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By the time Justin Mares had sold four startups and steered his fifth, Kettle & Fire, to be the top bone-broth company in the US, he realized a clear truth about being an entrepreneur: “Finding a problem is far, far better than finding your passion. Passions come and go, problems are lasting.”
He had cracked the code for growing companies and shared the formula in his book Traction, which became required reading in business schools. But now he was in search of a bigger problem he was uniquely qualified to solve.
Mares’ work bringing healthy food to a wider audience highlighted a big issue for him. Even amidst growing obesity and chronic illness, preventative health was almost non-existent in the healthcare system. But there was one exception: HSAs (health savings accounts), which are essentially like 401ks for immediate or future medical expenses. And though historically HSAs had been used for prescriptions and doctor co-pays, Mares saw that 20 years since inception, HSAs were on the same growth path 401ks had been 20 years after being created, and he realized that IRS regulations allow for preventative use of HSAs when prescribed by a doctor.
So he built a telehealth process and, with it, one of the fastest-growing startups in the country. Truemed lets consumers pay for thousands of the world’s top preventive health products, ranging from Peloton and 24 Hour Fitness to Nike Strength and Eight Sleep. Mares spoke to Entrepreneur about the four steps to solving any problem, the importance of anchoring your identity to process, not outcomes, and why boundaries are the key to an entrepreneur’s performance.
Give us the elevator pitch of your business and your role in it.
I am the CEO of Truemed, and we’re the leading HSA/FSA marketplace for preventative health products. HSA/FSA accounts were created so people could use pre-tax money to pay for interventions that treat, mitigate, or prevent diagnosed medical conditions. Our marketplace allows people with qualified medical issues to use pre-tax HSA/FSA funds on lifestyle interventions like sleep aids, exercise, and supplements that studies show can treat or even reverse many chronic conditions.
Tell us about a time you made a decision everyone around you disagreed with and what happened next.
I knew that starting Truemed, we’d have to educate people on our approach. Research shows that lifestyle interventions are among the most effective tools we have for treating many chronic conditions that make up 90%+ of our healthcare costs. Yet sadly, our healthcare system has no way to prescribe or incentivize patients to use them to treat or reverse disease. I wanted to change that, but doing so meant approaching healthcare differently than most folks in our space.
Earning trust with the industry took a while. We had many conversations with skeptics, and went to conferences, hired lawyers specific to the space, and mapped out all the possible reasons folks could take issue with our approach. We had informational conversations with every kind of stakeholder and with each conversation, we’d write down their concerns or questions. We turned this into a long document that we used to track industry objections and our response to these objections.
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