Your Next Move - Why Smarter Not Harder Is Betting on Healthcare Practitioners

Episode Date: October 13, 2026

In this episode of Your Next Move: Audio Edition, Inc. staff reporter Chloe Aiello sits down with Boomer Anderson, founder of Smarter Not Harder Life Sciences and Technologies, ranked No. 895 overall and No. 99 in healthcare on the 2026 Inc. 5000. The company develops supplements and other technologies designed to optimize focus, sleep, stress management, and overall health. Boomer explains why the rapidly growing company is shifting its strategy toward healthcare practitioners—even though doing so means sacrificing short-term margins—and how a new distribution partnership could put its products in the hands of providers around the world. He also shares how Smarter Not Harder evaluates new initiatives, prepares its international supply chain for tariffs, and decides which marketing channels are worth its investment. Plus, Boomer discusses the company’s expansive approach to AI, including its work to automate the analysis of lab results so practitioners can spend more time with patients. He also explains why he hires adaptable generalists, how transparency helps preserve company culture, and why the supplement industry needs stronger standards. Looking ahead, Boomer shares his ambition to help move healthcare from treating disease to optimizing health—and why the number of people served matters more to him than growth alone.

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Hello, I'm Mike Hoffman, and you're listening to the audio edition of Your Next Move, produced by Inc. in Capital One business. This season, we're talking with founders from the Inc. 5,000, about what's fueling their growth right now and how they're thinking about what comes next. In this episode, staff reporter Chloe Aiello speaks with Boomer Anderson,

founder of Smarter Not Harder Life Sciences and Technologies. The company ranked number 99 in health care and number 895 overall on the 226 and 5,000 list, after a year of rapid growth focused on health optimization and performance. The conversation begins with Boomer explaining how smarter, not harder, is shifting its growth strategy towards health care practitioners, even when that means trading short-term margins for long-term impact, and why getting products into doctors' hands is central with the company's mission to move health care from treating disease to optimizing health.

Starting off, just for the recording, tell me your name, your company, and what number on the Inc. 5,000? Boomer Anderson, smarter, not harder, life sciences and technologies. We were number 99 in healthcare. That's the number that I focused on. 99 in healthcare and 895 overall.

Is that correct? That's correct, absolutely. Okay. And can you give me a short description of your company? At Smarter or not harder, what we do is we create. create products and technologies to improve the human condition through health optimization. Very cool. I'm not entirely sure what that means on the surface, but we'll dig into it and find out.

Let's talk future looking over the next 12 to 24 months. What's the single growth lever that you're most committed to pulling? Healthcare practitioners. If you look at our core business, which is supplying people products to enhance things like focus, improve sleep, stress, our core focus, our core focus, over the next 12 months is to get those products in healthcare practitioners hands. We actually are announcing it this coming Monday, a strategic partnership with another supplement company that will allow us to distribute all throughout the United States and most parts of the world. Well, that's very cool. Are you able to tell us more about this partnership? Yeah, so we have a long history in this space that's broadly labeled alternative health care or integrative healthcare. And that includes having four medical doctors on the team. And what integrative health care is is essentially practitioners who

also use dietary supplements to enhance outcomes in their patients. Now, over the course of many years, we built relationships with other companies. And one of them happens to be this company, Quicksilver Scientific. QuickSilver Scientific is based in Colorado. We've known the founder for a long time. We just get along very well. And this coming Monday will be announcing that partnership, which allow quicksilver practitioners all around the world to be able to buy our products. Speaking of success, levers to pull, how do you determine that something has worked or if something is an initiative that perhaps you should put a stop to, pivot, kill? Whenever we announce an initiative, and this applies both to the forward side of the business,

so sales and marketing, and the backside of the business, operations, we always have a metric. that we're looking for. Now, in the case of, let's say, digital marketing, you have things like return on ad spend, you have cost per acquisition, cost per click. Those are all metrics that we measure daily. And we have internal targets. And based on those targets, we're able to determine, like, hey, for example, in digital marketing, if you're looking at a relationship with a customer, and you're saying that over the next 60 days, we expect to make $145 off of them, and if if our cost per acquisition is above $145, well, we need to re-rack and do something differently. So everything we do, every initiative we have, whether it's that initiative I just told you about

