Your Next Move - Commitment to authenticity and growth

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

In this episode, Inc. editor-at-large Christine Lagorio-Chafkin sat down with William Gaunitz, the founder and CEO of hair growth company Advanced Trichology. Advanced Trichology is ranked No. 4,192 on the 2025 Inc. 5000 list, which is the sixth time it has been an honoree. In addition to discussing how he got the company started and what inspired him, Gaunitz stresses the importance of creating a brand for your company, treating people as individuals, and leveraging your transferable skills.

With the VentureX business card from Capital One, you earn unlimited double miles on every purchase. Plus, the VentureX business card has no preset spending limit, so your purchasing power can adapt to meet your business needs. Capital One, what's in your wallet? I'm Sarah Lynch, and you are listening to Your Next Move, audio edition, produced by Inc. business. For this season, we gathered an array of conversations with entrepreneurs who made last year's Inc. 5,000 list. They joined us in our Your Next Move booth at the Inc. 5,000 to share lessons learned and anecdotes from building their businesses. In this episode, Inc. Editor-at-Large

Christine Legorio Chafkin spoke to William Gonnitz. He is the founder and CEO of Hair Growth Company Advanced Tricology. This is their fifth time on the Inc. 5,000 list, and they're ranked 3,382. Christine started the conversation by asking William how the company got started and what inspired him. Yeah, well, we were an overnight success after 17 years. So I started out because of my own hair loss situation, actually. So when I was 18, I started losing my hair. I kind of had a slow ramp up to the point where I was about 20, 21, and I was not having this whole hair loss thing.

And so literally most of the mainstream things didn't work for me. and I had to literally study tricology to figure out how to grow my own hair back. So interesting. And it wasn't in the U.S. at the time. None of the things that I used were in the U.S. at the time. So I brought them here. I had success. So I was like, this is going to be a great business model.

And I opened my first clinic when I was. Was it like propitia or what was the? Propitia didn't work for me. Okay. Monoxid didn't work. A lot of the mainstream things because they act on a specific. core reason. And it, you know, everybody's an individual. And so if you, you know, you're not going to have a DHD problem, like a male would have a DHD problem. So obviously that's not going to work for

everybody. So long story short, I opened my clinics in 2002 and it went nuts for a while. And then, you know, recession, all the rest of the things, I tried to expand. Within probably 14 years, I had developed a product line along the way with like working with so many people. And the clinics just wouldn't grow. Interesting. Okay, so you started with physical storefront clinics. So I had a full-blown, 3,600 square foot medical facility where we had a physician. We had all, we had blazer rooms, we had scout massages, we had all of these unique tinctures, and it did great.

I mean, our results were incredible. Yeah. But the business model was not sustainable through the recession. And so everything had to change. People cut their spending, they're cutting that, yeah. I had. Interesting. It was a money-back guarantee.

Okay. And with the money-back guarantee and when the recession hit, people were like, they were basically discontinuing their treatments and so on and so forth. Had to reinvent the whole thing. Anyway, the thing that through all of it kept growing was the product link. People stayed on the products. So I ended up after expanding and contracting a couple times, I was like, I'm just throwing the stuff up on Amazon and let's see how it goes. Yeah, sure. And was that the 17 years later or was that soon?

Okay. Wow. Wow, wild, wild. So what was the difference? Like, what had you design that made you stick to it, that you said, like, this works for people? Just treating people like an individual. Okay, so you had a different line of different treatments. Yes.

Yes. Okay. And now, I mean, we're the only ones doing still what we do. And I have an app that's going to finally be completed in 2025 where you'll be able to actually scan your own blood work. You'll be able to take your own photos. We're actually developing a portion of this where you can integrate a scout microscope and kind of look at your own hair. Wow. We're using AI to essentially enhance the entire process and keep people on track.

Because the hair that's growing today, basically, if it's going to start falling out, it will take three months to fall out. And if the hair that's basically starting to grow today is going to be visible in three months, then you have to basically work on it now. So you'll see nothing for 90 days. So most people give up. They're like, oh, this isn't working. It didn't start working for, you know, the six weeks that I was on it, so it must not be happening.

So it's a psychological aspect. But when you just keep going, maybe it's like losing weight or something. Sure, absolutely. You're going to start getting more growth. And I could see how an app that is giving people kind of progress reports on their journey could be really helpful to keep them on track. Yeah. If you lose that connection with like an individual coach and an individual location or an individual physician, right? Absolutely.

