Episode 12 - From Personal Trainer to 10,000 Patients: Kristin Oja on Scaling a Functional Medicine Empire

Kristin Oja, DNP and founder of Stat Wellness, joins hosts Dr. Erik Lundquist and Dr. Davin Lundquist to share how she went from personal trainer to building a multi-location functional medicine practice with 55 employees, five offices across Georgia, Nashville, and South Carolina, and roughly 10,000 patients. She launched in 2019 with one employee, an $8,000/month lease, no formal business plan, and didn't pay herself for two and a half years — driven entirely by passion and an unwavering belief that she wouldn't stop until it succeeded.Kristin walks through the origins of her cash-based membership model, which bundles provider visits with health coaching and dietitian access to keep patients engaged and avoid the "excitement and drop-off" cycle she saw at other practices. She explains why she built a brand around the mission rather than herself, invested early in scalable systems, and prioritized patient retention as her number-one marketing strategy. She's candid about the emotional toll of scaling — the loneliness of entrepreneurship, the whiplash between feeling like everything is thriving and everything is falling apart — and how joining an entrepreneurial peer group helped her feel less alone. She shares her leadership mantras ("find peace in the chaos," "let the fires burn," "delegate and elevate") and encourages practitioners to focus on one priority at a time, hire people better than themselves, and cast a wide net for mentors outside their immediate field. Looking ahead, she sees functional medicine moving fast toward AI and genetics-driven personalization but hopes brick-and-mortar care will remain central to the patient experience.Note from TRC-BOM Podcast - Kristin mentions using a 3rd Party software for her clinics for taking calls etc. That software is "Weave"Here is a link to their site. https://www.getweave.com/