From Green Hill to Advaita Health: Navigating Brand Confusion and Organizational Change

This week on Open-Source Health, we take you behind the curtain of our own brand evolution—where it’s worked, where we’ve failed, and what’s next. Tripp and Marcus open up about the messy, iterative process of defining who we are as an organization, especially as we’ve grown from Green Hill Recovery to AIM to Advaita Health.

We unpack how our identity has shifted alongside our services, values, and long-term vision. From conversations about mastery and failure to reflections on accessibility in healthcare, this is a raw and honest look at what it takes to grow an organization with integrity. Plus, we get personal with Marcus’s journey into health, fitness, and contemplative practice, shaped by his roots in Eastern North Carolina.

If you’ve ever wrestled with branding, scaling, or making values-driven decisions in healthcare, this one’s for you.

Takeaways:

• Why mastery is a slow, failure-filled process—and why that’s a good thing
• How our brand has evolved from Green Hill Recovery to Advaita Health
• Lessons learned from missteps in branding and communication
• The tension between who we are now and who we’re becoming
• Personal reflections on health, identity, and leadership growth

Chapters:
00:00 – Starting with Decaf Espresso and Catching Up
01:00 – The Long Road to Mastery (and Failing Along the Way)
05:00 – Marcus’s Health and Flourishing Journey: From Small-Town NC to Contemplative Practice
14:30 – Our Branding Missteps (and What We’re Learning)
28:00 – Clarifying Green Hill Recovery vs. Advaita Health vs. AIM
35:00 – Why Brand Clarity Matters for Healthcare Organizations
42:00 – Leadership Lessons: Holding Tension Between Present Reality and Future Vision
46:00 – Lessons Learned: The Value of Failing Repeatedly

Follow & Connect:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/advaita-health
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/advaitahealth
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/advaitahealth
• Website: aimwellbeing.com

Tripp Johnson

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trippjohnson
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/trippjohnson
• Website: https://www.trippj.com/

Transcript

0:00

We're figuring it out. man, how we doing? Oh man, did you just pull an espresso right now? So I'm actually drinking these decaf espressos at night. uh I'm like really tired. Like I really need to get a little bit more sleep. And uh so this is like my little, you know, whatever placebo effect type thing. It's working, it's working. Yeah, here we are, that's fine. I was just worried for you, man. It's nighttime where you're at. You gotta get in bed, get some sleep. Yeah. Oh. Yeah, y'all have been crushing it on the the leads thing Yeah, man. It's pretty satisfying seeing some of the stuff come together. It's like a lot of, lot of synchronicity. Everything's just coming together. think business development wise product, like the whole team, it's really fun. Like we're seeing this good alignment. It's fun. It's been, I feel like you've been in the hot seat for like, I don't know, at least a year, uh maybe more. It feels like a lot longer. This is one of those things where if I like, so dumb, right? When we first started all this, I was like, fuck it. Yeah, I'll jump on it. I'll do digital marketing. I'll do all this stuff that I don't know how to. Like, I'll try to learn it and learn it on the fly. And I'm really grateful. Right? That I did it. But if I knew what I know now and I was back then, not a fucking chance in the world. oh interesting, you know, what's so interesting with all of this, I guess this is one of the lessons I'm thinking about from it is it just shows you like what mastery really means to and not that you've achieved mastery yet or that we are masters in the digital marketing or business development. I mean, oh a really long year of grinding it out and iterating and then getting obviously, you know, Butler coming in and really yeah. having some of the experience with setting things up and finally it feels like it's all kind of humming on that side. So that's cool. it is cool. It feels good. You know, it's interesting that the concept of mastery, like I always think about things in terms of like, you know, like, from the contemplative sort of idea, right? that all, everything is just experience. All experience is just experience. Nothing is terribly categorically different than anything else. What you learn in one arena, you can apply to the next and... That's not to say that you have mastery over one thing, you have mastery over it all, but what I do think you sort of find and what I found is like the process of gaining mastery is the same in any arena. And it's just showing up, regulating your ego, failing and repeating over and over over again. And then eventually you just sort of hit this place where you look back and you're like, I now know something, I feel confident about something. it's funny, because I think a lot of people, myself included, probably you, anytime we start something, we never think of it in terms of this is gonna suck and this is gonna be the same process that I had to apply to anything else, which is failure, failure, failure, iteration, failure, iteration, and then eventually, understanding and some degree of competency and mastery. And that's the only way it comes. There's no bypasses. And when we look at other people that do it really well, we forget the