Dr. Stefanie Rodsater: Hey Deb, we’re so excited to have you on the Hotspot, welcome to the UAC Hotspot.
Dr. Lynne Mouw: Welcome Deb.
Dr. Deb Cirone: Thanks for having me. This is exciting.
Dr. Stefanie Rodsater: Well, we’re excited to get started with you. Tell us just a little bit about… We know you’ve been in UAC forever, and so tell us a little bit about that.
Dr. Deb Cirone: Well, I had been actually invited like 10 years ago by Dan and Merily Pompa, and our first experience was awesome, and it happened to be a bunch of Italians in the room, and it really resonated with that. And then we did our interview and everything, we were accepted in. And I don’t know what happened, but life got in the way, and we didn’t join and then Joe Esposito invited us years later, and my husband was able to go, I couldn’t go. And as soon as he called and I could hear the excitement in his voice, I was like, “Just sign up. We’re doing it.” And so, we did. And just the experience of being in UAC was like, we finally found our people, we found our tribe, like-minded people. We’ve been a part of a lot of different chiropractic organizations, and of course, you’ve got your core group of people that you connect with, but I feel like this was the first organization that understood us on an intellectual level, on a business level, on a social level, on a family level. A lot of the same… We share a lot of the same core values, and we didn’t realize it, but this was what we were searching for a long time. So, it’s been a really, really important part of our lives for the last, I don’t know, six, seven years, however long it’s been, I’m not even sure.
Dr. Lynne Mouw: Awesome, well, you and Joey are my people. I have just so enjoyed getting to know the both of you guys and consider you guys such great friends. Tell us a little bit about your practice. You’re in Georgia, but you’re from New Jersey. I’d love to hear a little bit about how you got to Georgia and what your practice is like.
Dr. Deb Cirone: So, we, again, came from New Jersey, never in a million years did I think I would be practicing in Sugar Hill Georgia and living at Flowery Branch. So whole different mindset of the total mind shift, but we came down here expecting that we were going to head back up north somewhere, maybe Maryland or Pennsylvania. And along that journey, someone told us that we should look in Sugar Hill and then we heard it again, and then as we were driving through Atlanta or driving through Georgia, I saw a sign for Sugar Hill, just happened to see it and I was like, “Babe… ” Well, I don’t think anything was just by choice or by coincidence, but we turned off at the exit and we started driving down Highway 20, and we drive over the Chattahoochee River, and I was like, “Babe, Oh my gosh.” She he was like, “What’s the matter?” I said, “I think we’re going to practice here.” And he was like, “What?” I was like, “I don’t know where that came from. I just got the weirdest feeling.” So, we kept driving even in about three more miles and we passed this house with this for sale sign in front of it, and I start bawling.
Dr. Deb Cirone: And that is not like me, I’m bawling and I’m like, “Babe, pull over.” He’s like, “What?” I started getting all like… “Pull over, that’s the one.” He was like, “What are you talking about?” I said, “Our practice is going to be right there.” And I knew with a bazillion percent certainty that that was it. I really didn’t think I was going to stay in Georgia at all, but for some reason, we decided to look, we drove down the road and God was like, “Excuse me, that’s the one.” And I knew I wanted to practice in a house, because that’s how my uncle practiced, the first chiropractor in my family, which in March will have number 14.
Dr. Lynne Mouw: Oh, wow.
Dr. Deb Cirone: Yeah. My second niece is graduating in the last two years, which is super exciting, but we pulled over and we talked to this guy that was out front with his two kids, and he was like, “That’s so weird that you want to turn this into a chiropractic office because I had a guy that was in contact with me a couple of years before, and he wanted to turn this into a chiropractic office, he even changed the zoning, so it could be a chiropractic office.” I’m like, “Well, that’s so crazy. It’s his name Troy.” He was like, “No, I don’t really remember.” So, I called my boss up, I’m like, “Hey, were you going to… You were one of the people that told me that I should come look here, were you going to buy a practice here?” And he was like, “Yeah.” And that was the house. And that was the moment that I knew why I went to work for that guy while I was waiting for Joe to graduate from school.
