Unlocking Longevity: Redefining Health and Wellness

Michael Burcham: Welcome to Microcap Moments, a podcast from Shore Capital Partners that highlights the stories of founders, investors, and leaders who have taken on the challenge of transforming ideas and small companies into high growth organizations. The journey of building and scaling a business takes one down many unexpected paths.

It’s a journey where we learn from our mistakes, fall down often, but have the entrepreneurial grit to pick ourselves up and persevere. Within this series, we will share these stories of success and failure of the challenges and the rewards faced by those who dare to dream big. And through their lessons learned, we hope to inspire others who are on a similar journey of becoming, growing and leading.

In this episode, Anderson Williams and I are visiting with Jimmy St. Louis, the CEO of Agentis Longevity. The company focuses on longevity services, including hormone replacement therapy, primarily tailored to men. Jimmy played football professionally for the NFL’s Tennessee Titans, and was also a member of the 2016 United States rowing team.

Needless to say, Jimmy has a passion for wellness. This passion led him to start Regenerative Medicine Solutions. and his leadership in building AliRX, a transformative health platform that provides personalized food prescriptions. Jimmy is now the CEO of Agentis, a new investment platform for short capital partners focused in the longevity space.

Through this endeavor, we are looking to not only improve, but to optimize men’s health and fitness.

 

Anderson Williams: Welcome, Jimmy. It’s great to have you here today.

 

Jimmy St. Louis: Great, thank you.

 

Anderson Williams: Will you just start by introducing yourself and tell us a little bit about your journey through the world of sports and how you got here to be sitting with us today?

 

Jimmy St. Louis: Great. Thanks for having me. And my name is Jimmy St. Louis. I’m the incoming CEO for Shore Capital’s Longevity Platform. I’ve had the great fortune of getting here, likely because of my experience in sports and just this emphasis on wellness, really my entire life, I grew up in a very athletic family who was very supportive about really helping me pursue not necessarily a career in sports, but the opportunity to just be active and experience new things, meet new good people, and started at a very young age.

I was fortunate to live in Seattle, Washington as a young child, and if you know much about Seattle, it’s kind of running country. So in the South, you play football, and then Pacific Northwest, you run track and cross country. And that gave me this incredible base of endurance, but more importantly, discipline.

I can count on one hand the amount of days I have woken up after 5 a. m., and that’s likely because of what I was able to experience there and grew up in this military family. So we moved from Seattle to Kansas to North Alabama and just imagine the stark cultural differences.

When I got to Alabama, it was football, basketball, track. And some of that was important to me, in addition to excelling in sports, was the ability to do something special to inspire other people. And as I approached my high school days in sports, it was more about doing something different than just excelling in winning.

So part of where I’ve really capitalized on my ability to display discipline took place when I moved to Alabama, the high school football coach approached me and I’d never touched a football in my life, and he said, we’d like you to play. And I said, I can’t, I’ve committed to cross country and that’s what I love to do.

And he said, well, I’ve already coordinated it. So you can get up at 5 a. m. and run every day and at 3 p. m. you can practice football and on Friday nights You’ll play football games and Saturday mornings You’ll run cross country meets and you’ll do that for the next five months and I still wasn’t sold and he said and by the way you can also break the state record for most varsity letters of any athlete in the state of Alabama, and I said sold.

So, he got me quite excited, and it turned out to be a blessing for me. It turns out that football and basketball were my calling. I had the opportunity to go and play those in college, and it paved a incredible path for me to continue on this health and wellness journey, keep learning about my body, and really live this life of wellness that we are looking to introduce here at Shore as well.

Michael Burcham: In the following segment, I ask Jimmy to share how his being a competitive athlete has impacted his approach to business and work. He sums up his experience and success around meaningful shared values and accomplishing something bigger than yourself. He also describes lived values as creating a safe place for both work and decisions.

Jimmy, how has being a competitive athlete in all these sports impacted the way you approach business and work?

 

Jimmy St. Louis: I believe that sports creates this opportunity for you to learn a number of different things to translate into the business world. Some is around teamwork, collaboration. We had the recent opportunity to hear Nick Saban speak and he spoke about not football and these great teams and these great players, but he spoke about values and he spoke about having a common interest in a very specific goal.

