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(uplifting music) - Welcome to Business Forward.

I'm your host, Matt George.

It's gonna be a great show.

Joining me tonight, Phil Caplis.

Phil is with Solvera Health.

Welcome.

- Thank you, thanks for having me.

- Yeah, I appreciate you coming on.

I've known you for a while, but let's just start off, are you from around central Illinois or did you grow up here?

Where are you from?

- I actually grew up in Northwest Indiana, about 50 miles from Chicago, right around the lake in Chesterton, Indiana where Valparaiso University is.

- Oh, Valpo, yeah, okay.

Alright, What brought you to Peoria?

- I went to Bradley University in '89, and just kinda never left.

- You just kinda never left because you also, before we talk about this company, you've been in the restaurant business a long time.

- Just over 25 years.

- Yeah, that's a long time.

- It is, and, you know, I started about a couple of years after college and opened my first business.

It's still open today, and just kinda moved along ever since.

- Yeah.

What business is it?

- Geo's Pizza in Metamora.

- Yep, Geo's.

So you've had other places you've had the Golden Corral, - Yep.

- Two25, and that was one of my favorites, was Two25.

You'd see me down there a lot.

- Yeah, I did, it was one of my favorites, a friend of mine started that, Bob Eid, and I kinda came in to help them and just kinda morphed into, I ended up owning the whole thing and then the Golden Corral, we built that for a franchisee that happened to go south, and kind of absorbed that through a faulty franchisee.

- No wonder.

I always wondered how you ended up with the Golden Corral, That's interesting.

So Bob Eid, you mentioned him, he's got a One World Cafe, - Yup.

- and then One World Catering.

I mean, so yeah, your food's great, Geo's Pizza's really good, but now you are kind of doing that pivot, right?

That overused word pivot.

- Right.

- So being an entrepreneur your whole life, I mean, it's almost, it's just in your blood, isn't it?

I mean, you've always worked for yourself it seems like.

- Yeah, I have, I worked at Caterpillar right when I was still in college a little bit, they were on strike and that's how I got the money for my first business, actually.

So I learned a lot from them.

That's where I really learned inventory control, and I was able to develop our systems and that's what I've become good at, is inventory and systems.

- And so I'm gonna talk about the new business, but with restaurants, inventory is key, isn't it?

- Absolutely.

- Because it can just go right out the back door, or side door.

- It can easily cost you four or five points on your profit.

- [Matt] Wow.

- And in the restaurant business, you don't have a lot of profit.

- No.

- So if that's costing you two, three points, labor's costing you two, three points, pretty soon you're losing money.

- That's interesting, huh.

So COVID hits and affects your business and you've gotta be sitting there at some time being in the restaurant business and going, "What am I doing?"

Or not "What am I doing?

", "What am I going to be doing?"

Because I got a call from you, I just wanna tell just a quick story.

I got a call from you, and here's how generous you are.

You said "Matt, the kids at Children's Home, I'm sure are hungry.

I have a lot of freezers full of food and a lot of dairy products and so on, and I don't want it to go to waste.

I wanna give all of what I have at Two25 and Golden Corral to the kids at children's home."

- Yeah.

- And I thought that was a really cool, and then right after that call, I got a call from Stefan Zeller at Avanti's, he did the same thing.

And so both of you guys stepped up and just loaded our freezers, and those kids ate well for a while, so we appreciate that.

- Great.

Well, I mean that that's attributed to you, too.

I mean, you support our businesses and you're there and you're in front of us, and, you know, you and I, we're not great friends, we don't go out to dinner together, we don't do a lot of those things, but we've had conversations.

- Yeah.

- We've had good conversations while you're in our restaurant, and I consider you a great acquaintance, you know what I mean?

- Yeah, me too.

- But you know, you get a lot of that credit because you're there.

- Well, I appreciate it.

So COVID, it really decimated a lot of businesses, - and some will say, - Absolutely.

- "Some needed to go."

Whatever that means, it doesn't need to go, though, for the owner of the business.

- I don't think the owners that closed wanna hear that.

- Right, I mean, I heard that once and I was like, what are you talking about?

I mean, but the one thing that it did do, too, is it sparked a lot of people thinking of "Where can I go next?"

or "What does my business," especially entrepreneurial minds, because your mind never stops.

Even if you were given a proposal, you're just the type, "I'm gonna vet it, I'm gonna sit here and look and see if there's potential that this is something I'm interested in and I might act on it."

- Well absolutely, I mean, I've looked at it and honestly that kept us from being in disaster mode, you know?

So when COVID did hit, I had been looking at other opportunities along, you know, a year, two years prior.

And my father was forensics toxicologist, a PhD in biochemistry, and was a pioneer in the drug testing industry and had his own laboratory, and my sister's the director of the lab now, and she was struggling.

