that have been doing this for several years. Again, it’s not a judgment or condemnation. I love everyone in FDN, but they barely had a few clients, right? And they got like 10 certifications. Then we have others that come through sometimes, and this might be the only certification they have ever done. And within one year, they’re earning over six figures and their clients are happy to work with them and refer them to other people because of the great work that they’re doing. That’s a heck of a good way to live your life when you can make a great living and people are happy to pay you it because you do such a darn good job at what you’re doing.
Now, not even just talking about the specific numbers thing, but like, you have had a lot of success with these lectures. So, you’re not doing the social media thing. The lectures, if I’m not mistaken, are free. I did charge for mine because I was doing Facebook ads, and I charged like $10 a ticket, basically.
But I know for yours, I think you do it the real way that Reed recommends, which is actually doing it for free. So, what are these lecture packages and how do they help connect our clients to us, as practitioners, and let them know what we’re doing here?
Hundreds of Clients: The More Lectures, The More Clients
[00:18:40] Dr. Kim Boehm: That was the third game changer for me.
The lectures are packages that I bought right off of the FDN site. They had absolutely everything in there that I was going to need. It had a PowerPoint presentation that Reed had put together, a video of Reed actually giving it, the handout material, surveys, who to call to try to book the venue, what to say. Here’s the ad to put in the paper. I mean, I made nothing up on my own.
I bought the package; I did the package. But there’s several of them. I had so much success, I bought them all. One is Stress and Hormones; one is Say Goodnight to Insomnia; Fibromyalgia, but whatever the topic.
That is something too that probably makes me a little bit different. Cause a lot of FDNs create a niche and that’s their niche and that’s what they want to focus on, which is beautiful. I know a lot of them. Jenn Malecha hits it out the park. You know, Lyme Boss hits it out the park.
Mine didn’t so much end up that way. I started out with a focus, fibromyalgia, because that’s what my sister had, and I wanted to help her. But then from there my practice took me in all types of areas. So, I can’t say that I any longer am specific to one niche.
But yeah, those lecture packages were the money. I went out and did them for free. Went to libraries just like Reed said. Had some libraries that told me, no, we don’t really want to do that. Fine. Went to some churches, did them there. But the more I did, the more I got. And you could sign people up on the spot.
Hundreds of Clients: No Age Requirement on FDN
I did some social media, but not so much. I’m almost 60, you know, so that’s not really my thing. I find people where I actually meet people, at my church, my friends, my neighborhood, my family, the lectures that I do. So, that’s really where I find my people.
[00:20:29] Detective Ev: I appreciate you saying this too, cause I never am going to ask. Well, one, people wouldn’t know it if they’re on the camera. But two, I’m never going to ask someone directly. But I appreciate you saying almost 60 because I told you before we got on air here, I’ve had some people call and they’re like late forties, almost 50. Like, am I too old to do FDN? I’m like, what? Where did you see an age requirement on this?
In fact, people are dealing with more health issues, statistically speaking, the older that they get, right? So, if anything, your market would open up even more. And certainly, I mean, I could say this as a 20 something. There are a lot more 40-year-olds and 50-year-olds that are willing to make changes for their health, for their longevity, and to be able to participate in their lives than there are early 20 somethings who want to go to college and get on the five-year party plan. Right?
So, it’s not that I’ve never worked for someone in their twenties, I have. But a lot of the clients that end up coming to us are notably older than myself.
Hundreds of Clients: Common Doesn’t Mean Normal
My point is, it’s a valid question, I guess. But I would dismiss it the second it came up, in my end of the phone call. I was just like, no. That is silly because we have people, like yourself, out there doing the lecture packages, crushing it, doing a lot better than some of the 30-year-olds that come in and do FDN.
And then I gotta shout out Leslie Parran. She hasn’t been on in almost a year and a half, two years. But Leslie, 40 years of nursing, retired 65 years old, comes and does FDN. Starts a full practice in the middle of the pandemic. I mean, so gimme a break. You know, people can do this if they want to do this.
[00:21:51] Dr. Kim Boehm: Yeah, I think sometimes too because of my age, you do have friends your own age that are starting to feel aches and pains that they never had. And the assumption is, is that because it’s common that it’s normal. That’s where I get to remind them that, you know, I don’t feel like that. I don’t have that going on. Nor do I take any medicine at all. My weight’s great. So, it gives you a different angle, I think.