amount of turmoil and striving that had to happen and the amount of failure and learning that had to happen. We see the finished product and we forget that there's this whole graveyard of mistakes behind that. Totally. I just sent an article my dad sent to me yesterday that was the title of it's you need to build mastery in order to find flow. yeah, I mean, it's and it's just a I mean, it's it's a you know, Mikhail Chiksin Mihaly the flow guy. But it's I mean, just a good I mean, just another example. And I Scott Galloway often talks about the idea like, you know, don't follow your passion, follow what you're really good at and get paid for. and it will become your passion. And I think like that is, you know, it's not the Hallmark card advice, but it's quite frankly, it's much better. And yeah, if you do want to develop actual mastery, it's going to be a painful process. So. Yeah. Well, with that, uh let's dive in to what else we got going on. Yeah, let's go for it, So I am really excited to uh have some other people uh learn a little bit more about your background today, Marcus, and just how you came to this ah personal flourishing project. Because I think from the first time we met that we have uh different backgrounds and histories. uh But kind of both ended up in a very similar place with very similar interests in terms of physical health, um contemplative practices. And even though, you you're a big meat eater and I'm a vegan, I think we see eye to eye on the way we think about a lot of these things. But I'd just be really curious, because I actually don't know kind of how you got into the physical health side. I know the mental health side, but why don't you just kind of spell that out for everyone? Yeah. So I actually think the two things are related for me. Right. So I grew up small Eastern North Carolina town had a, my father was alcoholic Vietnam vet, pretty horrific PTSD. Um, I watched a lot of my family and the people around me dealing with a lot of like disease related to just metabolic stuff, unhealth. saw a lot of unhappiness around me. Um, And so from a very early age, man, I got very, very interested in just the, like, how does someone become healthy, right? Like both in mind and body. And so initially I think the avenues that were in front of me were things like church. For a variety of reasons, I was drawn to the experience of church, actually joined youth group, did all that sort of stuff, and then converted to Christianity. And from there, I actually went to school to be a minister. And I think there was all where I always sort of struggled with this stuff was this idea of like, I always had questions about it. There was always this tension between things, Like this cognitive dissonance that I could never sort of lay to rest. And when I started studying it at a scholarly level, had a really good experience with a couple of professors and in particular, one professor said something to the effect of. Don't ever abandon a belief until you have something better to replace it with. And so that was this really interesting insight moment for me where I realized that beliefs about the world have utility, right? And that's sort of their function is to give us utility and mooring and orientation. And so that's my of contemplative, my launch into sort of contemplative practices. And eventually that led to meditation and things like that. Physically though, I started working out at like 12 and I don't know that I've gotten some degree of exercise every single day for about, since I was 12, right? So almost like 30 years straight of just at least 30 minutes of exercise a day. And it was just this attempt to deal with, to make sense and like engage in that product. Like I don't want to be like the people that are around me because they seem unhealthy and miserable and everybody's dying. And this is the scene in a way that seems really avoidable. And so that's, you know, those sort of things started coming, like I had both of those things going on at the same time. And I was introduced to Aristotelian philosophy in undergrad and this Greek ideal of human flourishing in particular Aristotle was this idea of eudaimonia. And in English we translated as happiness, but in this sort of Greek sense and that classical Greek sense, it actually was much more comprehensive than that. was. this general idea that one, a person has a duty to society and their community to cultivate their mind and to cultivate their body. And so one can't exist without the other. You're out of balance or you're never going to be on the pro- like, you're never going to achieve some degree of human flourishing and that you also owe that as a civic duty to those around you. You want to be a better human for the people around you. And so I have That was a sort grand unifying thing for me that brought the mind and the body uh pursuits together. um And I think over the years I've seen, like I've fallen into all the sort of health and fitness fads and trends and all that sort of stuff. had a Bowflex when I was in high school. I've done the keto thing, I've done, I actually did do vegetarianism for a little while and ultimately I'm a Gentile. And I can't avoid the, I can't avoid the meats, but, and I think what's really funny to me where I'm at presently now and looking back on some of this stuff, I've sort of circled back to these very basic things, right? Like it's lift weights, find some sort of activity that's this enjoyable. So for me, it's lifted, I lift weights, jump rope and