The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Bloom Health Partners: Cole Lysaught, Abbas Khan Co-Founders Interview

Episode Date: October 15, 2021

Bloom Health Partners: Cole Lysaught, Abbas Khan Co-Founders Interview Bloomhealthpartners.com

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks chris voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming to you live on uh all of our different formats out there for some reason we were were having a little startup thing there issue, but we are live now, so welcome to the show.

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You're probably watching this right now. If you have questions, feel free to put them in because we're live on the show, and we'll see if we can get to them if they're pertinent. Today, we have two gentlemen on the show, and it should be a pretty good, amazing show. We have Cole Lysod and Abbas Khan on the show with us. They're both with a company called Bloom Health Partners. Cole is a managing partner and co-founder at Bloom Health Partners, an entrepreneur at heart. He brings with him a strong background in finance and operational leadership. Abbas Khan is a managing partner and co-founder at Bloom Health Partners, a true

collaborator with a knack for building teams and implementing creative solutions. Abbas embodies Bloom Health Partners' mission to ensure unstoppable is possible. Today, we'll be discussing Bloom Health Partners' origins and how its co-founders, both these gentlemen, plan to help schools, businesses, and entertainment productions operate in what we now know as the new normal. Welcome to the show, businesses, and entertainment productions operate in what we now know as the new normal. Welcome to the show, gentlemen. How are you? Thanks, Chris. Doing great. Thanks for having us. There you go. There you go. So we've got both of you covered in the bios.

Who or what exactly is Bloom Health Partners? Hey, Chris. Thanks again for having us. Yeah, so Bloom Health Partners is a healthcare company with a simple mission of democratizing healthcare, and particularly in the workplace. We were actually, we began Bloom Health Partners, interestingly enough, in a parking lot. We started early in the pandemic, and when we started, it was a direct response to actually help our community. Oh, wow. In a parking lot. Now I've heard a lot of people starting in garages, but what parking lot was this by the way? I think we need some. Yeah. So we were in downtown Houston and so it was actually specifically, it was a vacant

Sam's club right across. If you're familiar with Houston and if you're familiar with the Houston Texans, where the Texans play is the NRG Stadium. So it's very central Houston. And I can provide a little context here, but we started this early in the pandemic, and the time we're talking about now is like April, May, June of 2020. This is right, I know it feels like ancient history now, but if you recall not too long ago, we were in quite some trouble with the pandemic, specifically us, Cole and I are in Texas. Our community here in Houston, if you recall, they had really long lines, if you remember seeing that in the pandemic, specifically us, Cole and I are in Texas. Our community here in Houston, if you recall, they had really long lines, if you remember seeing that in the news, and people were trying to get tested. So we actually came together and just a little

background, Cole and I are old, we were both living in Texas, actually, at one point, one point in time, we're actually roommates as well. And so we actually, we identified the problem, which was that people were very reluctant to get testing, quite frankly, because it hurt. If you recall, it was at the time it was that brain surgery, the brain tickle, and we all have cringeworthy, but that's, we were actually one of the first people to bring saliva testing to the state of Texas. And it opened up, it made people more comfortable with this type of testing. We also made it easier for you to actually just show up. The registration process at this time was quite cumbersome. So we brought innovation or we're one of the first

people to bring this innovation in Texas. So what motivated you guys to do this? What was the proponent that you guys were like, other than just COVID, but what made you go, we really want to resolve and solve issues in this space? Yeah, go for it. Yeah, I can take that. As you mentioned, my background, Chris is a lifelong entrepreneur, but started out in the finance world. And Abbas and his father have more of a background in the biotech and medical space. And very quickly on identified that COVID was not going to be contained to just the Northeastern US, New York, New Jersey, that's where everyone saw the headlines early in the pandemic, and realized that there wasn't going to be enough lab capacity in the country to keep up with the demand. And so that's what led us down this track of testing. And we were on the fence, you know, COVID, we had plenty of friends talking about procuring

PPE from China and, you know, the COVID cowboys out there. We've all, by now, plenty of stories have come out with things that went wrong there. And so we're a little hesitant to jump in. I guess we're getting older in age because the 20-year-old entrepreneurs would have dove right into PPE or something. But we just continued to evaluate the market. And then all of a sudden, like Abbas mentioned, in our backyard, I'm in Dallas, he's in Houston. The pandemic began surging really in early June of 2020. We said, okay, we're just going to jump in and do something now. This is hitting a lot closer to home now.