with our healthcare practitioners, we have a metric or a series of metrics that we're always monitoring to determine whether or not it has value. We typically have a predetermined time that we want to invest in a project that's a minimum of three months, usually a maximum of six months before we pull the plug if it's not working. So obviously, if you are an Inc. 5,000 company, if you are ranking that high in health care, you're growing extremely rapidly. What if any tradeoffs have you had to make to sustain your velocity, whether it be margin versus market share, speed versus quality, custom versus scalable, whatever that means for you. The healthcare practitioner route is actually a lower margin tradeoff for us. And if you look at direct-to-consumer in the nutritional or dietary supplement space, typically people maintain margins north of 65%. when you start going in the practitioner route, which is a market share play, we're actually decreasing our margins significantly because the way practitioners are incentivized is that they have

to be awarded commission on those recommendations. And so your margins definitely compress, but for us, if you look at the long-term mission of our company, which is to shift this perspective globally from disease to health, and that's predominantly in our own U.S. healthcare system, how do we do that? We have to make impact. And the way for us to make impact is to get our product in the hands of practitioners. One practitioner is going to serve upwards of 300 people, whereas one consumer that we might acquire through a meta or a TikTok ad, that's going to be one person.

And so the impact lever is what we care about most. And the benefit of being a private company with largely bootstrapped investment is that we can take long-term bets. And so over the next several years, we're willing to compress our margin to increase that impact. So this is a short-term, hopefully margin compression for long-term return on market share and eventually profit. Absolutely. Another reason why we're looking at this is part of my fiduciary duty is to look after the shareholders. And like I said, we're a bootstrapped company. There's only a handful of shareholders.

But if you look at dietary supplement space, those that have had the highest valuations when it comes to exits, a lot of that has been on health care practitioner-based brands. Let's talk about uncertainty. There's been quite a bit of it. It's a fun topic. Imagine tomorrow you had a 30% budget shock, which, you know, with some folks and tariffs and various things, this is not unheard of. This happened to me last week, actually. Okay. Well, then this is a perfect question for you. So what do you cut first that doesn't slow growth? What do you protect? How do you make that call? Well, I think it's more of just reevaluating every resource that we have or are planned resources for the future in our case.

So if you look at, take for example, last week, there was a surprise announcement of 100% tariff on China. First, we don't know if that tariff is actually going to hold. We've had incidences in recent past where announced tariffs turned out to be far less in the future. But you have to look at the future and say, how does this impact our business? Well, we can get creative initially. Now, if you're buying, let's say, in our case, ingredients from places like China, India, and of course we third party test all of those. But if you're buying ingredients from those places and they're shipping to the United States, well, there's going to be an increase in tariff.

But you can look at establishing companies in other lower tariff jurisdictions to serve as your sort of freight forwarding service. So we're definitely looking at that. And then we also look at future planning. So that mainly looks at staff right now. So we run a very lean team in general. But if we're looking at 2026 planning, what are those essentials? And I start to rank those essentials based on.

okay, here's the person that I absolutely need, all the way down to the nice to have. And as the clarity around tariffs in particular becomes, well, more apparent, we can start to make those hires, but we'll make them in that order of prioritization. So when you're talking about ranking importance, you're not talking about existing team members, you're talking about wanting, like, what you would want to have in a future hire? So high class problem, again, of being both bootstrapped, but also being a very profitable company that is also very lean, is that we already need more people than we currently have. And so for us, it is about ranking that person based on essential for new hires. Our current team, I'm very fortunate that I don't have to cut anybody.

That is fortunate. Oftentimes when, you know, leaders have to make cuts, you know, sometimes employees will, obviously not like that choice. whether it be a cultural change, a tool change, something. How do you communicate that to smooth things over? How do you provide sort of a balm to the burn of change when times are tough? Well, I think it all starts with transparency at the leadership level, right? And so for us, one of the things I pride myself on is all the way across our organization is transparency. Now, there's certain things that we don't talk about live, but for the most part, if it's a news headline, I want to talk about it and how it impacts our business.

We have quite a number of junior people on our team, and we want to be able to train those people to be leaders in their communities in businesses in the future. And so transparency is key so that nothing is a shocker. And we will be very clear with them if the event ever comes where we need to cut people well ahead of time. Nothing should surprise people. We talked about your business evolving,

even with this upcoming deal, with getting your product in the hands of practitioners. So we've sort of addressed that. But I want to talk future-looking. How is your go-to market going to evolve that you can anticipate? What channels or motions get more investment? And perhaps you've had this already. What do you intend to sunset or what have you sunset?

There are certain channels that we are deliberately decreasing investment in. For example, TikTok. It hasn't been the most profitable channel for us, but also there's lack of clarity around what's going to happen with the U.S. acquisition. So we have decreased, actually shut off investment in TikTok. We're doing a lot of organic content there, but not really paid content.