And that’s what I believe ultimately makes great teams. There’s a great book I enjoy, it’s called The Captain Class and you can put the best people together on a team and still have a mediocre season. Without the opportunity to focus towards a goal and with great leadership, right?

So that’s clearly translatable into the business world to me with great leadership and very clear, specific goals, not necessarily towards an end goal, not towards an exit or even EBITDA goal, but accomplishing something bigger. I believe that is something that’s important. It’s definitely translatable from sports.

The other thing that I really find really valuable is to be a values driven, mission oriented leader. Understand the mission, make that very clear and operate as a values driven leader by displaying those values every single day, front and center through your actions, but also have those values really become core to what you do within the operation.

It could be giving back or pushing the status quo. Those are things that I believe are something that you can certainly work with your team to translate into this winning environment that we’re trying to create within the business world.

 

Michael Burcham: Jimmy, that’s really helpful and insightful to hear because here at Shore, the very first thing we do when we’re launching a new platform is to focus on mission while we’re all here, where we want to go, and the key values that platform will have as it becomes an organization and other partners join us.

So I think you’re in good company with us here at Shore on that one.

 

Jimmy St. Louis: It’s part of the reason I’m very excited about the partnership and the relationship. I always say, with your values, let’s say these four walls are your values, we’re in a safe place. As long as you operate within those values, it allows you to make efficient, fluid decisions.

And if you’re ever struggling on yes or no for something, and you need to make a decision, weigh those against the values. And if they’re aligned, you’re going to be in good company and likely make the right decision.

 

Anderson Williams: I love that visual of the values defining the space. It’s really great.

Michael Burcham: Next, Anderson asked Jimmy to define longevity.

I really like Jimmy’s definition where your length of life meets the quality of your life. He also defines where he sees the acceleration of aging beginning. When each of us stopped being in motion. He further describes how fragmented the industry is today, which creates confusion for the consumer. His overall aim is to simplify that message for the consumer, so his firm can optimize their personal health.

 

Anderson Williams: You’re in the process of launching a longevity platform, and well, first you just tell us what a longevity platform means, and then why did this seem like not only something that obviously ties into your background as a passion, but why does this seem like a good business opportunity and the right move for you?

 

Jimmy St. Louis: I define longevity as where your length of life meets your quality of life. And the way to accomplish that is by introducing easy to understand high quality modalities for people where they can embark on this journey to avoid traditional healthcare needs and truly just live happier, healthier, longer lives.

I’ve always been. This person who wants to solve real problems for people. And a great opportunity to do that is to solve problems in health care and try to find a way to meet these unmet needs. I’ve spent a large majority of my career understanding what are those unmet needs and what are better solutions to make these things more accessible to people so they can really solve their health care problems.

Over time though, having been a competitive athlete after college as well, I started to realize that I personally would have to adopt practices to help me rest, recover, and repeat. And I have this saying that a body in motion stays in motion. So as we get older, what do we do? We start to slow down and that becomes acceptable.

But I believe that’s where the true aging process actually starts. And so without that ability to stay in motion, then ultimately we might see this aging process start to accelerate. So having been through a few injuries myself and having to adopt these different practices, I started to realize there might be a better way, right?

There might be a better way to help us. Avoid certain conditions from happening down the road and that was kind of one small piece and sound bite for me but after our last transaction, I said, where do I want to spend my next 15 years of my career in health care? and I had the great fortune to Start to go around the country and visit all these different clinics that call themselves longevity and what I realized was It’s super fragmented I don’t believe that there’s a lot of bad players in the space, but I believe there’s just lots of different opinions.

And I believe with lots of different opinions for consumers, they just don’t know where to go. There’s a lot of confusion. Most people that want to adopt these practices of being proactive towards their health care truly might go to two or three or four different specialists, and it just creates this complicated journey for a patient.

And so having had that opportunity to go and meet some leaders in the field, I committed about two and a half years ago to, as I say, find a way to create a solution, a brand that people can trust that they go to with high quality healthcare, with credible partners, that’s in a journey they can understand that also makes it accessible to the large majority.

There’s this piece where people think about longevity and they think that’s expensive. That’s not for me. The opportunity to simplify it and democratize this part of the market, I think, is an incredible opportunity that can ultimately help people not just live happier, longer lives, but find the way for their length of life to ultimately meet their quality of life.