So you have no physical locations anymore or do you still have clinics? So I sold my clinics in 2017. We had a couple franchises. I disbanded those. They just went out on their own. And I have a private practice in Laguna where I see people, but it's very selective. And everything else is done online, so which is fantastic. Wow. Interesting.

So for the record, because this is not a visual medium, I'm going to let our listeners know that this man has a full head of hair. Well, thank you. If I didn't have hair, then that would be a bad testimony. I mean, but it would be a testimony to the fact that you said, okay, people are all medically diverse, right, and have different causes. different reasons, right? True. But you yourself were treatable, and that's cool. Exactly.

Whereas mainstream medicine didn't know what to do with me. They were like, go lose more hair and come back. Yeah, so interesting. So what did it take to stick by this idea for those 17 years? It's funny. The opening talk tomorrow over that five minutes is mine, and it's about perseverance. Oh, cool. Great.

So I didn't have a choice. You know, I mean, I kept going. I was in this with all of my clients. I was in this as an entrepreneur, and I was dedicated to basically completing the idea. And even now, I mean, I have a vision of exiting for, you know, basically a very large multiple because it can be that. And it's not because, you know, for money purposes at this point, it is for this should be everywhere. It should change the paradigm of hair loss.

And that's what we're trying to do. So essentially just grinding it out until. something happened. Yeah, yeah. And you did that, which is amazing. And it's something that were definitely ebbs and flows of the business. So tell me about that decision to just, like, put the product on Amazon. How did that work? And do you have, like, one hero product that is your main revenue driver? So basically, again, I had my multiple clinics. We expanded from a clinical standpoint under our own umbrella to about five locations. Then I started franchising. By, again, 2010, like some of them were failing. I had to close some of them. There wasn't any individual who could do what I do.

Yeah. And so since it was practitioner-based, I'm like, this isn't working. So we had a first GoDaddy online store. I don't even think they have online stores, but that was like 2011. And we threw a couple products up on there. People were buying them. We're like, okay, well, this is cool. We don't even have to think about this. We're fulfilling them through the clinic. And then Amazon started growing, and then some of these other platforms started growing. So eventually, I'm like, Evolution Hair Loss Institute Clinic. has a product line, but it doesn't have a brand. It doesn't have an identity.

So we made it advanced tricology, since tricology is the science of hair and scalp. Does anyone know that? Very few. I'm a tricologist. Sure. And when people go, what is that? And they think it says... You could make up anything.

I mean, I should really be like, I'm a superhero. Mess with them. Absolutely. And then basically, again, when tricology, we started showing off our results. And the one-hero product was the D.HD. which was predominantly for male pattern loss. But the core of most people's hair loss is actually nutrition. And especially post-COVID, people have no understanding of what COVID actually did to their bodies.

And not that, you know, to go off on a lot of different tangents, but it screws up your microbiome. It screws up your digestion. Sure. Multiple illnesses can do that, right? I mean, yeah. The amount of research that's coming out now about in certain scenarios, your risk of hair loss increases eight times post-COVID. Wow. Like, it's just, I mean, it's all this new research.

Sure. And so that was one of the reasons why in 2019, 2020, we just took off. And so Shape Magazine listed one other product for COVID-related hair loss, which was the Fala Growth vitamin. And that's our core hero product now. And that just took off. Cool. So we've got about 12 skews, and we're going to add three more just for different reasons. And that's about it.

That's all you need. Neat. Neat. Is that, aside from the vitamin, the other product, is that, like, a medical product. None of the products are medical. Interesting. They're all natural.

That is cool. So do you need FDA certification for that? Do you need... Everything is manufactured in FDA-compliant facilities. And obviously, we follow all guidelines associated with that. But it's not an OTC. Yeah. And it's not a pharmaceutical.

It's not a pharmaceutical, right? So you don't need to employ doctors to prescribe this online. No. You're not following the kind of like hymns playbook of... No, just regurgitating monocidil. Yeah. Okay. No. No, that's what everybody else does. Right, right, right. Exactly. So interesting. Okay. So what happened after you put the product on Amazon then? So it's funny because I have pictures of my Amazon seller account, and I'm like, oh, we did $5,000 in a month. You know, now we do, you know, $1.5 million in a month.