And sometimes too, people perceive that because I’m older, I’ve been doing it longer. When really there could be a 24-year-old that’s been doing it longer than I have. But they look at the two of us sometimes and think, oh, you must be super experienced. Like, no, I’ve been doing it a couple years, you know?
[00:22:32] Detective Ev: Yeah, that’s cool. There’s always advantages to everything, right?
Hundreds of Clients: A Powerful but Cheap Option
Because I’m thinking actually, even as you said that some people perceiving it as normal, that actually might be a limiting belief right there. Whereas the 20-year-olds that I do know that do feel like crap, the one good thing, Kim, is they know it’s not normal. So, when they call, they’re already under the impression that we need to do something.
Guys, the point is, I just wanted to introduce some of this stuff today. Because can you do social media and be a guru with it and do fancy marketing and ads? Yes. I’m actually attempting to do that right now with my own business.
At the same time though, just two weeks ago, I called Kim beforehand to ask her how these things went. Cause I actually had never done one, but you were my inspiration for doing this with our business. We went out and we gave one of Reed’s lecture talks. We had like 35 people show up. Fourteen were interested in calls. We’ve already at the time of recording this, have facilitated the sales and are actively working with some of those people. We made more than enough money back from the event. The people are happy.
It’s really special when you can go out there and do something, one, for your community, that again, we only charge $10 for and there’s way more value than $10, or free, in these lecture packages. So, even if they came out and just got that, they’re good to go. Then you have this very authentic conversation about, hey, well, do you want to do something more? And we give them a free discovery call.
Hundreds of Clients: Rescuing Clients from the Cycle of Trial & Error
When you do the discovery call, I will give someone tips on that call even if they never purchase from me or I know that they will never be able to. That’s how I do business. And that’s how all of us do business cause it’s a wise thing to do. You give and then it just seems to be a cycle of life. Things come back to you from doing that in an honest way.
With all of this said, again, crushing it in the practice. Started out maybe with more of a specific niche and now it’s kind of branched out. I have seen this with other FDNs where maybe just to get on the ground and get running, you start focusing on one thing. But FDNs become known as people that can really help just about anything when nothing else has worked.
People call me when nothing else has worked. They’re like, I’ve been dealing with this for five years. I heard you could help. I wish they came to us sooner, but you will get known as that. Then it kind of becomes this broad thing.
[00:24:40] Dr. Kim Boehm: Yeah. I think my largest count now is I was the seventh practitioner that someone saw before they got resolution. They had been in that cycle going from their general practitioner to their endocrinologist to gastroenterology. Well, I don’t know. Your labs are normal. Let me send you here.
They were just in the proverbial loop and finally came to me with their hands thrown up saying, hey, you’re my last hope. Maybe it is just me, maybe I am making it up, maybe this is normal. I don’t know, but I’m just going to try one more time.
So yeah. Seven.
Hundreds of Clients: Do All the Labs
[00:25:15] Detective Ev: When these people are coming to you to move into, specifically, the client side, obviously, some people listening know about the FDN system, many don’t fully understand this. And you have that mix of coaching that you’re adding in. There are other things and then you have your expertise from nursing as well. There’s going to be things there that can be, probably, helpful.
When someone’s coming to you and they’ve worked with seven practitioners, where do you start? Do you just start with the basics? Are they missing major things in their life? What are some of the things that you’re seeing come up with those types of clients?
[00:25:42] Dr. Kim Boehm: That’s the beautiful thing is that FDN is the same every single solitary time, different for everyone, but the same elements in everyone’s program, although no one’s program is the same.
We start with all of the assessments. We start with, what is their diet, their metabolic type. We do the five basic labs. You know, it’s funny because I’ll see people say, well, which lab should I do for this? And which lab should I do for that? You should do all five labs every single time because they all tell a picture, and they all complement each other. That’s how I do it. I don’t ever look at eliminating one or only doing one. It’s like, no, I want them all.
[00:26:27] Detective Ev: I didn’t know that about you, because this is, for better or for worse, promoted a lot now in FDN. Again, I don’t know if it’s good or bad. So, wait, do you not even offer packages where they can not get all the labs?
Hundreds of Clients: Guess, or Test?