And the way to accomplish that is for us to Identify the proper advanced treatment options that people may not have understood were truly available to them in a clinical quality manner where they feel like they can truly trust it. To me, what the patient journey looks like when somebody comes into a true longevity clinic is a first, a comprehensive view of the patient.

I believe you accomplish that with four core tests. The first test is a comprehensive hormone panel. Understand what’s going on in your body. The next is a gut health test where you really understand what’s happening in your gut because that gut health contributes to overall pain and recovery and proper sleep, food sensitivity, making sure you’re putting the right stuff in your body on a daily basis, because what’s right for you isn’t always right for me.

And the last piece is a comprehensive genetic test, because although people may have a likelihood and a genetic correlation to say, a certain autoimmune disease that they’re scared of, it’s not guaranteed that they’re going to get it. And when you adopt the treatment options that we are looking to provide to people, they have a much higher likelihood of avoiding those.

And when you avoid those things, that’s where your length of life does meet your quality of life. And you’re able to significantly delay that. potential disease process that you may have seen happen in your loved ones earlier on in their life. And our objective is to be sure that you don’t see those until much, much later, if at all.

Michael Burcham: In the following segment, Jimmy defines why this is a great time to launch a longevity business. He defines our current environment, especially post pandemic, is one where consumers are experiencing a mind shift away from a traditional, more reactionary health environment, which he defines as medicine 2.0. He also speaks to Medicine 3.0, a philosophy of seeking to avoid illness by focusing on the daily practices that allow each of us to live our best lives.

So, Jimmy, what makes this a good time to launch a longevity platform?

 

Jimmy St. Louis: I think when you look at longevity, you think about some of the obvious answers, such as the baby boomer population, the aging population.

I think those are understandable. What I’m really seeing, what I’m most excited about is. I believe people are just starting to understand what longevity means. They’re starting to accept that hormone therapy, maybe out of their traditional healthcare network is probably something they should look into.

People are starting to understand regenerative medicine and biologics more. I also believe that we are in a time that’s very interesting for our world. Post COVID pandemic, people were really forced to take a look at their health internally and understand that traditional healthcare is likely not going to help them avoid these more significant problems.

We live in this world that we call medicine 2.0, which is essentially reactive, right? You’re diagnosed with something, you go get it treated. But I thoroughly believe that because of the pandemic, people are becoming more proactive and thinking about the things they can do to avoid those types of conditions down the road.

We believe that we’re starting to see consumers who would adopt boutique fitness, right? They go to club Pilates or Barry’s bootcamp. They’re starting to take those dollars and put them towards their health first. We’re actually starting to see consumers say, I understand the gym’s important, but I want to live longer, happier lives. I want to sleep better. I want to recover better. So we actually are starting to see this younger population become much more aware of this and willing to invest their time, money, and effort into it.

That piece alone gets us very excited and then also we’re seeing some trends where the world is beginning to become more accepting of advanced treatment options like biologics and understanding that going to their traditional healthcare provider may not necessarily help them accomplish those needs to help them recover faster from say a previous sports injury and with those being the types of options and treatments we may provide here within the clinic, we believe the timing is just perfect.

 

Michael Burcham: You know, you’re describing just an entire mindset movement from reactive treatment medicine to more proactive preventative, and I do agree with you. I think that attracts younger individual consumers much more today than even 5 or 10 years ago.

 

Jimmy St. Louis: Yes, I do agree. There’s this whole concept now of what people are calling medicine 3.0. The quick history is Hippocrates, let food be that medicine, medicine by the food. That’s medicine 1.0. It just simply, here’s what’s going on and here’s what you need to do without a whole lot of evidence around it.

Medicine 2.0 is this reactive world that we all live in right now. There’s a condition, treat it. Here’s a prescription. Here’s surgery. Here’s something you need to do to fix this problem.

Medicine 3.0 is the idea of saying, rely on medicine 2.0 when you really need it. When something really goes wrong, you have an injury, you have a major illness, but medicine 3.0 is saying, avoid those things. When you’re a healthy person, invest in your health. Understand that when you invest in your longevity, you likely are going to create this opportunity to avoid those adopting more traditional healthcare practices.

Michael Burcham: In the upcoming segment, I asked Jimmy to tell us what, beyond comprehensive testing, are the services that Agentis will offer. He describes the market entry point is hormone therapy for men. But beyond that, he describes the correlation between body inflammation and susceptibility to autoimmune diseases. It also describes having access to certain biologics and peptides that can foster weight management.