And so we reallocate that budget to places that do work, like meta, Google, et cetera. Now, when it comes to go-to-market, I would actually be curious how many people you have had in this booth who haven't mentioned artificial intelligence. But the way we look at artificial intelligence for our company is something that Jeff Bezos describes as the middle layer. For everybody in our company, they need to have proficiency in artificial intelligence.

And so we're actually investing quite a lot of money in education, as well as tools, to help our existing employees work more efficiently using artificial intelligence. That also allows us to do a hell of a lot more research faster on those go-to-market strategies. I'm really glad you brought that up. Okay, next question is artificial intelligence related? That's what we're talking about. So what key areas have you identified that AI or automation can create efficiencies for you? What work do you intend to keep fully human?

I guess that's a question about where you're currently educating people and sort of like what tools you're focusing on. Sure. So we have a unique team for a dietary supplements company in the sense that we have internal engineering teams as well as internal design teams. Most dietary supplement companies have that external. Number one, the reason why we do that is because we want to own the creative. Number two, I think technology is a great enhancer of anything that we do. So all of our tech teams are proficient in tools like cursor and all of the other enhancements that an engineer can want. And our design teams are learning how to use the various tools other than chat GPT to make our designs more vibrant and be able to adjust those on the fly, right?

And so we're able to test that pretty quickly. Now, you ask a question about the future. We have a nonprofit that is basically run by the same team, and the nonprofit teaches doctors and healthcare practitioners how to optimize for health rather and treat disease. That is a very artificial intelligence forward model, meaning that if you think about a healthcare practitioner's role in the world, what do they do? And they go and they see people, and what's the thing that a practitioner can't do? They can't scale their time. And so the number one thing that we're investing on there is how do we scale a practitioner? So,

the practitioner of the future project is our number one project at that nonprofit. That's very cool. I guess what would that look like in practice, scaling a practitioner? So practitioner spends time on a few things. One healthcare practitioner has to interpret lab results. So lab results come in from the lab. These are blood, urine, stool testing. They have to be interpreted and then placed into whatever that practitioner framework is to provide a recommendation. That whole process, given the improvements we've seen in OCR technologies, as well as just computational power, can be automated. And so we're working with that to allow the practitioners spend more time on the things they truly love, which is usually talking to patients. Speaking one more question about AI here, at this point have you institute any targets in terms of time or cost reductions or efficiencies that you're hoping to see with these tools?

Not yet. And the reason for that is we're still very much in experimentation mode. Several of us within the companies, we will try every tool there is out there or we'll build our own. And it allows us to kind of fine tune exactly what we expect to get out of this. So right now, I would say we are allocating almost unlimited budget towards artificial intelligence. And from there, we'll kind of hone in over the next 12 to 18 months as to where that budget's going to ultimately lead in terms of leverage. After the break, Boomer outlines how he's prioritizing hiring as the company scales and the traits he's looking for in early team members. Growing a business sometimes means taking a leap long before you feel ready.

That's what Hayden Wadsworth, Capital One business customer and co-founder of Hydrojug learned when he and his brother Jake launched a reusable water bottle brand from their parents' garage, starring with three colors and a nerve-rack. tracking 3,000 unit order, digital ads help them scale fast, 100,000 in year one, one million in year two, quickly outgrowing the garage and pushing them to sign their first warehouse lease. Through that rapid growth, they relied on their Capital One business credit card and cashback rewards on ads spent to help fund the move and keep momentum strong. Learn more at Capital One.com slash business cards. Speaking of budgeting, speaking of hiring, which we addressed kind of previously, you mentioned like sort of a measure of what's most important to you. What are those roles that are most important?

What are you willing to pour more money in in terms of talent and investment as you're looking to hire what you need, but not over hire at this point? Sure. I'm going to say two things. Number one has to do with the landscape that we're in. I mentioned earlier this announcement of tariffs and these sort of surprise international policy changes overnight. If you have an international supply chain, I think investing all of the money that I can to make sure that that supply chain is dialed in is very prudent.

When we look at hiring, one of the core areas that we focus on is supply chain management and operations in general. Number two, in terms of the areas that we want to focus on, we are still very much in growth mode in the sense that, you know, okay, we've grown. by 280% this year. We expect to grow by multiples of that next year. And in a fast-growing environment,

and I'd be curious about your experience because you get to interview everybody across the board. But my view is that generalists work well. And so we're looking for people with T-shaped skill sets, meaning that they have a particular level of expertise, but they have that lateral thinking that they could passport that expertise over to different divisions of the company. our total team right now is 16 people. I need a hell of a lot more than that in order to be able to run and gun like we plan to and to capture the market share that we want.