[00:26:39] Dr. Kim Boehm: I offer one I’ve never sold in the entire time I’ve been in practice. Yes, I have it. And it’s just coaching. I generally don’t even have to steer people away from it. I’ve even thought about, well just take it off, you’ve never even sold one.
But it’s, do you want to just take a whack at it, trial and error? Try to pull away the most common food sensitivities. Let’s see what bang we get for our buck. Let’s drag this out for months while we try and take away. Or do you just want to test and not guess? You know, test and I’ll just give you a two-page report. Here they are, let’s avoid these. You know?
I don’t know why anybody would. Most people are pretty excited when they realize that their lab work will just give them the answer and they’re happy to pay for it. I’ve never sold one that didn’t have labs.
[00:27:30] Detective Ev: Right, so, okay.
To make it more specific, I mean like some FDNs will advocate, again, this isn’t against them either. I’m just trying to raise people’s awareness that this can be done this way and it should be done this way, technically. When you do offer labs though, you do not offer a package where they can get one lab and three consults. It’s like if you’re getting labs at all, we’re doing the full program.
Dr. Kim Boehm: Yes.
Detective Ev: All right.
Hundreds of Clients: Adjusting Coaching Sessions, Not the Labs
[00:27:50] Dr. Kim Boehm: Well, the way I approach it may be a little bit different. But I started out my practice making three packages. One that had all five labs. It had, I think, 18 coaching sessions in it. Then I had a middle package that had three labs and 12 coaching sessions, again, with money being the financial barrier there. And then I had the one that had no labs.
I found that I was either selling my top package or nothing, because people really wanted all the labs. And so, I thought, well, how can I make that more attractive? So, what I started peeling away was coaching sessions, not lab work. Now you get all five labs, but instead of 12 coaching sessions, how many do you need?
Six. Six is great. With six we can do our report of findings, we can do diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction, supplementation, and a model for sustainable change. That will give you everything you need. And then if you need more later, come back and grab a coaching session on this. Let’s do a deeper dive here.
But I never cut the labs. I cut the coaching sessions. And people seem to love that. That’s my number one package now is all five labs with only six coaching sessions.
[00:29:03] Detective Ev: Excellent. So even though maybe you started out having a package that offered three tests, you were only selling the top one basically.
Nowadays, if I want to work with Kim, it’s like, theoretically, I guess, unless you take it off after this podcast, you could get the coaching only. But if you want to do labs, we’re doing the full FDN system. Is that correct?
Hundreds of Clients: Deep Dive the Protocol One Good Time
[00:29:22] Dr. Kim Boehm: Yeah. I find, people want that. They want all of it, all the labs.
I usually approach it from, how much handholding do you need, because some people really do need that accountability. Some people need that every two weeks for a number of months. But other people are more type A, if you will, and a, Kim, if you’ll just tell me, I’ll do it.
Well, that’s fine too, but I don’t want to cut out all the coaching sessions. I do want to deep dive. Let’s talk about diet and what we’re going to add in, what we’re going to take out. Let’s talk about rest. So, we go through all of the protocol one good deep dive time, but then we’re done unless you come back.
[00:30:01] Detective Ev: Yeah, there needs to be some coaching always. I mean, even the most disciplined person, like maybe they don’t react well to a supplement, right? Well, what do you do? Because now if you didn’t buy the coaching and they’re calling you up, that could get annoying pretty quick for both parties. So, it’s better to just have those in place.
My point in just honing in with this, forgive me for asking basically the same question three times, I wanted to prove something here. Because again, this is the third and final way that I know of that you really challenge what is being taught nowadays in coaching in general. But even in our own FDN community, a lot of FDNs do talk about structuring the packages in such a way where like, all right, maybe one package has one lab and one package has three labs and one package has all of the labs, and I am guilty of this.
Hundreds of Clients: Labs Give Priceless Insight
I have talked about this on the podcast and have stated it’s not ideal. But I did say sometimes, just depending on where your mindset’s at, it might be overwhelming for people to actually charge someone what you need to charge to justify running all six tests.
Now, is it worth it, if clients are listening? Yeah. Because we’ll get you crazy results, which is cool. But you have to understand from a businessperson’s perspective, they might be going from an employee mindset to running their own business. Like, oh, I can’t charge a few thousand dollars for this. I can’t do that. Even though they paid it themselves to get better. That’s beside the point.