So there’s some significant advancements that are being made in understanding the biology of aging. Tell us a little bit about the kinds of services you’re looking to offer as part of the new company. I mean, earlier you were talking about some of the testing that one would do first, but once you’re past the testing phase, what are the services you expect to offer in the business?

 

Jimmy St. Louis: We believe that the comprehensive testing will allow us to make a thorough, effective, efficient decision as to the journey that the patients should embark on.

However, I believe that when you are launching something that is relatively new and you’re trying to create a household name and help the world understand the definition of it, you have to have an entry point. The entry point that we believe there’s commonality across the board if you look at this Venn diagram is with hormone therapy.

Most people understand. What their hormones are, they hear about testosterone, they hear about estrogen. Most men understand that a natural sign of aging is a reduction of testosterone. So that’s really our first entry point. If you get anything done, you should have a comprehensive hormone test.

Understand where your testosterone levels are and be prepared to treat it if you need to. As you expand the honeycomb of services, or in other words, say peel back the onion on the patient, is to understand what other things are important to them. So somebody may have had an injury, recovery issues, sleep issues, or a genetic predisposition to some type of potential disease.

We want to understand what could cause those things and then provide you treatment options. A very, very simple one. to understand might be if you have a predisposition to an autoimmune disease. Most autoimmune diseases are correlated directly to your body’s inflammation. A way to reduce inflammation, you’ve got IV therapy, biologics, such as regenerative medicine, exosome IVs. The idea is give somebody the opportunity to reduce their inflammation, to avoid those potential diseases from happening down the road.

Another one is weight loss, right? I believe that ultimately helping to manage people’s weight. We do not want to be a weight loss clinic. We are a true health clinic, but helping people have access to certain biologics or certain peptides to control their weight is something else that we do certainly anticipate providing here within our clinics also.

 

Anderson Williams: So, Jimmy, what kind of customer experience are you looking to create with this platform?

 

Jimmy St. Louis: I believe that the most important thing you can do in healthcare is to create trust between the healthcare consumer and their provider. I also believe that hospitality has to meet healthcare. In an environment like this, people have to feel welcome and excited.

Now, when it comes to high quality care, which is what we will create here, As we introduce new treatment options, having the opportunity to consistently when you need to interact with a physician to continue to guide your care is something that’s very important to us. That, accompanied with continuous ongoing testing throughout your journey to modify your care program, we believe will create a great opportunity and solution for our healthcare customers.

Michael Burcham: Next, Anderson and I asked Jimmy to describe his ideal partner organization as he builds Agentis. He describes looking for founders who are focused on quality of patient experience. He also mentioned the importance of partners who have shown their ability to scale in their local markets. We also ask him about the team he wants to attract as he grows the organization.

So Jimmy, as you look to launch this business, what does the ideal partner profile look like of perhaps some of the providers out there you’d like to attract to be part of this journey with you?

 

Jimmy St. Louis: For the ideal partner, first and foremost is an emphasis on quality care. A lot of the potential partners that we’ve looked at have really said out the gate, quality of care is important to them.

There are these clinics out there that may not necessarily focus on the patient as much and take this more comprehensive view. I believe that the best way to assess quality of care is how much assessment are they initially doing.

The next piece that’s important to us is they’ve proven they can scale. They’ve proven that they can have a footprint that lives outside of their first location, ideally their three, five clinics and beyond. And they’ve shown that they have the ability to also expand beyond their initial knowledge base. If you’re a single physician who founded one clinic, I do believe you may be an opportunity for us to work with down the road.

But we really are looking for those organizations that have proven they can scale to, uh, at least a regional or a larger footprint than just a single facility.

 

Anderson Williams: And Jimmy, you’ve had a career in sports and elsewhere team was of the paramount of importance as you think about building your initial leadership team to help you launch this.

Talk a little bit about the kind of people you want to attract to your team and launching this platform.

 

Jimmy St. Louis: So I’m a big believer in creating this concept of culture index, where you have different personalities that certainly work well together, and you can have a bunch of star players. But I also am self aware enough to know that there’s certain weaknesses I have as a leader that I would love to have those things be shored up and accompanied by other leaders.