Dr. Stefanie Rodsater: So, what did Joe think and you’re driving, and you like, “Holy cow,” and all these things are coming together. What was his experience of that too?
Dr. Deb Cirone: Well, for one, back then, he thought I was totally insane. He had no idea what was going on, which I didn’t either. And he was like, “What are you talking about?” I was like, “I don’t know, I don’t know what this feeling is.” But now he knows that if I get that feeling again, to buy because every time I do, hands-down, I said that’s…
[overlapping conversation]
Dr. Lynne Mouw: Yeah, one thing I know about you, is that you are very led by innate and listening when God speaks. So, you’re tuned into that, I love it. So, flash forward to today, you guys have an amazing practice, you’ve had some functional in your practice, you help tons of babies, moms, family wellness as well, and you’re looking at a transition. So, so many of us are in this place in the UAC where we have conquered chiropractic, the chiropractic world, we’ve built teams around us to take care of our patients, and now we’re looking to the next step. So, what is on the horizons for you?
Dr. Deb Cirone: So, we are currently building other companies, and I have to say, without all of these years of going through the difficult times and understanding what our value truly is, I would certainly not be here in this place to be able to transition into something else, and I come from a very philosophical family. My uncle was a DE-doc for many, many years, and band of brothers, the whole thing, we were really, really deeply rooted in chiropractic. And I thought, I literally imagined myself taking my last breath while I’m over somebody’s spine, adjusting them and literally just falling over top of them, that was my vision for my old…
Dr. Lynne Mouw: May be a good way for you to go.
Dr. Deb Cirone: I know, right? Taking your last breath serving mankind. Well, I started getting asked to speak and I began to realize that I have… Well, I have a great value one person at a time over the tables, my real value is in affecting multitudes of people. So, our impact is happening through these other businesses that we’re working on, so we’ve been doing functional medicine in our practice for the last… I don’t know, 15 years because my husband got sick with Hashimoto’s and we fixed him naturally as we were learning how to do it. We were bringing that back into the practice and saying to people… We’re saying to ourselves, “Why isn’t Mary getting better? Why is John still on medication? Why isn’t this chiropractic thing bringing them to the other side? And then we realized that it wasn’t just about the physical subluxation, that they were also having chemical and emotional subluxation, and that just led us down the path of bringing medical professions in the office so that we can give people what they need through their licensure, taking blood tests and doing things like that. And that enabled us to be able to serve them with functional medicine, getting them off the medications that they were on, because we look at blood work and we look at the body and how it heals and how it gets sick a whole lot differently than medicine of course.
Dr. Deb Cirone: And so now we’re taking all of that that we’ve learned and we’re moving it into a clinic, it’s called Thryv, T-H-R-Y-V, why is really important in that word, because we want people to understand why we are different than other people that do natural hormones or that do vitamin infusions or work toward giving people the healthy things that they need to get better, where we can’t really supply just with straight chiropractic. So, we’re building other businesses like that so we can serve more people in a way that obviously medicine also isn’t serving. Yeah, so I’m super excited. This transition is exciting. I’m also starting to emcee this past year, so I’m getting on stage to be able to share my excitement for what it is that I know and love, chiropractic and functional medicine and all things natural and healthy that build people up to get better and build docs up so they can bring it back to their offices and help people exponentially, and you guys will see me at the Scottsdale UAC event. I’m seeing there and I’m so excited. Thank you for asking.
Dr. Stefanie Rodsater: You’ll rock it, your personality drive is so freaking magnetic. I love it so much. With what you’re doing with the functional side of things, I know you have a passion for kids and pregnancy, is there… Do you get to do some of that still with what you’re doing?