You started out maybe a little bit differently, but you ended up doing exactly what Reed says and you’re having success. I think that’s what I was really trying to get at here. It’s like, He was teaching this 14, 15 years ago and still in 2023, all the social media stuff, all the fancy technology, he always talks about he has his pager and his fax machine, or that’s what he had back in the day. We have all this fancy stuff.
Do the lecture packages, give people what they actually need, which is all the labs. We are not lab test salespeople. They are tools that we use. We don’t get a kickback from the labs. You are charging them to pay for the labs because it’s useful for them. It’s actually something that can give us insight. And you’re working with people in a meaningful way, right? Never cutting the coaching down to nothing but giving differences for different people. Some might need six sessions, some might need a whole lot more than that, depending on where they’re at.
Hundreds of Clients: Aim & Shoot
But this is working for you. It shatters every single excuse that I hear from someone when I’m talking to them and they’re saying, oh, well, I haven’t had success because of this or that. And this is not Ev trying to come out and hit people with the hammer, be a hard butt. I’m saying this cause I actually love our community and I think it’s crazy that some people aren’t having success with this in the first year of graduating.
I know that there’s different life circumstances, that there’s luck and unluckiness involved in anything in life. And this is coming from a highly motivated person. Yes, there’s times I’ve gotten lucky. But at a certain point, if you’re a year in and you’ve never taken one client, I don’t think that’s the FDN system. I think there’s something more going on there.
[00:32:41] Dr. Kim Boehm: I think that we need to coach ourselves first, right? Because you’re never going to hit a target if you don’t aim for it, and you don’t actually do the things that you need to do to hit it yourself. So, you know, physician heal thyself first, right?
You have to have a plan, work the plan, create your own barrier plan. What’s going to happen when I don’t have this, or what’s going to happen here? It’s not just open the doors and they will come. It is a business, and it does take work.
But if you do the work, I have found that Reed was 100% correct. Don’t tell him I said this, but if you’ll just do what he told you to do, you can absolutely crush it. And the lectures are one of those things, I think people have to get comfortable stepping out.
Hundreds of Clients: Clients Need to Be Understood & Guided
I understand that public speaking is not for everybody. That’s not their thing. They’re nervous about it. But if you’ll just do it a couple times, you’ll find that you really become passionate about it. And then you can create your own lectures, right? You can talk about anything. You just have to let them know that you understand their specific concern and how you’re going to address it.
[00:33:42] Detective Ev: Absolutely.
Kim, with the clients that are coming to you, I’ve been very curious about this, especially with someone who is now not really any longer working with any particular niche. With the demographics that you’re working with, are they doing the gluten free thing? Are they coming to you with a lot of a dietary experience or has some of these other practitioners that they worked with, have they never even talked about that?
I guess I’m wondering like, what are some of the biggest wins that are produced from the labs? I love what you said, how you know, the program always kind of looks the same, but every program ends up being different. I’m paraphrasing that, but I loved that. Because the FDN system is always the same. How we go about it with the individual once the results come back might look different.
But I’m curious if there’s common things that other practitioners are missing, whether it’s food sensitivities, bacterial overgrowths, or something like that.
[00:34:27] Dr. Kim Boehm: I think, don’t miss the big picture for any one specific lab. All of the labs tell a story.
Hundreds of Clients: All the Labs Together Tell a Story
For instance, the food sensitivity, I love that one. However, what I know to look for, and some of this now is with time and experience. It’s not just the technical textbook part of the knowledge, it’s the clinical aspect of the knowledge. You put the two together and that’s where you really start seeing more results.
But when I see a huge number of food sensitivities, I know to look for high zonulin on one of the other labs. I add a zonulin onto my GI MAP because I like to have two markers for it. But I know to look, and I love that they’re completely different labs. So, the labs are independent of each other, which solidifies and validates, in my mind, what I’m really seeing, high number of food sensitivities, high zonulin. Imagine that, high zonulin. Oh, wheat. Wheat is on their list. You can put your story together when you look at all of it.
Indican, you see a high indican marker. Well, then I’m going to look at the Metabolic Typing Diet. They’re probably not a protein person if they’ve got a lot of indican sitting there that they’re not processing.