And so we actually started out partnering with labs in other parts of the country because the labs here in Texas were getting bottlenecked as expected, or as we foresaw, the regional labs here in the Texas market were becoming bottlenecked. People weren't getting results for 10, 14 plus days. And what's the point of getting results for a COVID test two weeks later? At that point, you should be getting tested again. So we're able to, at the beginning, create a model where we're balancing this regional demand in Texas with excess capacity in other states where the labs had some spare capacity. So we started out actually with a lab up in Oklahoma and we were

couriering the samples every night to a lab up in Oklahoma from Houston. And that's how this got started. And that's really why it got started. Again, started to hit home in our backyards in our own communities. That's awesome. What specifically service do you guys provide and who are your primary clients? Yeah, sure. I'm happy to answer that, Chris. So as Cole mentioned, originally we were actually partnering with other labs.

And some of those labs didn't even know how to do this type of innovation that we identified. And this type of testing came out of the Yale School of Public Health. It was called Saliva Direct. So we were actually working with labs, validating it for them. And very quickly, to be all quite honest, it just, it wasn't a pleasant experience. What we learned about this industry was that they're used to doing things a certain way, certain times that they're in business. The reporting wasn't very user-friendly. If you've ever been on the other end of, I'm sure you have Chris, on getting your results for a screening or anything, sometimes it's not that user-friendly. So very early, we were identifying that this is an issue. And so while we were testing on ground, we knew that a lot of our

customers were coming to us because they needed to get back to work. And so it was a joint of us talking to corporations, employers, and employers coming to us and saying, hey, we have a whole team that needs to get tested. Is there any way you can come to us and do this? And that's actually, it really, it helped kick us off. That's exactly what we did. One of our first customers, actually, American Airlines, Envoy at American Airlines, where we were working with critical centers and testing for their operation. But very quickly, we pivoted to a pretty interesting industry in Hollywood, actually. And Hollywood was very interesting because they had a very specific problem that they asked us. There is a misconception, if you recall, it took a while for these studios to get

going again and start shooting. And it wasn't necessarily that they were halted because of COVID, but it was the unions and the Screen Actors Guild, as an example, one of these unions had such strict testing requirements. They were requiring three PCR tests, I think, at one point a week. So if you can imagine with Hollywood, it's already hard enough doing productions. But also, how do you do that when you're shooting remotely? Chris, you'll probably be familiar with one of our customers is the Ozark show on Netflix. And what we did was we actually built a high complex laboratory, put it into a mobile unit and actually essentially a trailer. And we actually parked this thing on the set of Ozark. And what that did was

really kick off the industry took note. And today we're proud to say that Netflix, Amazon Studios, Viacom, CBS, I'm sure I'm forgetting Apple Studios and most major productions. And today we're working with many productions. So those are customers to answer your question specifically, those are the movie industry customers, but we also work with a number of corporations. PepsiCo, Six Flags Nation events are some of those customers, and they all have different needs. We've built out an advisory consultancy part of this and also an aspect that's doing the in-house diagnosis as well. Oh, wow. That's crazy.