practice jiu-jitsu. And those are these sort of the foundations of my physical fitness and try to. eat moderately. then, you know, I think everybody, get obsessed with all of these other sort of ah hacks and like the influencer stuff. And like you see someone doing like jump squats on a Bosu ball or something while they're wearing yoga pants and funneling protein powder or something crazy, right? It's like, yeah, listen, we've, kind of figured that most of this stuff out, like lift weights. get some cardio, find some fun hobbies, and you're probably gonna be fine. And so it's just not that complicated. And I find it imminently more gratifying than a lot of this other sort of stuff. But yeah, I long story short, that's my path into this. So you saw, I mean, you got interested at least in the physical fitness and I guess kind of the contemplative life really early on. And yeah, cool. But didn't that, did you have many, like, did you have good influences or were you running the opposite direction of what you saw mostly in your community growing up? Man, that's a great, that's such a good question. Yeah, no, I think about this one guy in particular ah that I grew up with. Anybody that's from Eastern North Carolina that would hear this, they would know this, but there was this barbecue sauce called George's Barbecue Sauce. It was like an Eastern North Carolina barbecue sauce. And there was this guy that lived in my hometown, he invented it or something, right? Or started packaging and bottling it. And he built this like little mini empire selling these like big jugs of barbecue sauce that everybody in Eastern North Carolina has sitting around their house. And he was the first person in my life that I saw he would run, he did triathlon, he lifted weights. And I cannot describe how different this guy like that was, you know, just to see everybody like James smokes and drinks a beer a day. And this guy's like running around. Anyway, what was like really funny, you Atomic, you know just in a dark sort of way that he ended up passing away from cancer and was like wild as everybody in my hometown was like that guy see Like he was running all doing all that running for nothing And I just remember thinking by everything in my head as a kid in high school. I don't I don't think that's a lesson we're supposed to take from that but uh And so yeah, I don't have very a whole lot of that something tells me a lot of people didn't have a background in statistics either. Is what that is. Yeah, it's like, I'm looking at it like, dude, every one of you have had a stroke and you're just being held on by modern medicine. You're all dying. You're all dying of something. And this guy just happened. Yeah. Yeah, it just happens sometimes. Yeah. Well, thanks for talking about some of that. And uh I think it's probably time for us to move on to our next segment. Yeah, let's move on. oh have been long time listeners, hi mom and dad. We've added sound effects and we're really excited about this. So, it's the small things. know, 15 years from now when we're famous for this, people are gonna be like, wow, they really did just iterate and get a little bit better every month or so. Yeah, I have a feeling in 15 years we look back on this and this will be the irony of this episode will be that we really identified that we failed a lot and we talked about that at the beginning. man. Anyway, ah so I guess like, let me frame the discussion and then I think we're going to turn the table a little bit. You pull draw out some information for me. So selfishly, I wanted to record this uh segment of the podcast talking about kind of our brand and how it's evolved over the years as. we embark on a rebranding exercise. ah So like this is really just because I figured if we talk for 20 or 30 minutes, then it would make my job a lot easier. ah I guess like the simple way to put it is over the last few years, we went from Green Hill Recovery to then we started Advida Integrated Medicine and Advida Health Ventures. Yeah, yeah. And then we started calling, you know, Advita Integrated Medicine. We call it AIM because that's easier to say. And then it's like, okay, but what about Green Hill? Like when we operate functionally as one consolidated organization, but we have three separate legal entities. So we decided to call it the Advita Collective because that didn't sound too, it sounded nice, I guess. But then it... then people say, what kind of collective is this? It's just one organization. It's not a collective. So then we're like, OK, we're going to go with Invita Health. But we're still managing, we're essentially managing these three brands in some capacity right now. And I don't think we're going to hash out today what that looks like moving forward. I think we could end up with the three brands. I think we could also end up with a know, at Vita Health and Green Hill Recovery. But just wanted to kind of talk about the genesis of it some. And hopefully in going through some of the background, we start to tease out some of the things we need to look for in the future. And obviously, you know this personally from your seat. Like, I think it's been, it's always surprising to us uh how little people know about our lives. And it's really disappointing because I like to think I'm like the main character a lot of times. sure, yeah, yeah. And so people forget, but we still get pegged as like, you guys only work with young adult men, right? And it's like, that hasn't been the case in four years. And so we have