You know, that’s experience, I think. But I’ll tell you, going through that in the FDN course where we had the mock clients, that’s real life stuff. Rather than being nervous about it and wishing you didn’t have to do it, embrace it. Because that’s what it’s really like.
And they do want to see you succeed. You know, nobody’s trying to trip you up, they want to see you succeed.
[00:36:06] Detective Ev: Right.
Hundreds of Clients: Get Expertise by Doing the Work
I think that’s one of the coolest parts about this. The FDN course can teach you a lot. But there’s just something that comes from the experience of looking at the labs and seeing these real human beings and what happens, what it looks like on the results. And then when you work with a hundred people plus, it’s like, wow, you really gained a unique skillset.
We always have the support here too, which is great, guys. If something comes up on the labs, first client, that is super complicated and somehow we didn’t cover it in the FDN course in its entirety, you can literally get a clinical advisor session. You can talk to them and then of course they know what’s going on. They’ve seen it.
It’s so amazing what some of those guys and girls have seen before on the labs. Like, I’ll see the weirdest thing; they’re like, oh yes, I saw this one time in this very specific person two years ago. I’m like, cool. Thank you. I’m glad that we have you.
But then that’s one more notch to your knowledge that you have now and you’re never going to forget that. Then the next client has it. Okay, cool. I know this one and I can go back there. The FDN thing is amazing, but it is doing the work with the clients that just makes you an expert at this and really get to the next level.
So, if we could quantify it somehow, with the success that you’re having now, what percentage is contributed to the nursing background? What percentages contributed to the coaching, what percentage would be contributed to FDN? And it’s okay whatever it is. I’m just curious cause you do have a mix of backgrounds.
Hundreds of Clients: FDN + Health Coaching
[00:37:23] Dr. Kim Boehm: Nursing, as wonderful as that was, I really have to say, absolutely zero. I’m just being honest. What that taught me was doctors are wonderful people and they really want to help. But doctors, unfortunately, are a part of a business model that is structured in a way that they’re not the boss.
You tend to think, oh, the doctor is boss. The doctor is not the boss. Doctor’s a paid employee just like the receptionist and is told how many people he or she will see today before they leave. Our number was 32 people a day. If you do the math on that, that’s somebody every 15 minutes.
My doctor was one of the nicest, best people I’ve ever known in my life who just didn’t have more than 15 minutes to spend because he was going to see that many people. He was going to talk about so many different things to put the checks in the boxes.
Medicine and being a nurse taught me, I don’t want to do that. It taught me, I want to be able to spend time with people, to not just throw medicine at them and resolve the symptom or suppress the symptom. I want to help them fix the problem. You just can’t do that in 15 minutes. That’s what I got from nursing.
FDN put the last check in the box I needed to be successful. Health coaching, great. Taught me how to talk to people, how to create plans, how to work a plan, but it didn’t tell me which plan to work. FDN told me what to look for, where to find it, what to do to resolve it. Then put that with how to coach them to it, game changing.
Hundreds of Clients: Client Success Story #1
[00:39:09] Detective Ev: Beautiful.
I’ll ask at the very end where people can find you and work with you and stuff. But I think since you have worked with such a variety of people in a very short period of time, I’m actually kind of interested in covering like maybe two or three client testimonials or just stories to the degree that you’re able to share. I understand some people, even if they have great success, are more private than not.
So, to the degree that you’re able to, are there any client stories that come across your mind when I say like, all right, what’s some of the best transformations that you’ve seen? Where like, maybe someone is coming, seven practitioners in, at the end of their line, and unfortunately thinking to themselves that this might be normal. And then we’re actually able to help turn things around with them.
[00:39:47] Dr. Kim Boehm: It’s funny cause as I look back over the last couple years, so many come.
Certainly, the one that is most recent was just Monday with the young lady in her late twenties getting ready to have her gallbladder out, who doesn’t have to do that anymore. That was a huge transformation in just a little more than 90 days.
She said to me, the funny thing is, is that I paid you the amount of money I did to basically tell me that I have to eat right, I have to exercise, I have to reduce my stress, and I have to just drink a lot of water and all these things that are so common sense. But I wasn’t doing them, and you helped me do it. It’s life changing how much energy I now have. That’s certainly one.
Hundreds of Clients: Client Success Story #2
Another one was a young lady that I worked with down in Florida.
