We were lucky to catch up with David Meredith recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi David, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

Our mission is to move people beyond the oppositional paradigms of “sickness vs. health” or “symptom vs. recovery.” Our mission is empowerment, and helping people to thrive in a complicated world. We call this concept “optimal living,” and the process is the following:

1) Understand what your symptom is, and what it’s trying to teach you. This involves understanding the balance of what makes it worse and what makes it feel better.

2) Apply traditional and cutting-edge wellness interventions (and simple lifestyle modifications) to assist with this balance.

3) While tracking improvement, begin sowing the seeds of optimal living. What will not only improve the person’s symptom, but enhance their whole life experience?

4) Once balance is achieved, keep going! What is the point of returning people to the state where the symptom started, having learned nothing about where it came from, so it can happen again? This is where people get stuck doing the same things that lead to the same results… and usually those results are not moving them toward where they want to go in life. It’s like sickness-health-lather-rinse-repeat! How about stepping beyond that cycle and truly thriving on a holistic level?

The story behind this mission is simply watching the more disempowering paradigm happen over and over again in my 12+ years in private practice as an acupuncturist. Then, about 14 months ago, I was enjoying a trip to Portugal and a friend and mentor of mine suggested that I look for ways to bring the relaxing, carefree, inquisitive nature of that vacation into my patients’ lives. Instantly – and I do mean instantly – ideas began to pour into my mind. What could I add to my solo acupuncture practice to enhance the results over time, and be affordable enough and enjoyable enough to incorporate into a true lifestyle?

A few months ago, I expanded my two-room office into the 3000 square-foot Very Well center for optimal living, featuring acupuncture, red light therapy, PEMF therapy, a salt room and infrared sauna, and vibroacoustic therapy. Clients may choose to come in for individual sessions of any of these interventions, but I truly believe that the value comes from the memberships that we offer, which are helping guide people own multiple levels from being caught up in their unpleasant physical or emotional concerns toward doing really meaningful things in their whole lives.

David, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I spoke about some of this in the earlier question, because what we offer at Very Well is so tied up in our overall mission, and vice versa, and I’m happy to tell you more about myself and my background now.

In the 1990s, right after I graduated from Johns Hopkins University, I found myself working as an editor at a publishing company that focused on personal and professional development. We worked with a unique (some might even say strange) combination of famous self-help and business gurus, some of whom actually practiced what they preached and some who famously did not and were just out to make a buck. My coworkers were also a mix of both true believers and cynics who secretly disparaged every new publication. I think I came away from that job – at the ripe old age of 25 – with a deep insight into many worldviews and the empowering idea that adjusting the way we see the world would also change our lived experiences. As I observed the world from there on out, I was able to identify both people who were able to free themselves from challenging or even oppressive circumstances, and people who had trapped themselves in misery even though they had all the options in the world available to them.

That was also the period of time I launched myself into entrepreneurship, first in creative services and later as the owner of a couple of brick-and-mortar businesses. I credit my earlier experience with the idea that, if I could envision something, I could make it happen in the real world… but at the same time, just having a can-do spirit doesn’t mean that real challenges in the world somehow become less challenging. After a period of particularly high stress, I began to suffer from debilitating tension and pain in my neck and especially my jaw. That was when I first started seeing the acupuncturist who helped me change my life. Years later, when my business ran headlong into the Great Recession and had to close, I looked around for new options for moving forward and decided to attend acupuncture school, myself.

At Tai Sophia Institute, I studied with two great teachers and thinkers, who eventually became my mentors and good friends: Bob Duggan and Dianne Connelly. They helped to shape my philosophy of wellness, which I have continued to build upon over the years.

To answer your question of what I want my potential clients to know, it is this:

Every bit of my past experience has come together into my current offering. When you walk into my door, whatever your concerns are, I see you as a whole person and begin envisioning new possibilities for your living. Beyond just “feeling better” from your symptoms, I want you to “get better” in your life. I become your partner and coconspirator in this goal, and I do not ever give up.

Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?

I will be candid in that, as the relaunch of my acupuncture clinic into the much larger wellness center happened less than three months ago, I am probably at that point right now. The ramp-up of business (filling seven rooms vs. filling two rooms) is not happening as quickly as the costs of expansion are kicking in. This is not unexpected, but it is a little hair-raising nonetheless!

The only real story about it is that a week or two ago, I happened to come across an old “I-Ching” app on my phone. The I-Ching is a classical Chinese system of divination, and I downloaded the app years ago to complement my acupuncture education. I decided to do a little casting and the result was something like “be like the Sage,” which was not surprising because the results are always some variation of “be like the Sage.” They were really into Sages.

But since I am already doing all I can to minimize expenses while growing the business, I took that to mean: “Don’t fret. Live as an example of how you would expect others to live. Throw yourself into helping people.” That really does help with the day-to-day mood management!

Any thoughts, advice, or strategies you can share for fostering brand loyalty?

I used to do this only seasonally, but lately I’ve been sending a longer email newsletter every week or two. I use these to provoke thinking, launch new services, and share any new wellness info I’ve come across. I try to make them valuable even if the reader is not a current client, and they tend to have pretty good click rates.

I realize that in 2024, I’m supposed to say that I do brand management via social media, but I’ve hired someone to occasionally post for me, based on the newsletters and blogs I write. My clients tend to be middle aged or older, and I don’t tend to encounter them on Instagram, which is not to say that I wouldn’t love to help anyone for whom Instagram does make sense! It just doesn’t to me.

Contact Info:

• Website: getverywell.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/getverywell
• Facebook: Facebook.com/getverywell
• Other: Bluesky: @getverywell.bsky.social Threads: @getverywell

Image Credits
E Brady Robinson, David Meredith