screwed up our brand awareness and clarity around that. And I'll say I have. yeah, so where should we dive in? You know, here, want to, I want to tie this back to some maybe meta themes in this episode, but we started off talking about the idea of mastery and failure. And to me, this becomes like a perfect case example of this, right? Like we've had these brands, brand launches and failures. And you know, like failures may be not the right word, but they're missteps to their experimentation. We're trying something. And then we kind of realize that we have to shift or change in a different direction. And so like, you know, I'll call them some degree of like some sort of something like a failure in a learning experience. And in some ways, I mean, this kind of, it ties thematically to a lot of this, I think. So yeah, we have screwed up the brand. We screwed up the brand. Yeah. Yeah. So when I came aboard, I was originally kind of a co-founder, but really everything was already in motion. And we're not going to cover all of that. But the name of the company was Green Hill Recovery. And the little uh trivia note is that we were Green Hill Recovery, which sounds incredibly boring and bland. ah as do most, you know, private equity type, ah you know, entities. So my, you know, my original co-founding partner has a mountain house on like Green Hill Road and it's like a gorgeous view. And so the words Green Hill came from like, you know, Green Hill Road or drive, whatever it is and blowing. yeah, yeah. And uh I think that was a canary in the coal mine for a lot of problems we had to come. But so basically when I came on, we had uh a logo that looked like it had been generated for 20 bucks by someone on Fiverr and a very, very just generic plain website. remember asking like, how much did it cost to do the website? And they were like $5,000. And I was like, that sounds like a lot. And here we are, you know. things change. ah But the original logo was this just, you know, it said Green Hill Recovery and it had like a tree on it and some and like a line zigzag for a mountain. And quite frankly, you know, and that's what that's what it was for about the first year 18 months. ah I remember the first, uh, Reed logo rebranding from you too. You were very excited about it. No, no, no. I was a, I was a referral source. You and I have connected and become friends at that point, but it was, uh, yeah. Yeah, I remember it because that was like, you, I actually remember cause it was the first time you got really obsessed with design like that. And you were just, yeah. Yeah. And you were insistent. it was funny. I was at a conference or something and you weren't there and you were like frantically emailing me the updated logos and stuff. Cause you were so stoked about it. Yeah, so we, I guess that's the next kind of story in this when we, so when I took over from, know, my uh co-founder was originally CEO. When I took over as CEO, he kind of moved in the background as CFO for a little bit, and few months later moved on. But the first thing I wanted to do was do some sort of rebranding uh because it felt like uh we were already in trouble with the brand. And what I mean by that is a lot of people in the industry, we had rubbed the wrong way early on because it was, hey, there are these two guys who say they're doing something different. And I think uh we annoyed a lot of people and especially, you know, I'll say like I had to move into the CEO role and I'm a fairly abrasive guy. And if I'm the palatable one of the duo, like you can tell how how difficult things may have been for us to establish meaningful relationships in the field. So anyway, we did this big rebranding exercise and it was really fun. had, ah I think it was over the course of maybe two or three months and we ended up, what we had already done is we had articulated our values. We had the names and the faces of our program and And we wanted all of this to be like very authentic to what we were doing in Raleigh. So like our logo, which is the logo for Green Hill still to this day, or the insignia. ah The insignia had three components, which were supposed to line up with the three phases of our program, being like discover, empower, and connect. And so we had a compass for the discover. We had an Oakleaf for the Empower and also being in Raleigh like for growth. And then we had the infinity symbol for um Connect. And it was a cool, I mean, it was a pretty cool logo and they did a pretty good job with that version of the website. And I would say that was kind of like, that was the kickoff of the original kind of heyday for the transitional living world. And I mean, I don't love the colors. I never did, but. everyone else kind of did like there's too much of the orange and blue feels like a shitty NBA team to me or I don't know but I'm not a fan of orange in general no offense like it looks good on you right there but I'm not I'm just not a I'm not a guy looking my skin down I can't rock orange like I'm just not a I'm not an orange guy Well, this is salmon. This is salmon. That's a... Yeah, I think. So that, yeah, so we did that rebranding. then from there, you know, I guess it was a 2021 when we launched the aim. We had a man by the health. We already had the advice that we had an advice to help ventures brand, which was initially we didn't know what we were doing. So if I had to help is now, you know, technically a managed services organization. So we don't, and we don't have a ton of brand work done for the overall