Brilliant young woman at the aerospace college down there. The name of it is escaping me on my tongue. But she was about ready to have to quit school because she was having migraines that were just so debilitating. She would stay in her dorm room with her pillow over her eyes because even the light and sound just created nausea. She just couldn’t handle it.
And so, she was trying her best to go to class. She was missing all the social aspects of college. And she was grabbing an apple and something else here and there thinking, okay, I’m just going to try to eat healthy. I’m going to weather through.
We did her food sensitivities, and it turns out the more apples she ate, the worse she felt. That was like the highest food sensitivity that she had. We pulled that away and a couple of other things. Got her sleeping better; taught her some stress management breathing techniques. And now she’s crushing it and about to graduate. Who knows what she’s going to do in our space program one day?
That was pretty cool.
[00:41:28] Detective Ev: It’s amazing.
I know that you do a lot of talks, are these young people coming to the talks or did you find them somewhere else?
[00:41:36] Dr. Kim Boehm: I have a condo down in Florida and so I have two churches. I go to church here in Virginia where I live, and then when I’m in Florida, I have a church there. She was part of the church family there and knew that I was an FDN practitioner. She knew that I had gone back to college myself to get my doctorate.
Hundreds of Clients: An Inspiring Curiosity
She was talking to me one day and while she didn’t ask for my help, I have to admit she’s one I did pro bono. I just felt like I was being led to help this young woman. If you can help her, just help her. And I did. Her family paid for the labs, and I did everything else pro bono. But it almost makes me cry when she just runs up to me now and throws her arms around me and tells me how life changing it really is. It was a beautiful thing.
[00:42:19] Detective Ev: Yeah. This is awesome.
So, I have one personal question for you today. I was hoping I’d have time for it, and we actually have quite a few minutes to ask this. You stated yourself, almost 60. You’ve done very well for yourself, right? You’ve been involved in business before this even before coming to FDN and crushed it better than 90% of people that go through the program, just through doing the actions that we recommend.
You just opened up a lab that does different things, different types of testing than maybe we would typically do with FDN. But you just opened up a lab, you’re pushing the FDN stuff, working with 15 to 20 clients at a time. I gotta ask, what is inspiring you personally, Kim, to just keep going and doing all this cool stuff?
[00:43:00] Dr. Kim Boehm: Curiosity. You know, I think that nursing opened up a curiosity of why people don’t feel well and what are they doing and what do they all have in common. Then starting my own practice, just one thing led to another. After FDN I remained curious.
Hundreds of Clients: FDN Fulfilled Credits for Doctorate
After that, I went back to college. I got a doctorate in naturopathic and original medicine, which was very much in line with FDN. They actually let me count FDN. It settled 14 of my credits and 210 hours of my doctorate program because they looked at the FDN and saw what I had learned.
They were like, check, check. You don’t have to take this. You don’t have to take that. Which was beautiful, right? So, I went ahead and did that. Wrote my dissertation and made sure on the front page I gave Reed Davis all the credit for getting me started on that path.
[00:43:52] Detective Ev: I love this. Curiosity is a great answer actually for this because I guess it’s a little different.
I’m in my twenties. You want to believe certain things and maybe it happens, maybe it doesn’t. But I really felt like you and I got along so great at the Biohacking Congress in June. We were lucky, because other than another volunteer, Kim and I were kind of like the main, not that you were staffed per se, but you were doing the speaking for FDN. I was staff, of course, at the time, so we were truly there representing FDN. I just felt like it was such a kindred spirit thing.
It’s so weird to me to see people slow down for reasons outside of just like, okay, we obviously are, unfortunately, even if we’re FDNs, we’re going to have less energy eventually at some point in our life. That’s just the natural progression of this experience here on earth. But for me it’s like, I want to do things that I love, I keep adding on more stuff. Cause again, I’m excited and I am curious.
Hundreds of Clients: Passionate About Work
I see people like Reed, who, I mean Reed is 70 years old, right? And the guy’s going and doing keynotes at conferences. He’s doing two to three podcasts a week and so much with FDN.
Again, there’s a certain time where you always gotta check in with your own health and making sure that you’re not overloading that. I fully get that. But I think the reason I ask that question is one, cause I’m selfishly interested in it. But two, I think this is what can happen when we are doing work that we’re truly passionate about.