And then you do schools as well? Yeah. Yeah. We just recently, I guess just this fall, this school year, started doing K-12 testing in the state of Alabama. We're one of the two vendors working with the University of Alabama, Birmingham, UA to carry out K-12 testing in the state of Alabama. We're also working with a number of school districts here in North Texas about doing their testing. There were some funds, the ARPA funds that were earmarked for K-12 testing back in March, and those are just now making their way down through to the state HHS departments and now to the school district. We've had an opportunity to, again, step up for not only

our own communities here in Texas, but in another state. For example, in Alabama, we've had an opportunity to, again, step up for not only our own communities here in Texas, in another state, but for example, in Alabama, and we're talking to another state up in the Northeast as well about doing K-12 testing there. It's been quite an interesting ride so far. Hey, you guys have pulled this off in basically a year and a half. That's quite extraordinary. Amazing. Thank you. Yeah, a lot of hard work. And really, it speaks to putting a team together. I think Abbas and I both have a knack and a passion for building teams and seeing teams be successful. And from our board of directors, some people that are much smarter than we are, both from

a healthcare, scientific, medical background in technology. A couple names. We've got Dr. Namesha Kaliya, who is the chief medical officer for GE, General Electric Company, who is on our board of advisors. Dr. Mehmood Khan, who is the former chief scientific officer and vice chairman of Pepsi, was also previously a Mayo Clinic endocrinologist. Former deputy secretary of the HHS, Eric Hargan, is on our board of advisors, former Bayer CDO, chief digital officer, Jessica Federer is on our board of advisors. And then we've got a great team, COO that came to us, a strong clinical background

with UT Southwest, a big hospital system here in Tech, our chief director has been instrumental in setting up these labs and hiring dozens of people to be working in these labs across the country. So it's been a huge team effort and a big lift in the last year or 16 months, like you said. This is pretty amazing. Education and misinformation have been tremendous challenges during COVID. So how do these board members, how are they critical to your client support model? Sure. Yeah. Some of that, Chris, if you don't mind, Cole, I'll stick to that.

But some of that falls on, even within now that we're, Cole and I have, part of that partnership is we're good at different things. And usually the, I have a background in corporate marketing and communication. So you nailed it, Chris. It is a huge challenge for us to not only communicate what this is, but what it's not. If you can imagine doing testing, particularly school testing with children in the state of Alabama, it's a highly contested, the topic is. And what we aim to do is really inform the truth and get away from the conspiracy theories. And believe me,

you'd be pretty surprised at the things that Colin and I are'm trying to do uh i'm not putting any chips on any kids or you know like that's uh so this is very much part of the challenge cole mentioned this great board we have but one of the board members we have is john garcia he used to be actually the former chief marketing officer at sprint so we i really leverage his background as a young marketer and talking to him about someone comes with a lot of experience. And this is an area where it's highly contested. It's unfortunate that it's a partisan issue, but it's something that we are continuing to evolve. And at the end of the day, it's about being transparent.

That's in our DNA at Bloom. When we first set out this company, and thank you for your compliment on how we've been able to achieve all these things so quickly. And a big part of that, Chris, is because when we say, when we promise a customer, hey, we're going to do this, that's what we do. And actually proud to say that under our watch, with all the productions, with the businesses, there's been no delays and there's been no cancellations due to COVID, at least under our watch, which is actually surprisingly not the case. It's not very common. That's a great track record. So with your guys' business model, I don't know if we've already covered most of the business model or if you guys

want to expand on it a little bit more. And tell us what makes it different than your competitors. Sure. I'll take that, Chris. And really, our mission at Bloom Health Partners from day one, even when we started in that parking lot, a boss mentioned democratizing health care, but also bringing health care to you and making it more accessible. Now, in a parking lot, you might think that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. If you recall at the time,

people couldn't even get appointments at clinics or hospitals to get in for surgeries until they had a COVID test. And like Abbas mentioned, pretty quickly, we recognized most of our clients in that parking lot were employees that were in need of a negative COVID test in order to get in. And then we started fielding calls from companies saying, will you bring your testing to us so we can get our employees tested so we don't have to send them to your parking lot? And so that's when the light bulb really went off for us. Part of this mission of bringing healthcare to you is you, the organization, and bringing these clinical and ancillary services to an organization. And really, people talk about disruption, but it's more of an evolution of this healthcare space