Dr. Deb Cirone: Not in that capacity, not in that capacity, but as long as I’m still in practice, we’re hoping over the next three years, we’re going into contract with their associate, we’ll be buying it out over these next few years. So, I’ll just keep feeding into them and wherever I can speak and teach like I’ve been doing over the past 10 or so years, to teach other docs how to do what I’ve been doing for the last 24 years, it’s always fun and always a pleasure to share and help others grow with that.
Dr. Stefanie Rodsater: That’s awesome.
Dr. Lynne Mouw: I love how the circle goes. So, you’re coming out of exit in your us as Stephen Franson would say, coming out of exit in your clinic, and then you’re going into launch again, which is so exciting. So where do you see the biggest challenges for your… For scaling your business quickly, and what are some of the asks that you would need from the room from the UAC, and in terms of scaling that new business.
Dr. Deb Cirone: That’s actually a really great, great question. So, we have gotten the ball rolling and we’ve done a lot of the business stuff that is necessary to become a business, to become legal and whatnot. So, I would say some of the ask for the room is… The goal with Thryv is to bring the best of what medicine has to offer, because I do have an MD and nurse practitioner as partners, and they have this… They’ve been doing clinics like this for years, and then take the best of what we know, the functional medicine side and the products that we know, and the services that we do personally to keep it and to stay healthy. So, the ask in the room is, is there anything that anybody knows that can lead us and guide us to using… To doing the best practices of course, and to using the best products, who do you know? What do you know? Give me some connections on things that we could always stay ahead of the curve because that is the goal. I don’t want to be like every other hormone IV drip place that’s out there. We are going to stand up and just stand out amongst the crowd, because people are going to know when they come in at our office that we look at the whole body, we look at how the body functions, how to make it better, just like everybody else in the room and is that UAC. So, anything that you guys can offer it in that way, it would be really beneficial.
Dr. Stefanie Rodsater: That’s awesome. Well, the room always seems to bring lots, so I’m sure there’ll be some awesome deliveries. You have to report back on that. Another good question is, I think there’s tons of us that have worked with our husbands, and I think you guys are such a dynamic duo. I love the two of you so much. So, give us a little bit on your ups and downs and what’s been really amazing about working together and especially through this transition. I’m sure roles are changing, and things are evolving and how fun that is to do that with your spouse.
Dr. Deb Cirone: So, it is a conundrum. It’s… You girls will understand this, and there are so many couples in chiropractic, I’m sure anybody that’s listening to this may have some experience, but working with your spouse is amazing, and it’s also very frustrating because the personality traits that brought you together and the strengths that each of you have are so different that it’s really… In a perfect world, it comes together, and it marries together a great team and always. But we come from this romantic relationship, and then we build up this business and there’s family, and there’s all these different dynamics that we have to deal with, that you have to learn to create some expectations and agreements, and I think a part of that really is learning to know yourself like, who are you before you can be an us. We’ve heard this in getting together with the relationships, but it’s all relationships, especially in business. Before there can be an us, there has to be a me and you, and then we have to be able to come together and create expectations and agreements about who is going to do what? In the beginning, we both jumped in and he’s like, “You should make the calls because you’re a woman” and then I, “You should do this because you’re a guy.”
Dr. Deb Cirone: And so, we always had these… We had these unmet expectations because we never really understood what it took to run a smart business. So, it’s been a lot of years and a lot of pain and training a ton of interns to… I mean, we’ve had 105 interns through our office.
Dr. Lynne Mouw: Wow.
Dr. Deb Cirone: Yeah, and I think having people that you need to teach in your office, puts you in a position of thinking in a different way, so you’re not just communicating to your husband, you’re looking to see how are they being affected? Kind of like how you look at your children as you are communicating with your husband. Well, I’m doing that as the interns and the staff are in my office, and I’m wondering how can I communicate in a way that they’ll understand or not communicate with him like I might at home, in a way that will show other people how… What’s the best way, what’s best practices? What’s the best way that we can build relationships and build an office? And I think all of that, that is to really get to a place of dividing, learning how to divide and conquer, we don’t need to be in each other’s space all the time.