entity, but we knew we were going to be seeing patients through Advita Integrated Medicine and that we really wanted to have, uh you know, some good graphics branding from the beginning. We went with like what now seems very minimalist given the current trends in design, but I love our, I still really like our logo for AIM. you know, our little wavy person. um And now we're just at a place though where people are genuinely, I mean, what's your take on it? Like what's the feedback you get? What are you hearing and like why? I think like it's true for the people on our team, but also the external, you know, the community. It's like people don't know who does what or what we provide. Yeah. When I think we've been in some somewhat of a limbo and I'm going to back us up for just a second, because I think there's sort of an interesting transitionary point, right? Like I, from the first time you and I met, I think both of us were entering this stage of skepticism about private pay healthcare and that sort of thing. And um you know, not to, not to denigrate anybody or anything like that, but I think we had this like interesting parallel process happening on and I, there was this really interesting moment where I kicked you an article on recovery oriented systems of care and someone had already kicked it to you. And so we were both reading it and just uh sort of doing what you and I do and call it ADHD fixation or something. Yeah, we started like diving with that sort of stuff. And I mean, very quickly you were like, but you know, you have this entity of this green hill thing, but then philosophically you're shifting off of that. And we're both shifting out of it, but you're still, this is what you have. This is the vessel that you have, that you have to sort of launch from. And there's just not, for a long, long time, there just wasn't, you know, there was aspects of it. think there's, we thought we were doing, I think we, and I still do, I think we were doing the best. version of what that is, we just don't think that there's a whole lot of value alignment with us for what it is, right? And I say this all the time, but one of my issues, anytime someone talks about private healthcare or like a private service or something that you're paying for, and they talk about how amazing it is, right? And it could be, it could be the best product in the world, but I've never worked or known, been able to afford it or know anybody in my personal life that could accept it. access it so then it becomes an issue of like well don't care that it's the best because it's it's completely even if it is the best right like it's completely theoretical and I don't know scalable doesn't have a whole lot of social value because I don't know anybody in my personal life that could access it so and if it is the best then you have a I think an ethical and moral obligation to your community and society to make it as accessible as you can possibly do. And I think that's just really difficult. And so we were sitting into this tension and I think there was this, we've got this Green Hill thing. And matter of fact, when you started recruiting me and we just knew that we were gonna kind of work together in some capacity, one of the things you said is like, listen, we're just not gonna be doing this forever. Like Green Hill's not, this is what we have, this is what we're launching from, but we wanna build integrated healthcare, we wanna build something that's more. in line with our values and creates accessibility. And so that's where the Advata Integrative Madison came from. so to some degree, yeah, like people don't know what we're doing, right? Like I've got a call here shortly for someone that is still kind of looking for what Green Hill was, this private pay, transitional living. And I've tried to that, right? And so people, yeah, people don't entirely know. what it is, but I also think we're in this very beginning stages of shedding what was and really sort of settling into what we are. And there was always ambiguity around this. Like when are we releasing this and stepping into the next thing? Yeah, and like it was a weird, think like the hindsight being 2020, we just realized that's just how that had to go. Because like we couldn't just say like we're not, we're not that thing anymore. We're this thing. Yeah, I mean, it just would have been even more confusing. Yes, so, yeah, I mean, I guess like, I'll just start by saying, you know, Green Hill Recovery still exists. Full stop and what it's going to be. And this I think is, set fairly set in step. So Green Hill Recovery is the entity that we've got that is where we will do treatment from. Like that is the official, that is the entity that gets licensed by the state that needs joint commission accreditation or CARF accreditation in order to do, you know, be a network for PHP and IOP services. When we do ambulatory detox, that will be through Green Hill Recovery, technically. But it's all of the services that are, I would also say one place is like it's time bound. At least if we're talking behavioral health, it is time bound and it is treatment. And so people, think like the reason that Green Hill should continue to exist, even if we could kind of just like collapse that brand, is like if we want to be uh a kind of And quite frankly, there aren't many models of what we're trying to do to model ourselves on. The best way I can say it is like a closed loop system, uh much like Kaiser Permanente out West. But the idea being that like we're