and the healthcare model, which was so big and complex and people can talk till they're blue in the face about how inefficient it is. But we've got all the tools at our disposal, talking about leveraging technology, all the new diagnostic devices and equipment that's come out over the last 10 years, even in the last year and a half, point of care testing instruments because of COVID, that was all accelerated. And then combined with that, a lot of research that's being done in improving human productivity, which also trickles down to employee productivity. And so really our business model now is bringing that healthcare and those clinical and ancillary services to companies. Of course, right now, COVID is really the big challenge that we're helping our clients navigate through not only COVID testing, but also return to office strategies. How do we safely bring people

back into the office? What type of testing cadence and schedule do we need to have? And it's now starting to evolve. And we see the direction this is really heading is more of that, more of an onsite healthcare clinic that we bring to a business's campus or even to a large office building to, again, make that healthcare more accessible to employees. There you go. You guys really deserve a promotion, or you really deserve seeing the long-term vision of this. And some people are just like, yeah, it'll be over in April, or yeah, it'll be over in the summer when it warms up. You guys really captured the long-term vision of this and saw what it is. Now it appears that, correct me if I'm wrong, but it appears that

we're probably going to live with COVID for the rest of our lives and it's going to become like a flu season sort of thing or some sort of thing, but it's always going to be around and we're always going to be having to deal with it. So pretty cool that way. What's your vision for the Bloom Service Platform? Yeah, happy to take that, Chris. And I thank you. That was actually a part of how we were able to stay active and able to grow, particularly early on. We actually had folks who were quite senior in their companies. We're talking chief operating officers, CEOs. And they said, look, I think a lot of other companies, they were trying to sell subscriptions or there'd be testing minimum. And we didn't do that. We knew

that they were in operating models, weren't built, large operations weren't built for something like this. They already run pretty darn lean. And so for this to be blindsided by this, it's just, they don't have the capabilities internally. So we were happy to help. And we took the tough projects, Chris, we were the small guy. There was a lot of business being turned down because it didn't from other folks, because it didn't make sense from a bottom line. I think as a, an entrepreneur, you have to be hungry, but also the reason why those opportunities were not more turned down was not only because the bottom line was because they were tough. We work with theme park customers who were back in testament to them

back in August of 2020. They were already looking ahead. They said, hey, how are we going to... Mothers don't feel comfortable about entering our theme parks. How do we make them feel more comfortable? Hey, Bloom, can you help us figure that out? And we devised a strategy to do this. This was a lot of logistical expertise. But it was, as Cole mentioned, we strategy to do this. This was a lot of logistical expertise. But it was, as Cole mentioned, we had to bring this expertise inside internally. All of a sudden, we were bringing in geopolitics because this is a population health issue. We're bringing military folks, colonels in the Army and the Navy. We're bringing in analytic chemists with instrumentation backgrounds.

All of a sudden, to handle these type of projects, we had to build this overall team. And now we have this great brain trust of folks that come from very different backgrounds. And it's, hey, what else can we do here? And it's not some, it's interesting enough that there's a lot of initiatives that these corporations had started before COVID had happened.

And sure, we're coming to some of those. But if you don't think that healthcare and the world has changed because of this, you got to be kidding yourself. And I can tell you right now, Chris, I wish I could sit here and give you my roadmap for the five years, but it's quite literally, it's impossible. We don't know. I will say this, we are strategic partners of these folks. I think that the landscape internally for corporations has changed significantly. I'll give you one example. The chief medical officer role, who has actually been, you can imagine, it's funny, interestingly enough, we were at the Super Bowl last year,

and they'd asked us, we were working with one of our clients who was one of the major sponsors there. And the health and safety and the chief medical officer is looking at me and said, look, you know who the real rock stars here are? Because all of a sudden they are the most important people or one amongst the most important people in this organization. But I'll tell you something that's interesting. They weren't necessarily before COVID weren't necessarily inward looking about the health of their own employees. It was a very outward looking rule. So if you have if it's if it's Kraft or Coca-Cola, they're more more interested on what that nutrition label is and how the consumers are reacting to products rather than.