Dr. Deb Cirone: We’re different people, we function in different ways, we think differently, but if we agree that the outcomes are supposed to look like this, and then we create expectations as to who’s going to be in charge of what and how it’s going to get done, and then we hold each other accountable, it’s no different than having your CEO, your CFO, and everybody else that’s in a business, you have to do that, and then you have to be able to create time where you… Like when I come home, we don’t talk business, we have set times for business, it doesn’t mean that nothing ever comes up, but we’re really cognizant about how we communicate with each other and when we communicate, so we set special time aside to make sure that we’re working on business or we’re working on finances, or we’re working on talking about our schedule. Schedules are massive, but it’s all about expectations and agreement. So, it can be fun, but don’t think like, “Oh my gosh, we’re married, we’re going to have fun going to business.” It’s not just going to happen. You have to make it happen.
Dr. Lynne Mouw: Oh man. That is such great advice. So helpful, and you guys have had a massive impact with all of those interns that you’ve had come through, all those students on their lives and on the profession, and congrats on the speaking gig coming up. It’s going to be at our Scottsdale event, which is coming up in February 17th and 18th. It’s ultimate life building, so I’ll be sure to reach out and make sure your hotel and your space is reserved with Krista. And before we close, I really have to talk to you about this book. So, in everything else that you’re doing, you are also putting all of this wisdom into a book. Have you started it? Are you planning on… I’m always interested in the tactical side because people… There’s a lot of people who want to write the book, but don’t know how to publish. Do you get a ghost writer, all of that. So what stage are you at with your book, and we have to hear the title. [laughter]
Dr. Deb Cirone: Are you ready.
Dr. Lynne Mouw: I’m ready. You’re ready?
Dr. Deb Cirone: Little kids close your ears. The Queen has Balls. [laughter] The idea behind the book. And this was really prompted by UAC event, which by the way, this is where I created a lot of… We’ve created a lot of our connections with, again, like-minded people, but who are doing different things. There’s coaches in UAC event and there’s Franchise owners in UAC, and there’s chiropractors who are in practice and doing functional medicine. We’re in all different arenas, so to be able to share who we are and what we do and how we do it is so amazing. And in one of those meetings, the book came to me, and the whole premise behind it is that I know a lot of women that are leaders, and I am naturally attracted to a strong personality like my husband. He’s got a very, very strong personality. And years ago, I used to be that personality that was enabling, anything to keep the peace. I don’t want to start anything up, if that makes him happy, then I’ll just go with it, go with the flow type B personality, and then as we had some real-life experiences, it literally thrusted me at 40 to just have this whole new innate wisdom about who I am, and my value.
Dr. Deb Cirone: And I also looked at people, especially women, a little bit differently. So, in all of those relationships with these strong-minded women that I have, I noticed that there’s a large percentage of women who are just like… Just take the bull by the horns and eat your young and step on however you have to go get to the top because I’m on my own and I’ve got to handle this. And while there was a time where we were kind of on our own, we have a lot more women female leaders to lean into, and my hope is that this book will be one of them because I would love to see number one, women just in general, who are looking to get ahead in advance to see how a woman can do it and stay feminine and stay true to herself and be a team leader and build people up and build a tribe around you. And on the other side, those women who are those like hm-mm, they’re always attracted to grit, and they don’t have the grace behind it, to teach them that there is a more graceful way of being strong and being a leader.
Dr. Deb Cirone: I just feel there’s a lot of that missing, and I’ve been asked several times over the years to come on stage and be that more female empathetic presence because we have so many women that are tough on the outside. So, it just feels like it’s the time, it’s the right time. And so I started talking with different publishing companies, and there’s a lot of options, there are some that will do everything for you, you literally just have to have a conversation once a week and they’ll build that book up for you, and they will take that book and for an extra fee, they will convert it into audio books and then for another fee, they’ll market you not only beforehand as it’s building, as you’re building the book, but also afterwards getting your name out there and making sure that you get on TV or on podcast, make sure that influencers know who you are. And then there’s other companies that will just… They’ll take your words and they’ll reward them for you, so you can have more of a ghost writer or you can have people leading you and guiding you, or you can have somebody take the things that you’ve written it and convert it into what you want, and it’s obviously, all at different levels of payment, whatever it is that you decide that you want to pay. And then of course, on my search, I’ve looked up YouTube and there’s lots of advice out there, so it just depends on what you’re willing to pay, how much time you want and how much guidance and leadership you need.