your medical home. But I think where that comes in conflict with treatment sometimes is people want to go to treatment and eventually be done with treatment. Doesn't mean they're not they're done with health care, they're done with therapy. But they don't want to feel like they're showing up to the same place they had to when things, they were at a different phase in their life. And so I think treatment needs, totally, totally. And so I think we want to have a treatment entity that you go to. And then we want to have all of the services that you can engage in throughout the rest of your life, if need be. um So the Green Hill Recovery does treatment. And right now we provide PHP and IOP level of care for substance use treatment. uh We do skew pretty heavy on the co-occurring and we as we discussed in the last episode, moving into the uh kind of planning phase of our mental health, PHP and IOP service launch. that coupled with outpatient detox is quite frankly, like that is the full suite of services available in uh outpatient behavioral health. So we'll have all of that under one roof, is pretty exciting. ah So then it just takes us, go ahead, go ahead, please. no, no. was just going say, I mean, to me it is very exciting. It feels, again, like there's some degree of this is very gratifying having been along for the ride and part of the team and everything, And I think the last thing I'll say on the Green Hill side is what that's also going to allow us to do is there are no bright lines between is your mental health primary or your substance use primary for those edge cases. And anyone who's in this field knows that's true. We're not talking about someone who's clearly presenting with some sort of psychotic disorder or someone who is clearly just chemically dependent. on a substance. We're talking about how most people present, which is it's a mix. So this is going to allow us to do what I've always called the campus schedule, but uh really trying to tailor. It's not just like, hey, you're in this IOP, but really tailoring the groups so that you might be in a substance use IOP, but you might go to the DBT skills group that week or vice versa. You may be in the uh mental health track, but you have had problematic substance use. And so you're going to some of the process groups for that. However, that may pan out. And then you've got this whole other side of things, which is the Advita Health slash Advita Integrated Medicine. And this one is the one that is maybe the most frustrating for me, uh or just the one that I don't know. Like, our websites aim well-being. AIM works pretty well to talk about. I personally like Advita Health as like a brand more than I like Advita Integrated Medicine or even AIM. Same, actually, yeah. And so I don't know. mean, there's a chance we just get rid of, know, Advita integrated medicine as like a brand and everything becomes Advita Health and Green Health Recovery is part of that. I don't know. I mean, and this uh is the stuff we've got to figure out. Yeah, and it's funny, before I started this stuff, didn't think, conceptually I understood what brand was, but you don't think about all the practical stuff that you start to hem yourself into. You mentioned all the legal stuff around it, but I'll give a very practical, funny sort of example. For a long time, we were in the habit of, as part of business practice, you fly. Participate in these large green floors and you have a reference that would place at Green Hill. They would come in, they'd tour us and some other programs and you call share to make it accessible for them. And so part of that, I had got us a corporate rate at a really nice hotel in Raleigh. And I called yesterday to actually get a re-upped and renewed since we're going to be doing a little like we're coming back to Raleigh and doing. We're going be doing a little more in Raleigh now that Chapel Hill is kind of locations going. so I wanted to make sure that we had that corporate rate and iron a few things out. So I called the person and she was talking to her super friendly and she was like, so you guys still green hill recovery? And I was like, oh, I mean, kind of, but this is actually, we need to switch this to our sort of updated company. was like, oh, is this the Avada Collective? Well, wait, she's like, was at Arvada Health and it's, let's just do aim. We're gonna do, and then she saw my email address. And so, you know, there's these, all these like micro friction points that really do make it difficult of like what direction are you gonna go in? What is this? But that's like one example of an infinite number, right? I mean, the other real practical one, we were trying to get, make sure that our Google business profile was certified and they kept flagging us because in one of the pictures, on our Google My Business profile was assigned this at the Avada Collective. And so you don't, never, I thought branding's probably important. I didn't think too much about it. ah And now it really is at the size that we're at and what we've grown into and what we hopefully grow further into. These are really vital things to work out. Yeah. I think what I think where our lack of understanding on that came from is largely because the worlds we came from was just relationship driven. I mean, it was all, you know, you didn't even care about the name of the people wouldn't even know the name of Green Hill. They just know Tripper Marcus or Nick or someone there. They were like, what's the name of your program again? It