And I went up there and we started a program called pharmacogenetics, which is how your body processes prescription medications.

So we implemented the new equipment, we put everything in place, and then lo and behold COVID hits.

We got some nice contracts, so we were able to weather the storm before COVID, but then when COVID hit or, yeah, when COVID hit, we transferred the equipment all over to be able to do PCR testing for SARS COVID-19.

- Wow.

- And we took off, the lab took off.

And I made my living basically over that last year, swabbing people's noses in the drive-through that I had set up in a parking lot of her laboratory.

And that's the way we survived.

If we hadn't had that potential, we'd have been in really big trouble as a family, you know, being in the family business we'd have been in really big trouble.

We would've had to find other work because none of our businesses were open.

So that was a difficult situation.

- That's being creative, I'll tell you.

That's interesting.

And you know, another thing is like, you were shut down with Golden Corral, and then I remember you saying, "We're trying everything."

Because, you know, it's a buffet, so you touch things.

And so, but you didn't give, - No.

- You sat there and said, "I'm gonna have all these sanitizing stations.

I'm gonna do this, we are going to, after every person comes through, we're gonna wipe down."

You tried everything.

- Absolutely.

- And that one thing that you told me in doing that, showed me the grit that you had as an individual of going all in all the time.

I love it.

- Yeah, we put a sink in.

We put a sink in where three, four people could wash their hands at once.

Everybody washed their hands before they came, and I took that from the cruise industry.

We had just gotten back from a cruise in February, or January, and I noticed before you ever walked into their buffet, everybody has to wash their hands.

They don't let you go by without washing your hands.

So when that happened here, I was like, "Well, we just need to do what the cruise industry did, put a sink right up front."

So we installed one.

But it's just too difficult of situation to overcome.

- Right, alright, so let's talk about Solvera Health.

I have a ton of questions about this.

So what is it?

- Well, it's a comprehensive primary care facility.

We want to take the individual from A to Z as best as a primary care doctor can.

And primary care doctors, they're trained to handle just about anything.

I mean, that's why they're the family doctor.

However, in medicine today, we don't necessarily use that primary care doctor to their fullest talents.

They ship them off to specialists right away, they don't get to do as much as they're trained to do.

We wanna kinda change that.

We want to say, "Hey, let's go back from A to Z," if they can handle it, you handle it.

If the doctor's comfortable handling it, handle it, 'cause you are their primary care.

- Are doctors hard to get to come to Peoria?

Because you have UICOMP and you have, and not just Peoria, just central Illinois in general, I mean, you have Methodist College and you have, OSF has a nursing, but all you hear about is, it's just hard to fill jobs, not just in the restaurant business, but also in this business.

- Well, doctors have a very different feeling of medicine, I think, than the big institutions have.

So they want stability, they want a family life, too.

They want different things.

There's not a lot of independent physicians left.

So now here we are offering independent physicians an opportunity that they can come practice a five day workweek, you know?

And I think that they're realizing that bigger isn't always better.

A lot of people want something a little different.

- I see that you can schedule appointments 24/7.

That's a unique feature, isn't it?

- We have our call center, it's very similar to the competitors.

I mean, we're gonna have a call center that's going all the time.

You can get ahold of somebody, you can talk to somebody.

So yes, we are very focused at Solvera on hospitality 'cause that's my industry.

You know, that's where I came from.

That's something that we believe is lacking very much so in the medical world.

Hospitality is a big deal.

I just read an article from the CEO of Cleveland Clinic and the one thing they asked them is "What are you doing different?

How are you gonna change things here?

What's your number one thing?"

He's like, "I need to hire smiles."

(Matt laughs) So there's a lot of things in the healthcare industry that you're not seeing.

There's a great book out there, we've all read it, "If Disney Ran Your Hospital".

Now there's some good points in that book, and there's a lot of people that are negative towards it and say, "Well, it just can't be done."

Well there's certain things that can be done.

And in the hospitality industry, that's what we're going to bring.

That's my job is to bring that to our clinic.

Let the doctors be the doctors, let the clinicians be the clinicians.

- Yeah.

I like that.

So, "We're hiring smiles."

- That's right.

- I think I'm gonna steal that one.

(both laugh) - You know, I hired a gentleman at Two25 at one point, I hired him, I didn't know him, I was sitting with my assistant manager at a booth, and at the time we were struggling, at Two25, with just culture in general.

And he walked through the door and I said, "Who's that?"

And she says, "Oh, I have to interview him."

And I said, "Hire him."

And she looked at me, she says, "I don't even know who he is yet."

I said, "I don't care.

Did you see that smile?

I can't train that."

You can't train somebody to smile like that.

- That's awesome.

So Solvera in Latin means to solve, - Yep.

- and so you're solving problems that are simple to very complex issues.

- That's correct.

- Right, alright.

- We're primarily a Medicare controlled group right now.