For example, finding a really great Chief Operating Officer who understands how to build a national footprint of hundreds of clinics will be something that will accompany me very well. Having a Chief Financial Officer who is able to be metric driven, operations driven to accompany a lot of my mindset, which is geared towards optimizing revenue, driving core KPIs to the, you know, to the organization that will help me to begin to round out a really good team.

Something that’s also always been important to me that I’ve done in every organization that I’ve led is define those one, two, or three people that are young, hungry, very passionate about this space and to find opportunities to help them accomplish their overall goals.

Something that I’ve been able to do in the past is to find those young people. And now they’re running organizations, you know, much bigger than I’ve run. And it’s an honor to see them have the opportunity to go and do that. So to me, building this team is also something where I’d like to try to find those young, hungry people and have the opportunity to groom them, to help them accomplish some of their career goals also.

 

Michael Burcham: I asked Jimmy to describe what attracted him to partner with Shore Capital to grow this business. He describes the journey of entrepreneurship and the need to have a financial partner who’s not only experienced in healthcare, but also brings meaningful resources to help him grow this business.

Jimmy, what was it about Shore Capital that you thought, this is the right partner for me.

 

Jimmy St. Louis: I think for all the entrepreneurs who have the opportunity to listen to this, we can all agree that being an entrepreneur can be a bit lonely, and if you’ve been through it more than once, there’s certain things that are really difficult to get through in that first year. I think that shore capital provides the opportunity to run fast with lots of experience and a blueprint for success and incredible resources that we can tap into.

To be very efficient in our first couple of years of business. I think through things like the Shore Resource Team, where there’s best practices already put in place from experienced operators who have run businesses themselves. And we have the ability as in founding this organization to tap into those types of resources.

There are other things as an entrepreneur that I just may not be good at, right? The ability to tap into experts who understand financial strategy, transaction, bringing debt into the organization to help us scale at a faster rate. Those things grease the wheels far beyond what I could have done myself.

And I think oftentimes the question has been asked, Could you go do that yourself? Sure. And I believe it would take three to five years longer. And I believe that somebody would outpace us. And to me, this is an organization and an industry where timing is very, very important. We talked earlier about how timing is right now. And if I was to delay that a couple more years without greasing the wheels, I believe we’d be left behind and would likely do this market a disservice.

Michael Burcham: In this final segment, Anderson asked Jimmy to offer any insight or lessons learned thus far. He shares the importance of good market research and understanding both the market but also the key players in the space.

He also speaks how this depth of research and market knowledge helps one avoid the blind spots that can set the business back.

 

Anderson Williams: So Jimmy, you’ve had obviously a long career but are new in this journey with Shore as a founding CEO of a new platform. I’m curious if you’ve got any lessons learned already in the first stages of this journey with Shore.

 

Jimmy St. Louis: The early stages with Shore have been phenomenal. And one thing I’ve really learned is the importance of truly investing in the market research, understand the business and the amount of time, money and capital that really should go into that. I believe that’s something that’s unparalleled that Shore brings to the table.

That’s beyond something I’ve ever experienced. And I can think back and past businesses where mistakes and adjustments and pivots had to be made because they were blind spots. And in this business, I think we have done a very good job early on early on of at least identifying what some of the blind spots could be and that’s helped us to identify once we launched this platform, one of the first moves that we should be making to prepare for a pivot down the road and ideally be much further ahead of the rest of the market.

 

Michael Burcham: Jimmy, thanks so much for spending time with us. We’re really excited about what you’re going to be doing in the longevity space. And for anyone listening, if you’re interested in partnering with Jimmy in some way, I know he’d love to hear from you. Thank you, sir.

 

Jimmy St. Louis: Thank you.

 

Anderson Williams: Thanks, Jimmy.

 

Michael Burcham: This podcast was produced by Shore Capital Partners with story and narration by Michael Burcham. Recording and editing by Austin Johnson, editing by Reel Audiobooks, sound design, mixing and mastering by Mark Galup of Reel Audiobooks.

Special thanks to Jimmy St. Louis and Anderson Williams for joining me. In today’s discussion.

This podcast is the property of Shore Capital Partners, LLC. None of the content herein is investment advice, an offer of investment advisory services, nor a recommendation or offer relating to any security. See the terms of use page on the Shore Capital website for other important information.