But it was just a slow progression. People were buying the product. And then they were like, oh, this works. So I'm just going to keep buying it and keep buying it. And now, you know, you can see some of these metrics that are on Amazon. And, I mean, I think one of our products has an average of 60,000 repeat purchases per month or whatever it is. Wow. And are these, like, people are subscribing that really take.

taking it daily. Yeah, cool. And that's so fascinating. So then did you have to start thinking of the company differently? Like you needed fulfillment. You needed a huge pipeline of supply. Like you needed to make supply chains happen, right? I mean. Oh, yeah. I mean, all of those things. I mean, we still have a relatively small team. It's expanded remarkably in the last year. But, I mean, our core team is only about 10 people. And then everything else is outsourced. But fulfillment was a huge issue. We were fulfilling product in my clinic. And these girls at the front desk, they, they were looking at me like, we have 30 orders. What are we going to do? Well, now we have 1,200 orders a day, so at least you don't have to handle that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, my gosh.

But it's just Amazon was great. But that wasn't in their original job description doing the postage or whatever. Right, right, right. Oh, that's so funny. So interesting. But FBA, you know, back in 2016, 2017, 2018, we got in relatively early. Okay. And now, I mean, it's, you know, we're up there with the really big guys who've got, you know, bought by Unilever and things like that. It's cool. When we come back, Christine asked William about the transferable skills he found as a founder. But first, a quick break. Here's a tip for growing your business.

Get the VentureX business card from Capital One and start earning unlimited double miles on every purchase. That's right. With unlimited double miles, the more your business. the more miles you earn. Plus, the VentureX business card has no preset spending limit, so your purchasing power can adapt to meet your business needs. The VentureX business card also includes access to over 1,000 airport lounges. Just imagine where the Venturex business card from Capital One can take your business. Capital One. What's in your wallet? Terms and conditions apply. Find out more at Capital1.com slash VentureX business. I imagine that managing a online kind of sales company is different than managing a clinic,

but there's probably some skills that carry over. Like what's been changed in terms of your running the company and your management? Well, luckily, I have a right hand who happened to sort of be a consultant in 2019. He was like, look, I have a lot of skill sets that will benefit you. And he basically came on as my COO, and he's handled much of the growth. And so I could focus on science. I can focus on content, product development. And so a lot of the fulfillment has been, you know, automated through his practices.

And even some of the growth of just finding new manufacturers and excelling at things that, I mean, he's smarter than I am at these things. So finding the smarter people than you in those areas is key. Absolutely. So in terms of the doing the continued research, science and marketing those things, too, like, what's next for you? Like, what are you finding? What are you looking at?

So that's my wheelhouse. Yeah, cool. My YouTube channel's got 1.1 million subscribers at this point. The content, I mean, people love it because no one else is saying. Uh-huh. And that I'm committing to really escalating in the next six to eight months so that we can deliver the message. And then the science, I mean, I'm constantly tinkering and constantly doing research, constantly a little bit, almost experimenting on myself in certain cases. Because I'm like, I think this combination is going to work.

And then I'm like, you know, then you slowly roll it out. with other test cases, and then it grows, and you have to prove the concept. So some of it takes years to develop. But that's all happening. So I have been working on a new set of products for the last five years, and I'm just about there. And so that's going to be coming out next. That's great. I feel like that is such a tricky content kind of delivery area to be in, right? In health, medicine, this kind of stuff is like ripe for spam, ripe for like trying to get people to get down your rabbit hole. And like, you've been in this for two decades. Like, you know what you're doing. How do you make yourself stand out from like the junk science that's out there?

That's also a great question. People, I think I may come across authentic simply because I have this bizarre wealth of knowledge that you only get with experience. You cannot read a book to go, oh, well, all of that makes sense. And it was two decades of experience going, well, no, that's not actually how it works. These are the things that actually make that work. And, you know, from a content, from a spam perspective, I've been deep faked multiple times already. Oh, God, I'm sorry. Take my likeness, and then they're selling other products, which I'm kind of flattered, I guess.

Right. But, you know, I'm not actually pushing those other products. Right, right. But, yeah, it's just going to commitment to authenticity and growth based on my own personal experience with clients. And I don't deviate ever from the integrity of what I've seen or what I've built. I will never suggest anything that I've never actually seen work. Great. And so is YouTube your primary marketing channel or what's your best online marketing channel? Marketing-wise is probably meta.

And it's basically snippets of me doing podcasts or snippets of my videos. And then we find something that goes viral and then we just basically repeat it and do it over and over and over again and drive them to the website. Yeah, absolutely. So what's your plan for the future now that you've found this growth? You've found the thing that works. Like, you're going to launch new products maybe. You've been doing some more research. But, like, how do you keep that growth up?