And so this is a very interesting opportunity in health care where they're saying, how about we focus on the internal what's going on inside? So in this this very much fits our mission of democratization of health care. When we came to Houston, sure, everybody was focused on the moms with the soccer vans and making sure that they registered right online. And what about the large Hispanic community or some of the underserved community who doesn't have access to healthcare?

The pandemic, as we all know, does not discriminate on who gets sick and who doesn't. We have to serve the whole population. We're seeing that, and now it's interesting, we're seeing that internally with these corporations. It's not just a top-down approach. How can we better serve? How can we make healthcare more accessible for our company so that they can better take care of their employees? There you go. So you guys are really making companies more dynamic. They never really had to, in my companies, we never had to be like,

we need to worry about their health. We gave them a health care plan, but we never had a chief medical doctor at the thing. I think we had a first aid kit in a drawer somewhere or something for, you know, somebody put a stapler through their finger. But yeah, this is pretty amazing. And the evolvement of the evolving variants in the COVID thing, the D, everyone thought it was winding down and that COVID D kicks in. And I guess there's a whole mess of them running around the world right now. What do you think are the biggest challenges that companies and industries face in this phase of the pandemic in the future? I'll take the first stab at that and then I might let Abbas give it a go. But one

of our sayings, Chris, at Bloom is that unstoppable is possible. And if you look at some of our sayings, Chris, at Bloom is that unstoppable is possible. And if you look at some of our clients, less so the white-collar clients who, for the most part, their workers have been able to stay at home and they can stay in front of a computer and do Zoom meetings. But you start talking about Hollywood productions, which we have a lot of clients in that space. The boss mentioned earlier, a lot more people are at home. People want to continue watching their shows and movies and Hollywood can't stop. They need to continue to create content. You've got manufacturing companies.

So we have a few companies that are in the food manufacturing space. They don't have the ability to allow people to, from home and zoom in to the manufacturing line and be sorting and doing the QA, QC. So, you know, again, I think a confluence of factors are the availability of technology, the growing body of research that's pointing to simple things we can do and supplements that can be used to increase productivity and then throw in the tailwind of COVID. There's no doubt that COVID is the here and now and we're, you know, our clients navigate through those uncharted waters to stay operational. In the future, it's just allowing companies to remain operational.

Yeah, no, just to echo your point. And actually, it's interesting because he brought up Hollywood, Chris. We're seeing the opportunity because we were, again, we were here trying to solve for a very specific purpose, bringing healthcare to these folks,

making this more efficient. And really they don't, look, people aren't excited about doing testing. It's not like one of those things that corporations, but we know that it's today is still the best defense tool against this, especially as long as folks can, even if you're vaccinated, as long as you can get the virus and transmit the virus. This is a must within certain pockets in certain organizations. Interesting.

I'll tell you, I'll share a little anecdote. When we brought our, and we're so thankful we have an army of healthcare workers that are deployed all over the country now. And when we brought this service to these movie studios, and they were here doing COVID testing, of course, they have their bloom, they have their scrubs on and they're there. You'd be surprised at how many people are coming with a burn on one side, I got a finger cut on the other. Hey, can you help me? And so that told us right away, and this is us on site, that told us that there's an opportunity here to help these folks. They don't have this capability today. Many times, Chris, they're asked to go outside for healthcare. They're asked to leave

their workforce. Now explain where the opportunity is in that. One is, of course, you don't provide immediate needs. But secondary, let's say it's a diagnostic. Let's say we want to keep our workforce healthy. And look, we've given you this ability to go to this hospital. It's in, here's some locations. But when do you go, Chris? Do you leave work to go? Or you're going to go on the weekends when you should be tossing a Frisbee around your dog or watching the game or what? It's not very popular. So I think that companies are being a little bit more deliberate about keeping their, not just providing, which is great. I'm so happy to see that. And really we work with really altruistic, empathetic leaders who want the best for their companies. These type of services, Chris, did not