I mean that we're going after the Medicare senior population.

So you're gonna have complicated issues there and that's what we need to solve.

- And one of the things, you kinda touched on it, is that your company here, this company, and the doctors, so it doesn't matter whether it's walking through the front door and an admin or whoever, you wanna have that personal experience with every one of the customers.

- That's right.

- It's key.

- The person that I said that I hired just because of his smile, he's gonna be our greeter at the clinic.

- I think I know who you're talking about, too.

He was always happy.

- That's right.

- So that's interesting.

That's really cool.

So what's the difference between this and what a normal prompt care would be?

- Oh, we're a full, like I said, almost A to Z.

In our clinic, when I say comprehensive primary care, I truly mean comprehensive.

When you come in, we have consultants there to talk to you, if you don't have insurance, we're there to help you get insurance.

We are even having an insurance brokerage in our facility.

- [Matt] Like a navigator?

- Yeah, they can help sell you Medicare.

They can get you insurance, Medicaid, if you need Medicaid, they'll help you get Medicaid, so we have that component.

Then we have 12 exam rooms.

In those 12, we have bone densitometry, which does a full body scan to give you your resting metabolic rate, your muscle mass, your fat content, do you have osteoporosis, what's your bone density, to help people with their gait, specifically elderly, you know, how are we gonna help them develop their muscles?

We have physical therapy involved.

We also have a full blown pharmacy, even with compounding.

We have x-ray, so we have imaging, we have a small procedure room where we can bring doctors in to do simple procedures, potentially vasectomies, colonoscopies, pain injections - [Matt] Treatment.

- Treatment, absolutely.

We have ultrasound.

- Wow.

- We can take care of you.

So when people are thinking, "Where am I gonna take my dad?

Where am I gonna take my mom?"

Well, Solvera health is gonna be a tremendous partner in the community because you can take mom or dad here, and the chances of having, "So, well, go make an appointment here and get your lab done."

That's another thing we do, the lab.

So you can take mom or dad to go down and get a lab, now I gotta make another appointment.

Or they need to see a specialist, go make another appointment.

So we're trying to keep the patient in one location as much as possible.

- Coordination of care.

- [Phil] That's right.

- So when you say compounding, just so everybody knows, what does that even mean, 'cause I hear- - I'm not a pharmacist, I know they make creams for inflammation.

- They make them there, right?

- Yeah, they'll mix medicines together, make a cream, do things like that.

- [Matt] Isn't that crazy?

- It is, I think there's enough out there already, but they still - I know!

keep making stuff.

- Interesting piece of the business.

So telemed and tele-health are very popular.

Are you gonna be doing telemed?

- Absolutely.

- Okay.

- Lots of doctors we've looked at hiring right now, they want a portion of their days to be telemed.

There's a lot of people out there looking to change the way that they work and doctors are no different.

- And again, for our viewers, if you haven't done telemed, the doctor could be in Dallas, Texas, and you could be here and have that doctor on- - That's true.

That's true.

And one of the things that we are doing is in every exam room, we have a 50 inch TV.

So for example, you bring your father in and he needs, we've exhausted everything the primary care physician can do, but we say, "Hey, look, your father really needs to see your urologist.

We'd like to make an appointment."

Well in the new world, it's much easier.

In the old world, and still today, they'd probably say, "Well, you can go, there's several urologists, go find one."

And then now you, the son, or even the elderly person has to go find a urologist.

I mean, we can only give recommendations.

We can't tell you where to go, so.

But one thing we can do is say, well, look, now we have a urologist who's one of the top urologists in Nashville, Tennessee, and we're looking at partnering with him and he's saying he would like to help us.

So what we're saying is, wait a minute, in 15 minutes, we can have the urologist on the TV for your dad.

So now you don't have to go elsewhere, you don't have to negotiate a new building, and we can say, let's get the first one out of the way.

Maybe the urologist can fix it right now and there's no need for another appointment.

Yes, you might have to wait for 15, 30 minutes for the urologist to be available, but they are guaranteeing us that, yeah, we'll be available for you if you need us, you just give us a call and we'll be on the zoom or however, the tele-health appointment.

- I mean, it's really changing in this last five years with this telemed.

- Absolutely.

- Are you doing telepsych or is that a whole different issue?

- That's a whole different issue.

- We do telepsych at Children's Home, and it's just, it's a hard model because when you vet these companies, you're kind of at the mercy of what they have on the other end, right?

And so you have kids, as an example, that are, they're kids.

And we have so many kids in our system that trying to coordinate, that's why I used the term navigator earlier.

A lot of people, like, use insurance as an example, a lot of people don't understand it.

So if I'm sick or if I have whatever, I really don't understand how to navigate that insurance piece.

I don't know if I'm doing it right, I don't know what's covered, and then you just dread that bill, getting it and go, "Oh, oh I only owe $82," but then sometimes you look at it and go, "Oh, 1500, what the heck?"