So that T-shaped skill set where you're looking for a certain level of expertise but also that lateral thinking, which is quite rare, to be able to jump into an operations role, to be able to jump into a marketing role if needed is what we're really on the hunt for. And so we'll hire young,

we'll hire people that do exactly, exhibit those talents, and we'll let them grow into our business. And to what extent is culture important to you? What does your company culture look like? How do you protect that as you scale? Are there any non-negotiables from a culture perspective that you're looking for, aside from this particular skill set with your potential hires? Sure.

I mean, culture's king, right? I'm sure somebody has said that to you already. But when we look at culture, we have a three-step interview process, and the first one is always culture. And what it's evaluating on is do you meet all of our five values? And so our five values are actually based on the ocean's framework, which is personality traits. And so what we look for is conscientiousness. We look for agility and the ability to dance between roles, that T-shaped skill set that I talked about.

We look for communication. We're looking for non-reciprocal altruism, which I'll get to that here in a second. And we look for curiosity, of course. So if I recap those again. So we're looking for curiosity. We're looking for communication. We're looking for agility. We're looking for conscientiousness.

And then we're looking for that non-recipical altruism, I think. And so when we capture that in people, we know we've got it. And let me spend a moment on that whole idea of non-reciprocal altruism because I think what we're trying to do is slightly different in that we're trying to provide a business framework that is different than your traditional for-profit company. in that we've also launched a nonprofit at the same time. We all give our time to that. And so can we find people that are willing to give to something greater than themselves

this cause of shifting from disease to health and really pushing our current health care system, which is basically disease management, towards health? And we feel like we can interview for that quite well. That's great. We've talked a lot about risks, particularly with that tariff that we were discussing. What would you say is the biggest external risk to your business in the next 12 months or so, whether that means tariffs, if it's regulation, capital markets, supply chain?

What is it and how are you derisking for that in advance? The number one risk to us is regulatory. And within the United States, the Dietary Supplements Act is governed by the FDA. So, of course, there's a governing body there. but the regulatory risk I'm actually referring to here is government's choices around international policy. And this goes back to tariffs, right? Tariffs increase our cost of goods sold. That compresses margin, which then we would have to pass on to our consumers at some point.

For the most part, our competitors ourselves, and most of these guys I wouldn't call competitors, they're friends at this point because we do everything a little bit different than them. we're not passing on those costs yet. So if it became a point where we had to pass on those costs, how would we do that? And, you know, how would we make sure that the customer knows that this is only temporary? But, you know, how do we also de-risk from that? So we always look for alternative suppliers. We're looking for additional suppliers of all of our ingredients, but also setting up that entity.

So if you look at places like Singapore, Singapore current tariff, rate is 20%. And so over the course in the next couple of months, I'll be spending time setting up that entity in Singapore such that if tariffs do become a bigger issue than they are currently, we can run all of our ingredients through Singapore and actually reduce that increase on cost of goods sold. I was wondering if there's external risk in the form of perception around supplements particularly. There's been a lot of reporting about how folks, there isn't a lot of oversight into what a lot of supplement companies are doing. And if you buy something on Amazon, say, you don't necessarily know what you're getting because, you know, for one reason or the other. So to what

extent does that affect your business? How are you combating that stigma or that fear among consumers? I welcome further regulation. And we are actually advocates here of establishing something new, which is right now you have the dietary supplement space. You have the prescription drug space, what about establishing something new in between, whereby all of the ingredients have been third-party tested, just as we have done. And you have to go through a certification process to make sure that not only are those ingredients what they say they are, but also the label claims are what they say they are. And there's numerous studies out there.

We saw this almost 10 years ago now with a very large supplement distributor, having a number of their products pulled off the shelves tested, and they found out that. they didn't meet label claims at all. And for everybody who's listening to this, in the United States, dietary supplements only have to have plus or minus 20% versus label claims in terms of the ingredient. So can that be improved? Absolutely yes. And so we're actually involved in that conversation and very much advocating for people to ask more of their supplement companies. We should really have a higher standard because this is something that you're putting into your body. And you're also investing quite a lot of money. Supplements aren't cheap, particularly the good ones. And so,

wouldn't you like to know that what you're taking is not only good for you, but certainly not doing harm? I think a lot of folks would welcome that, particularly given, even when there is what it says there is in the supplement. You don't know if taking it in a certain quantity is going to be harmful or helpful. It's a fantastic question. I wish more people would ask it, because I think more people need to demand more of their supplement companies. The Amazon problem is a very real one. Right now, you see a lot of fake supplements going up on Amazon. even companies that are just basically slapping a printed off label onto a bottle and selling on Amazon, there needs to be a lot more policing of this. Let's talk about your leadership.