Are you going to try to? Well, I have a lot of wall space for more ink-5,000 plaques. All right. So that's something we want to keep growing at this rate. It is hard to sustain that fast growth, right? year after year. It is. Yeah. So we've kind of peaked it around 35% annually, but next year with the app and so much of these innovations that we have coming out, quite frankly, I think we're probably going to hit 80, 90, 100% growth. So that should keep us on the list for the next couple of years.

Great. We can you see on site what kind of hair loss they have? Oh, I walk through like Target and stores and go, that person has low ferretter or that person has low vitamin D. Interesting. And most of it's nutritional. Wow. This is stuff that their regular MD should be handling, right? But everyone should be on vitamin D. Most people, but you have a sweet spot. So, I mean, you want to be between 60 and 80 nanograms per millilator in your blood. You want your zinc to be around 90 to 100. You want your ferretin to be at least 60. It's your iron storage protein. Most people think about iron, but it's not iron. It's ferretin. Okay. And I'm really looking at copper now because I think that, I mean, I even tested my copper recently and I'm like, oh, that's a little bit lower than it should be. So when you

biohack, it should be optimal. Okay. And literally, if everyone did that, there would be at least 60% less hair loss. So interesting. I mean, no pharmaceutical can't actually do that. Wow. What about like the hair loss four months after you have a baby? Postpartum? Yeah. That is due to nutritional levels depending on whether they breastfed. Yeah. And then usually, I mean, your estrogen level peaks to between 25 and 50 times higher than usual. So then as soon as you, you know, as soon as you postpartum. I mean, you give birth, and then that drops within a month. So that hormone can create a stress shed, or if you are susceptible to female pattern loss, then it will actually cause more loss, like, in the temple region. This is, I've never had good hair here. Like,

never. It's like these Irish baby hairs. Well, that... But, like, this was, what, like, four months after giving birth three times, four months after, it just, like, was really bad. Did you breastfeed? Yeah. Okay. And then did you ever go back on, like, a prenatal? No. I mean, like, and I was taking a lot of iron while I was pregnant as well. And was your hair great while you were pregnant? It's fine, yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I'm going to assume how much red meat do you eat? Not that much.

Okay. Yeah. Are you... Probably need a little more iron. Well, and it's not even, it's cumulative. So even if you had iron for, let's just say you were taking normal amount of iron, like 35 milligrams of iron for the next... Just taking like a lot, like the liquid shots. Okay, like the Farishell? What is it called?

Florida. or something like that? Oh, yes. It's got like mountain herbs in it, too. I know. It just tastes a little better. So preferably heme iron would be better. So that's typically derived

to sort of like an animal-based iron. But if that's not an option, you'll need like 100 milligrams a day and you want to track your blood levels. Okay. And that's what we do. Yeah, cool. And that's because we do all the blood work

and that's where you're literally going to be able to scan your blood test and it's going to be able to tell you exactly what you need, which is super, super cool. So you like sell kits to test your blood? to, or no. We have a contract with Quest.

Uh-huh. And so you can order it on our website. It goes to Quest. Quest draws the blood. It sends it back to us. And then we use a panel to make recommendations. Wow, cool. But, I mean, it's pretty wild.

Yeah, that's really wild. It's so simple. Neat. I mean, I always thought when I would talk about this that I'd basically work myself out of a job because people are going to just pick up on it. They don't. Well, it is fairly complicated, right, to, like, track on your own and, like. Well, that's why we're making it easy. And so what's your next move after that?

What are you thinking for exit strategy? I'm assuming that one of these larger brands is going to go, wow, this is a really good idea. And they're going to want to, you know, take it over. So I'll just throw a number out there and let's see where it goes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then after that, I mean, I think I'll just do nothing for a year until I'm really bored and then figure out something new. You know, I hate to break you to you, but I hear from many people it's shorter than a year. It's like the next morning they wake up and they're like, well, what am I?

What am I going to do next? I know, I know. But it sounds like it's been a fascinating journey, and congratulations. Well, thank you very much. That's all for this episode of Your Next Move. Our producers are Blake Odom and Avery Miles, editing and sound design by Nick Torres. Executive producer is Josh Christensen. If you haven't already, subscribe to Your Next Move on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Your Next Move is a production of Inc and Capital One business. Thank you.