exist before. Yeah. Due to the pandemic, it's because of COVID. It's because we've acknowledged this and we're trying to solve for this specific issue that this opportunity is arising for us to take care of each other better and our employees better as employers this is pretty brilliant i'm just amazed at how fast you guys scale this up it's really crazy just just i just think of the logistics of it you guys have built these complex modular pcr laboratories and then you've performed, the note here says, 250,000 gold standard PCR lab tests. Is that correct? It's probably gone up a little bit higher than that in the past month. Yeah, that's just a year and a half. That's a hell of a scale. Now, you guys were recently acquired. Tell us about that. Yep. So we were

acquired by Matri Health Technologies. It's a publicly traded company in Canada and a couple benefits to that. One, you just mentioned just the amount of work that's been done in the last year from a operational logistics side of things to scale this up to where we are today has been a huge lift. But one thing we've always been missing is really the tech chops in-house. Neither a boss nor myself have a background in programming or coding or even just basic IT. And so Main Tree Health brings a deep bench of tech and programming chops to the table. And they've got a platform prior to us being acquired by them that they had built, which met a lot of needs that our clients were looking for, including digital vaccination records,

which it's especially timely now. I think by the end of the month here, we're going to hear whether or not that's going to be a requirement for workers, but the digital health records, and then as we transition into potentially that onsite healthcare model, you can't avoid technology in any industry these days. It's been a lot of logistics and boots on the ground operations at this point, but to really scale this to the next level, we knew we needed to either bring that in-house or this opportunity with Matri Health. They're also publicly traded companies

that should help us advance some of these initiatives and be able to raise money from investors for this combined team to really scale this up and offer this solution to companies around the country because we see very soon on the horizon we could run into a bandwidth issue, especially if these OSHA mandates come into effect at the end of the month here. We already have a number of very large organizations asking us what we can do on November 1st if these mandates go into effect. And so we know that technology is going to

be a backbone to any business in this day and age. This partnership made all the sense in the world for both parties, really, because we also, based on our existing relationships with these corporate clients, have been able to provide those insights to our team now at Matri Health of those programmers to make sure that they're building something that our clients actually want and need and are looking for versus your typical tech company that builds something that they think is really cool before really selling it to the market. And then they find out, well, gosh, we spent a year and a half building this really cool technology that no one

wants to pay for. So it really is a great partnership. That's awesome. Have you guys worked with event companies? Like there's the CS show, there's a CDS show recently that had to get canceled. The NAB show got canceled again. The Chris Voss show, we do a lot of remotes with the podcast where we go out, we interview CEOs, these big shows, these trade shows. And number one, it killed a lot of our business with COVID, South by Southwest. And of course, they've got employees, especially in the thing of CES, they've got hundreds or maybe thousands of employees that are there on support site. And of course, they're dealing with all this COVID thing. I still got to go down and get my clear, my vaccine clear thing so that I can go to these events. But a lot of them are still shuttering, like Cedia just shuttered on me, NAB show.

One of my friends, Gary Shapiro, who's the president and CEO of the CTA and runs CES, I'm probably going to refer you guys to him because I'm tired of seeing these shows closed. So events could really use your guys' help. Yeah. And it's so important to get people back together in person. I think everyone has Zoom fatigue at this point. And so just to get people... Not us, of course. Is that a clinical term? last week. And so we're doing that. We've done a number of shows for Live Nation Entertainment.