really didn't matter that much. Yeah. But then when you need, when, the majority of your work is, or the majority of your patients are finding you on, you know, on Google or you need other, like a lot of professionals to know what you do in your local area, you need that to be very clear. And I think there's like this interesting, you know, those bell curve memes where like on the, on the left side, you've got like the guy who's drooling on himself and he's saying, It just needs to be on the nose, man. uh And then in the middle of the bell curve, you've got the guy saying, brand identity is like X, Y, Z. We've got all these documents. And then on the far right side, the genius is like, dude, brand just needs to be simple. And so ultimately, you have to reduce a lot of complexity to something simple. And uh I'm certainly no expert in branding by. any means, obviously, if you didn't catch the last 20 minutes. ah But it's a really interesting, you know, kind of, it's a tough thing to, ah it's a tough thing to really get right. And I think it's like one of those things you can, you know, m the words are escaping me, I want to say like, it doesn't matter until it matters. ah But that's how I feel about brand is like, it doesn't matter until it matters. And some places never develop a brand either and are good companies. Everyone's got a different approach to that. I think for us though, I think about this a lot right now from... ah where we came from was we were largely trying to map onto other people. Like we're kind of like this program in a different state or we're kind of like this program, but here's what we do different. And now I think what we're really standing for as a healthcare organization and I think the work we put into the Advaita Way and updating our values to be very on the nose that are very kind of personal, I think for both of us, like we really dig this stuff. um I think like the thing about like a brand and when we're getting to the size is what we're doing now is it's not like we need to convince people of what we do or who we are. What we need to do is we need to attract people who understand what we're saying already. Yes. And this next iteration, uh both from kind of the team perspective and the perspective patient perspective, like we have like a brand means you're drawing differences. It doesn't mean it's not generic. Right. And I think like so many brands are kind of generic. um And the best ones do, like Apple. People always talk about Apple. And it's like you go in and everything's sleek. Steve Jobs was obviously obsessed with both design, but the user experience on his products. I think about a lot of the brands I like. And now I'm not thinking of any of them, of course. And now it's like, OK, so we stand for flourishing. And flourishing is nuanced and we're not going to capture all of that in a slide, right? And this isn't going to be a logo that tells you, they're just about flourishing. This isn't going to be a plant growing. But a brand is also a lot more than its visual identity or the words that we use on a website or on brochures. I mean, it really is the entire what you experience when you interact with the organization. Yeah. And I think like I like to see brand as more of uh an external culture in many ways. Like I think of brand as like, you you need a lot of things to come together. It's kind of like culture. It's like no one really cares until it really works. And then they're like, damn, that's a good, you know, we have a good culture or that's a good brand. And so now I think it's going to be interesting to see how we. you know, go through this. just had, you know, we brought a, we've got a full time uh designer on our team. Now the idea being that we're going to do a lot with uh the software side of things. She's a product designer, historically, but also does a lot of, you know, knows a lot about branding. And we talked last night, we're excited to kick off some workshops in the next couple of weeks, you know, to kind of sort through what we want this to look like. And I'm really excited about that. And I feel like ah I loved the process we did with Green Hill. ah The AIM process was kind of abbreviated because I had someone who was just graduating from undergrad. But we went through a process, but I kind of said, hey, this is the branding process. Here are the exercises I'm going to do and give you the results uh as opposed to her telling me how we were going to do it. And I think it went pretty well. I think it's... um Yeah, it's exciting. It's exciting for me because I think we also have people who are, you know, one of the coolest things, I guess I'm just going to pat myself on the back for this one. But for our, you know, our last, uh you know, team member appreciation day a couple of months ago, you know, we put together these kind of goody bag type things for everyone on the team. And I was like, guys, like, I don't want like little chats, chats keys that just have our name on it. like the pens and people get pens and notebooks and we ended up also doing a canvas tote bag which we designed and looked really cool and the fun thing about that is the product, the canvas bag is something that a lot of people use in their daily life so it's cool that they're using that and the design looked cool so now we're getting our name out there even more. Yeah. One quick thought on some of this that I think is interesting. And there's a tension, right? There's a tension of you have to have aspirational for what are