- How am I gonna pay for this?

(Phil laughs) - Yeah, so you you've got, I don't like the term one-stop shop, but in a way you could say that we offer so many different opportunities for the customer or the client.

- Yeah, we use the slogan "All the care you need under one roof" - All the care you need under one roof.

- And it is all the care you need under one roof in a sense, because we're gonna take you through the whole process.

We're not gonna say, "Hey, go find a urologist, here's some names" we're not gonna say, "Go find a gynecologist, here's some names."

So we want to make sure that we're involved because the primary care doc is the quarterback.

That person's responsible for making sure that all the meds, you know, and we're gonna implore pharmacogenetics at our clinic.

Seniors take a lot of medicines.

So the chance for drug-to-drug interaction, drug-to-gene interaction is high.

So we want to make sure that we're utilizing every tool that we can to keep everyone safe and out of the hospital or out of the emergency room, because that's what becomes the big problem for the hospitals.

- Is that what's called preventative health?

- Absolutely.

- [Matt] And so there's a focus there on that preventative health, too.

- Absolutely.

Medicare is demanding it from the doctors.

I mean, your Medicare pays you based on how are you performing, and that's what we wanna do.

Our job is to keep you as educated on your health as we possibly can, to make sure that we are doing everything in our powers to keep you out of that emergency room and out of the hospital.

- Is that called case management?

So use me as an example, like, am I one case and you open up the file and Matt George is got this, and maybe we need to prevent this from happening 'cause I have high blood pressure or whatever.

- For example, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, one of the things, your chronic care is if you have two or more major conditions, so let's say you have diabetes, hypertension.

We wanna manage those with you, we wanna educate you.

And everybody has a different, you know, Matt George might have a very different aptitude of what diabetes is than, say, somebody else.

Somebody else might be, a one being the lowest, they might be a one, Matt George might be a four.

So Matt doesn't need as much education as this other person.

And the words we use, all of that changes in our training.

The words we use with people so they understand what we mean.

It's funny because you mentioned that and I've been so hyper-focused on the health care now, but I have all these people, and my heart has been in the restaurant industry for 25 years, and I look at those employees and all of them are under insured.

So we're looking at how do we bring it so that at least they have primary care?

You know, that's an area that we're gonna tackle.

- Well, I mean, that's the compassionate piece of you, too.

You know, when you have a business like you do or had multiple businesses, your restaurants, I mean, those people are your lifeblood.

And you get to know those people year after year after year, and those families, you're charged with taking care of those families.

- Yeah, and as I was saying that the gentlemen, being hyper-focused on this, he had worked for me for on and off for 15 years, and he's become diabetic and he's on Medicaid.

He hasn't been working and I looked at him and I took him down, we do the state fair every year, we have five businesses at the state fair, I took him down and he's told me he's diabetic now.

And I said, "Well, what are they doing for it?"

And he's like, "Oh, I just have to take this pill."

And I said, "Okay, what else are they doing for it?"

Because I know he probably needs educated on this.

And I said, "Well, you need to be our patient.

When we open up, I want you to be our patient."

Because he's a perfect example, 'cause the next morning I see him and he's eaten a cherry pie and he's drinking a Mountain Dew.

And I was like, "What are you doing?

You're diabetic, you shouldn't be," He's like, "Oh, I just have to take this pill."

So see, he doesn't quite understand the concept.

So that type of patient is the patient we're after to help keep them out of the emergency room, because that's where he's gonna end up.

- Yeah, it's interesting because that preventative piece is so key.

I mean, use high blood pressure as an example.

Just because you are on a pill and have high blood pressure doesn't mean that you can't start cutting salt intake, start working out, start doing something to wean yourself off that pill.

That's the goal.

And if somebody's not telling you that, and they're just saying "Here, take this," you think you can eat four bowls of soup at lunch, that's an issue.

So I like this preventative piece because I don't think we talk about it enough.

- No, we don't.

And you're gonna see it happening more and more over the next decade.

- That's interesting.

So where are you gonna be located?

- 3525 North University, right where the old Golden Corral was.

I mean, we've gutted the Golden Corral all the way down to the studs, pulled out all the electrical, all the plumbing and redid the whole building.

And it's comprehensive primary cares.

- That is great.

So you're reusing the building, so.

well, I appreciate you coming in and being on the show because when I started reading about this business, I thought this is just very, very interesting.

But we appreciate what you do for the community, we appreciate what you do for the employees in your restaurants, because it's been a tough go, so.

Appreciate all that you do.

- Thanks.

- This is another episode of Business Forward, I'm Matt George.

And Solvera Health, go there.

We'll see you then.

Thanks.

(uplifting music) - Thank you for tuning in to Business Forward, brought to you by PNC.