They've got big music venues that they manage. So we have been doing some of that, but I certainly think that's a big opportunity, especially in a city like Vegas or cities that have large convention centers that host a lot of these. Because from a tourism perspective, that really, that trickles down to a lot of other industries. You mentioned South by Southwest, Boston's three hours away, and that's a huge deal for everyone in the state of Texas when South by is shut down for those two weeks out of the year where it normally takes place. Yeah, it's very similar actually, Chris, to the reason why school screening is exactly

related to this. Last year, I have a nearly five-year-old, but my four-year-old was twice sent home. And then she was sent home for two weeks was the protocol because someone had tested positive at different times. So it was an exercise between my wife and I figuring out, okay, who needs to be home? And so why is that so important in our team? And I think our team is listening in from Alabama, but this is why their work is so important is that in these communities, if school shuts down, it's not just how are we taking our kid, but it's also how are we feeding our children in some of these communities? This is a food security issue.

Yeah. So screening actually allows us, and this is again back to our positioning at Bloom, about being unstoppable as possible. We want to keep organizations going. We want to keep your school going. We want to keep your event going. We want to keep your, and that's exactly, this is the best line of defense for that. And believe me, if there was a better way of doing this, we would have identified with the brain trust we have, we would have identified it by now. And schools and companies seem to realize that you either need to spend money on this preventative stuff with services like yours, or you're going to spend on attorneys. I just saw, I think yesterday, one of the big school systems somewhere is being sued now by parents who their

kids got COVID from the school system, and now they're suing the school system. So you're either going to pay attorneys or all that crazy stuff. Yeah. We've heard the same thing about lawsuits trickling through to companies. People get sick on the job. Especially if they get long-term stuff. Yeah. And the regulatory, and that's another, an area where we are providing a lot of guidance. In-house legal counsels already have their hands. And actually, our advisory team has the regulatory understanding to focus specifically on this and how is this changing, how the mandates. And it's actually, it's not only is it different from state to state, but it's actually different down to the county level. So if you have an operation,

such as a Live Nation or some of the, like you mentioned, event companies, they're not, they're just, they're not only focused on, okay, can you give us an idea of what's going on in the country? Okay, we're having an event here. Where in the state are you having the event? So we're actually working with them on providing guidance there as well. Yeah. You guys could make a killing in Vegas.

In Vegas, we live on tourism. And that means people are coming here with all sorts of stuff. And so, you you know the events so many events are just closed it just kills me i'm just like another event closes and it's just a fight i was in full calm i think in florida that i'm supposed to hopefully go to later on this month if it doesn't close sema there's a big sema show which is the big automotive aftermarket part show that's huge in vegas and of course the big ces show will be coming up in january and yeah there's so many people there's so they have so many boots on the

ground with their employees and i'm sure those people want to get tested because they don't want to be a center of source uh of stuff there so yeah just a uh heck of a thing going forward i just i've just had to we've had a lot of bio medical on the show with books and stuff, and we've talked about COVID. I've just had to folks that we've spoken with who's on our advisory board is an epidemiologist who actually right before COVID was living in Africa doing tropical medicine, is Dr. Shepard out of Yale School of Public Health as well. And it's interesting talking to him. And I don't want to get, because we're not, Cole and I are not healthcare professionals, so I want to be very careful here. But some of the anecdotes about the behavior of the virus, and he does a great job of explaining why this virus is and also what some of the concerns on and I won't don't, I don't know the exact percentage, but he actually I went and

visited him in Connecticut. And he lived in this rural setting. And he said, you see, there's trees out there. So yeah, he said, Now, imagine if those words weren't those trees out there, you'd see a bunch of deer. We're in Connecticut. It's a lot of deer. And he said, what if I was to tell you that a significant population of those deer have the antibodies for COVID? I said, that's interesting. I said, I'm more interested in what does that mean? And he said, that's a darn good question. What does that mean?