Many people that come into the world of FDN, Kim, I talk to them and they’re coming from jobs that they’ve been stuck in for 20 years. They were okay jobs, nothing wrong with them in and of themselves, but they’ve never been passionate about their work.
They were trained from the first day of kindergarten to not like Monday through Friday. Then they were forced back into that in the workforce. And so, they have not liked Monday through Friday, generally speaking, from five years old all the way up until 40. This idea that they can go do something that they love and like, I am so thankful to be able to hop on this podcast with you at 8:00 AM.
You don’t have to do this with us. This is not your most profitable means of doing something. It’ll be lucky if one or two clients come from something like this, and yet you still choose, happy as can be, send a huge smiley face in the email, can’t wait to hop on. Right? That’s a good way to live, guys. And I think that gives us life in and of itself.
Hundreds of Clients: Blessed
[00:46:00] Dr. Kim Boehm: Well, Jim Carey said, you can fail doing what you don’t love, so why not do what you do?
[00:46:10] Detective Ev: That was in relationship to his dad becoming an accountant.
[00:46:14] Dr. Kim Boehm: In relation to his dad being a CPA and hating every minute of it. He wanted to pursue comedy and other things just like Jim wanted to. And when he saw that his dad failed doing what he hated, he decided, why not do what you love? If you’re going to risk failure, at least risk it doing something you want to do. So, that’s how I choose to live.
[00:46:37] Detective Ev: I have never heard someone else bring that up in conversation, but I heard that part of his one speech. I’m sure he has brought it up many times, I guess. But that stuck with me.
What people don’t get is pursuing something that you love, even if you haven’t achieved it yet. Like, you know, I do this speaking in schools. Just the act of saying I’m moving towards that every day and seeing yourself get closer, that’s a good life.
Most people, we’re not moving anywhere, or we’re moving downhill. Like, it’s not good. You’re not really stagnant, you’re either growing or you’re dying, right? So, just the journey of trying to go after what you want, that is a more exciting way to live than most people are living right now anyway, by choice.
If you are fortunate enough to actually get to that next level, get to do the things that you want to do, that’s just called being blessed. I think we’re very blessed with that ourselves. I think a lot of FDNs are. They absolutely love what they’re doing.
Where to Find Dr. Kim Boehm/The Signature Podcast Question
[00:47:33] Dr. Kim Boehm: Me too. Yeah. It’s the most fulfilling work I’ve ever done. To feel like you’re helping other people, it’s a beautiful thing. It’s life changing.
[00:47:39] Detective Ev: Kim, where can people find you? Obviously, they don’t have to go to a lecture of yours in Virginia or Florida to find you. If they wanted to reach out to you or work with you, where can they do so?
[00:47:48] Dr. Kim Boehm: Functionalhealthgroup.org. That’s my website. That’s my Facebook page, LinkedIn, every different social media. Functional Health Group.
[00:48:00] Detective Ev: Perfect.
And then our signature question on the podcast only because I cannot remember if I asked you this cause it was an Instagram Live. And even if I did, you’re constantly learning. So, I don’t know, maybe it’s different.
But the signature question, Kim, is if you could get every single person in this world to do one thing for their health, so you can get them to start doing one thing or you can get them to stop doing one thing, what is the one thing that Kim would get them to do?
[00:48:25] Dr. Kim Boehm: Lower your stress level.
My answer last time was get outside, get some sunshine, get some exercise, some fresh air, all of those beautiful things. But when I see the impact too, of lowering your stress level and just starting from a lower set point, you can have the exact same reaction to things. But when you started a higher set point, you end up at a different place than if you just lower it.
For me in that naturopathic whole progression of health that’s a very strong spiritual base for me. That’s a beautiful thing. It is a peace. Peace that passes understanding.
Conclusion
[00:49:02] Detective Ev: I respect your memory, not only knowing that I asked you last time, but you’re like, oh yeah, this is what I gave the answer to. So, FDN works, guys. It keeps us sharp.
Thank you so for coming on with me, again.
Dr. Kim Boehm: You’re welcome.
You can always visit us at functionaldiagnosticnutrition.com.
For more informational and functional health-oriented podcasts like this one, go to functionaldiagnosticnutrition.com/health-detective-podcast/.
To learn more about us, go to functionaldiagnosticnutrition.com/about-fdn-functional-testing/.