we going to be, but the entire time that you can have the vision and the idea of what is it that we're going to be, but then you also have what you are in the moment. And that's always sort of existing in some sort of tension with each other. It can make it really difficult to take to do the basics in the moment. um Like it's, know, simultaneous, like the code switching necessary for something like Greenhill versus something like AIM is very, very, very different. And the stakes are very different. um And in some ways it becomes really difficult to take certain things seriously when there's this discrepancy between. either the stakes of it. so I think at times, kudos to you. I think at times like we've really, you've done a good job of holding the tension between this is what we are right now, but I'm pushing us to be like, I'm pushing us into the values that we will need to grow into. And sometimes it can be really difficult for people to take, myself included, but like for us to take that sort of seriously, right? You speak a big, like we can speak a big game, but until you're at a certain scope and size, you're just, you're sort of all trousers, right? Like you haven't filled out your britches yet. And now like where, you know, we're filled out our britches a little bit. So this feels more authentic than I think stuff that we've done in the past, which feels good. It makes it actually much more exciting. Yeah, so I guess we'll uh follow up maybe about a month and see uh where things are with the new branding. Perfect, love it. Well, I am looking for something here. oh, I found it. And now for our final segment of the day. ah Did you prepare your favorite quote or lesson learned or what you learned this week? Yeah, I don't have a good quote because I'm never great at remembering this sort of stuff. ah But I was thinking again in terms of this piece, like the power of failure. ah And I could reference any number of things, but I've been thinking quite a bit on the value and the failure. And I'll try to be succinct with this, but I was coaching Jiu Jitsu this week and had a couple of new students that started. And they're younger, stronger, bigger, actually not stronger, but bigger, you know? And one of the things, one of the guys said, he kind of, he came out of like a hot can and we were running, grappling, doing all that sort of stuff. And, you know, I was just kind of playing around with him and tapping him pretty easily and all this sort of stuff. And he looked at me he was like, how long have you been doing this? was like, 10 years. He's like, how'd you get so good? I was like, well, you know, like I'm only good in comparison to you. but it's like I've been training like three to five times a week for 10 years and I've failed an infinite number of times. It's the same as anything else. That's how you get good at anything is you fail over and over. How about you? What's your quota week? What's your big takeaway? This is the one that I sent you. ah And it's from Alan Watts in the book, The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. And it's uh very short. Genuine love comes from knowledge, not from a sense of guilt or duty. And I think why I really like this one is I'm a big Alan Watts fan overall. But depending on your kind of contemplative practices, like the word love gets used a lot, right? And it's not one that that kind of resonates with me. And I think that a lot of people who are seekers and still on that path and still trying to find what they're looking for, you know, they're looking for this uh ecstasy, this just being filled with love, this, you know, like this, this experience of happiness all the time and they think that's enlightened. And I think there's this other side of things where like this quote really struck me because I was like, oh, genuine love and we don't need to be like non-dual about this or talk about how no one exists to actually love anyway. the idea that like genuine love comes from knowledge, not from a sense of guilt or duty requires like what it means is it's not naive either. Right? It's not naive and it's not for someone else. Because, you know, I think a lot about this, uh you know, like to know that you love someone means that you know what it's like to think you love someone but find out you didn't or say, you know, something like that. And I think like there's a and I think there's also this other side where like, yeah, like sometimes family relationships, the love in families comes from a sense of guilt or duty. Like, so that to me is like, yeah, that's family, but like that may not be genuine love, right? ah And so I think it's just one of those, I don't have a ton of so what to it, but I think it actually bridges the gap, but kind of between like head and heart, if you wanna make that distinction, just the idea that like, really can, these are not diametrically opposed and then, yeah. in some types of yoga, think like Jnana yoga is like the knowledge yoga. so, you know, there are in Zen Buddhism, like you have koan practice, and there are these kind of riddles and paradoxes that show you reality better. And I do think that, you know, if we can acquire the right knowledge, then love does flow more freely. But now I sound like I've taken a little bit of Ayahuasca or something. Yeah, grab your bucket. All right. well, I think that's it for this for today. I forgot to mention this is our first live show and apparently it went well. Yeah, yeah, good audience. See you next time! See you next time.