Because we got this thing from an animal. Now we're giving it to animals. And now what happens if... these are just i know this is obviously it's much more complex than these folks who are at a high level really thinking about this but one thing that is consistent i'm sure you've heard the same thing from these scientists a lot more than we do about it chris is that is a lot of a high level of uncertainty here yeah i had a biologist who'd written a book that was on the show and he flatly told me, he goes, we're darn lucky that this thing wasn't like an Ebola type virus where you get it and you're over quickly. But there's still these variants that are developing, which are really scary and

it gets more powerful. Everyone was like, like I said, everyone thought it was over. And then COVID comes around and is like, no, I got something better for you. And there you go. Anything you want to touch on in the future of what's next, what's next from here or anything on the future of what you guys want to talk about? I'll hand it over to Cole. Cole's very much our visionary here, but I would say, I would encourage it. Please follow us, follow along on what we're doing. We really think we're part of a greater movement. You can find us easily at bloomhealthpartners.com, just B-L-O-O-M, healthpartners.com. I will say that for Cole and I as entrepreneurs, there's nothing greater than seeing something that we quite literally,

and Cole, I don't know if you recall the 100 degree weather that we had to endure. And I'll joke with, I don't like to joke about this, Chris, but there was one point I feel like Cole and I could tell if someone had, I'm joking, this is a, don't take me literal on this, but I feel like we could see when someone had COVID just by looking at their eyes. The number of people that passed through and we were diagnosing for this. But I will say that this is, there's no greater pleasure than to see people take this idea, this vision, and then, and now working with serious professionals. And we're all over the country, as mentioned. We have our operations, our hubs are in Dallas, Vancouver, New York, Atlanta,

Alabama, of course. And then we do, we have satellite, these modular offices everywhere. I will say that I've never had a greater sense of responsibility now. We've started this, we're working with teams, and it's a part of that responsibility is getting better, learning more. I can't tell you how often I'm impressed by when Cole's in meetings, and I'm listening to him. And I'm like, I don't know, if they didn't know better, Cole, they would think you'd be a doctor or epidemiologist in this space. But also just learning more about healthcare. We've taken a personal mission. I'm spending my weekends now.

I'm attending the Yale School of Management. Their mission was very much dedicated to both people and business, how the interaction of society and business. That's why I chose to go to that program. But their focus is also on healthcare. And that's something that we will continue to evolve and learn more about this space

and with the goal to make a greater difference. There you go. Anything you want to say? Tough to follow that. But like Abbas said, from an entrepreneur's perspective, very proud of what our team has achieved in such a short period of time. But something else, too, that I think is on a lot more entrepreneurs' radar screens maybe now more than ever is that we're actually doing something that's making a difference for not only the communities that we live in and serve, but also for organizations and their

employee population. And so it's always great when you can feel good about what you're doing on a daily basis. And there's such a need for what we're doing. And we say it all the time, for an entrepreneur, there's more demand than there is supply of companies who can provide these services, the operations, the logistics, but then the high level advisory that we provide as well, because we don't just do testing or onsite health. We also have an advisory service where a VP of legal or an HR director, a chief medical officer, a CEO could engage our advisory team just to have an hour long call once a week, once a month, and just have questions that cut to the facts and cut through the headlines because there is just so much uncertainty and so much noise out there.

Just trying to cut through a lot of the noise that's out there and do something that's good for these organizations that we work with and communities that we work and live in. There you go, guys. Bottom line, you guys are saving lives. That's really where it's at. Fortunately, the death rate of COVID seems to have slowed quite a bit than what it was doing in its first year, but you guys are saving lives, and that's important. Give us your plugs one more time. I know we've done it before, but give us, as we round out, your plugs so we can do that. Sure.

You can find us on LinkedIn and our website. We're bloomhealthpartners.com. Again, that's B-L-O-M, healthpartners.com. There you go. And thanks, guys, for coming on the show and enlightening everybody. And hopefully a lot of companies will hear this and reach out to you guys. Thanks for coming on. Thank you.

Thanks a lot, Chris. It was a pleasure. Thank you. And thanks, my audience, for tuning in. Go to YouTube.com, Fortuness Chris Foss, to learn more and see more videos of everything we're doing. Also, go see all of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, wherever all those cool kids are playing these days we're at. Thanks for tuning in.

Be good to each other, and we'll see you guys next time.