Tell me about a recent mistake that you made. Or let's say how about a mistake that you would make again because you learned something so valuable if that's happened for you. Sure. On the talent side, let's go into intuition. And so I think ultimately when you're doing something new that nobody has done before, which is this space that we're trying to carve out in between supplements and prescription drugs, you're going to make mistakes, but you have to ride on your intuition. And so when it comes to hiring, and you asked a very good question about hiring for culture before,

you have that burning feeling in your stomach that even though they pass the culture interview, that it's just not going to work. And in the past, I have gone against that burning feeling in my stomach. which has resulted in us making a hire that I knew wouldn't work. And it turns out three months later, we had to pull the trigger on that and get rid of the person. Now, there was a huge learning on that. Ultimately, it's even if they check all the boxes

when it comes to the culture interview, and they pass the case study and they go on to the executive interview, that if there's something burning your stomach, acknowledge it and be able to appreciate the fact that your intuition might be right there. What would you say is one of the most difficult leadership habits that you are adopting to be the leader that your company needs? I would imagine as someone who's tuned into health, you have some personal health hacks. I don't know if that's one of your productivity strategies, but I'd love to hear it.

Yeah, we can get into productivity strategies here in a second, but there's something that I'm admittedly working on. And I think it was Elon that said being a CEO is a CEO. oftentimes the worst job in the world in the sense that you get allocated all of the biggest problems of the company and you're not really going to ever focus on what's working because it's working and so you want to allocate your time towards those biggest problems and so I think you described it as something like staring into the abyss and eating class now I would largely agree with that but if you start doing that and you start reading things like chopinauer you can oftentimes put yourself into a box of a lot of negative feedback loops, right?

And so ultimately, how do you keep that positive attitude, that positive momentum in your mind? And that's something that I continually work on because my job is to fix those problems that are unfixable. And ultimately, we want to make sure that the company is also going in the right direction and people need to stay motivated. They don't want to have Arthur Schopenhauer sitting there and being a cynic, right? they want to have somebody there that's telling them that, hey, everything's going well, and we need to just continue cruising along. So balancing both that need to work on the problems that nobody else can fix, while same time articulating the story, the vision, and making sure that we're heading in the right direction, I'm ultimately working on that. Now, this also flows

into the health question. So I will do anything to make sure I have a good night's sleep. That includes flying into a conference a day early. That includes making sure that I leave the cocktail party at a particular hour. But we advocate for something called the sleep anchoring technique, which is basically that your day starts when you go to bed. That's counterintuitive for most people. And so rather than saying your day starts when you wake up at 6 a.m. or whatever it is, making sure that you start booking your calendar at, let's say, 10.30 when I go to bed, rather than that 6 a.m. when I wake up. I'm sure that comes as a shock to a lot of folks like myself who are absolutely feral before bedtime.

But that's good advice. So I just wanted to ask you to look three years out, you know, what does growth look like for you? What metrics are you going to look at? And what are you hoping for? So the metric that I care about most is the number of clients served. The second metric on top of that is a metric that we look for in terms of recurring clients. So that can be recurring customers, which we track or subscription rates. In particular, subscription rates is pertinent for us. So why is that important?

Because a number of clients served is our measure of impact. And I say to the group, you know, the target is 3.5% of a population. I'll come to that in a second. But if I'm able to hit a certain number of clients, then that's an impact factor. But the recurring revenue or the subscription number is ultimately a metric of client satisfaction. And so how long do they stay with us? So there's three metrics that I look at. Number of clients served, number of recurring clients, and then how long they stay with us for.

And I mentioned something about the three and a half percent rule. And this is actually a study. It was cited in a book called Ordinary Magic. And it said that three and a half percent of any population engaged in a nonviolent movement will ultimately be successful at whatever they're trying to do. And if we talk about shifting that perspective from disease to health, what we're looking at is can we engage three and a half percent of first the United States population in our products to focus on things.

like sleep, like anxiety, like focus, and how ultimately make this world a better place because they're making better decisions because they're healthier. I think that's a great place to wrap up. Thanks so much for more. Cool. Thank you for having me.

That's all for this episode of Your Next Move. Our producer is Blake Odom, editorial editing and sound design by Nick Torres. Additional editing from Sam Gibauer and Tad Wadams. 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.