Dr. Stefanie Rodsater: That’s so awesome. Well, Deb, you are going to bring so much to our Scottsdale event, I can’t wait. I think that you definitely radiate that feminine strong, amazing energy. So, I’m so excited, I’m so grateful you are here with us today. I’m glad that everybody got to know you well today as you go. So, thank you so much for sharing with us. Just as a closing like any… Last things as far as like maybe you can just touch on your accountability group and just like what that has brought to your life through UAC, I know that it’s… I know it’s a big part of your life, so I just would love for you to share just a tiny bit about that too.
Dr. Deb Cirone: So, four of my best friends have come out of that in such an amazing experience, and now we do girls trips, and we do fun stuff together, and fortunately, all of our husbands get along well, so we do family trips together. And I find that happens with a lot of the accountability groups, because when you come together with people who share your common values, you want your kids hanging out with those kids, you want to… Hopefully, we can get some marriages out of all of these… Out of all these families. Right?
Dr. Stefanie Rodsater: [laughter]
Dr. Deb Cirone: And it is a higher-level experience. When I came into UAC, some of you have heard the story from me before, but when I came in, I grew up with boys and I always thought that I was a guy’s girl because although I had girlfriends, I really just connected the best with guys. And I’m not a drama girl. I don’t get on the phone with my friends and talk a bunch of garbage about people. So, I had a hard time getting into those friend groups, and I think it was my second… It was my second UAC event. We just had the most amazing conversation, all the lady stepped outside in beautiful Napa Valley looking over the vineyards and the guys went out and they did their thing. And while we were there, we just started talking some really cool high-level conversations and hearing everybody’s responses I was like, “Oh my gosh.”
Dr. Deb Cirone: Immediately is like, “These are my people.” And so, I connected with certain women that I was just so enamored by, that my mom always said, “Show me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are.” And though it was… You would not imagine this for me, I’m sure, because on the outside, you see someone that talks and can connect with people, and it doesn’t seem like I have a hard time, but sometimes I do, and I feel like I had the shy side of me, and it just for some reason, I don’t have that in this group. And so, I came home and within… Probably within the first week that I was home, I was saying to my husband, I need an accountability group and I need it with these women, and he was like, “Well, then call.” I was like, “Do you think they’ll like me? Do you think they’ll want to talk to me?” And I just got such a great response from all of them, and we’ve been talking for the last five or six years every week to every other week, and it’s been amazing and encouraging, supportive. And if anybody is not an accountability group that they’re not gaining something from and feeling like they’re really giving back to people that they care about, then you either need to find one or… I think that’s the only option, just go find one, and that’s what we do at UAC, right?
Dr. Stefanie Rodsater: Yeah. Exactly.
Dr. Lynne Mouw: Yeah, I think Crystal will even you, and we can help curate that group for you, but you’re right, there’s so much fulfillment and those evolving relationships too. Not every group is going to go the distance because some paths aren’t meant to travel together for whatever reason. There’s pivoting that happens, but if you can find that group that goes for the long haul, there’s so much… There’s so much juice in that and stuff. I know you have that experience in your group. So, thank you so much Ms. Deb, echo Steph, can’t wait to see you up on that stage so we can hear more from you.
Dr. Deb Cirone: I can’t wait to. I’m so excited I’ll see you guys in just a few weeks, I guess.
Dr. Stefanie Rodsater: Alright. Thanks for joining us, Deb.
Dr. Deb Cirone: Thank you so much.
