The New Wellness Revolution E-Book

Paul Zane Pilzer

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 486

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2007

Beschreibung

Read the Preface, Introduction, and Chapter 1 at thewellnessrevolution.paulzanepilzer.com. Five years ago, Paul Zane Pilzer outlined the future of an industry he called "wellness" and showed readers how they could get in on the profitable bottom floor. The New Wellness Revolution, Second Edition includes more guidance and business advice for entrepreneurs, product distributors, physicians, and other wellness professionals. It's an industry that will only grow, so get in while you can.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Preface: The Revolution Continues

Introduction: Why Wellness is the Next Big Thing

Chapter 1: Why We Need a Revolution

How Wellness Became My Cause

Why We Need a Revolution: Two Nations Divided by Great Want

How Economics Perpetuates Obesity and Malnutrition

How Economics Perpetuates Sickness

No Solution in Sight

An Economic Solution to an Economic Problem

The First $200 Billion (2002)

How Rodale Paved the Way for the Wellness Revolution

Why We Often Reject New Ideas

How Traditional Western Medicine Rejected Wellness

The Wellness Revolution Is about More than Just Making Money

Chapter 2: The Baby Boom Generation: Understanding and Controlling the Demand for Wellness

Practice What You Preach

The Baby Boom Generation Is the First Wellness Generation

The Mistake Many People Make: Misunderstanding Consumer Demand

Quantity Demand and Quality Demand

Wellness Quantity and Quality Demand

How Some Prospective Entrepreneurs Misunderstand Our Economy

How Unemployment Leads to Economic Growth

Economic Implications for the Wellness Industry

How the Vitamin Business Shifted from Sickness to Wellness

Chapter 3: What You Need to Know about Food and Diet

What Is Food and Why Do We Need It?

The Two Major Problems with Our Food Supply

How Our Bodies Process Food into Energy and Living Matter

The Opportunity in Water

How We Obtain and Burn Calories

Four Reasons It’s Difficult to Lose Fat

The Critical Importance of Proteins, Vitamins, and Minerals

How the Green Revolution Changed the Economic Opportunity within Food Production

How Food Economics Created the Wellness Food Opportunity

Empty Calories: The Core of the Food Supply Problem

Economics versus Avarice and Our Food Supply Problems

Chapter 4: Making Your Fortune in Food

How Religion and Government Fell Behind on Wellness

Agricultural Subsidy Programs

The Dairy Deception

The Soy Solution: A New Opportunity Born from Wellness

The Soy Wonder: Building a “Right Livelihood”

The Vegetarian Burger Wonder: A Wellness Cautionary Tale

What Restaurant Entrepreneurs Need to Know

Chapter 5: Making Your Fortune in Medicine

The Search for What’s Inside the Black Box

Hippocrates: The First Wellness Practitioner

Our Limited Vision

Multivitamins and Multilevel Marketing

ConsumerLab.com: Sharing Knowledge Is Big Business

Mercola.com—The World’s Most Popular Natural Health Web Site

The Wellness Cardiologist: How People Are Transforming Traditional Roles

Physical Exercise: A Wellness Entrepreneurial Opportunity

America’s #1 Female Club Entrepreneur

Creating Wellness, Inc.

Revolutionizing a Profession from the Inside

Chapter 6: What You Must Know about Health Insurance

The Crisis in Health Insurance for the U.S. Economy

The Crisis in Health Insurance for U.S. Individuals

The U.S. Health Insurance System Is the #1 Cause of Personal Bankruptcy

The Crisis in U.S. Health Insurance for Wellness—Treating Symptoms versus Preventing Illness

How the United States Got into the Current Health Insurance Crisis

How Most U.S. Consumers Waste Thousands of Dollars Each Year on Their Health Insurance

The New Solution for Wellness-Oriented Entrepreneurs

Chapter 7: The New Health Insurance Solution: Helping Your Customers Finance Their Wellness

What Is an Individual/Family Health Insurance Policy?

How to Help Your Wellness Customer Save $5,000 or More on Their Health Insurance—Money They Can then Invest in Their Wellness through Your Wellness Business

Health Savings Accounts

Chapter 8: Making Your Fortune Distributing Wellness

Unlimited Wealth: The Biological Principle behind Modern Economics

How Distribution Opportunities Surpassed Manufacturing Opportunities

How Distribution Has Changed in the Twenty-First Century

Intellectual Distribution versus Physical Distribution

The Category Busters: A Supersized Wellness Opportunity

The New Era of Zero Marginal Product Cost

The Importance of Combining High Touch with High Tech

The Impact of the Internet and Dot-Com Companies

Chapter 9: Direct Selling—How to Get Started

How the Direct Selling Industry Found Me in 1991

The Direct Selling Industry Today

The Value of Residual Income

Helping Others Succeed

The Direct Selling Association (DSA)

The Final Criterion—Patience and Expectations

Chapter 10: Staking Your Claim: The Next Millionaires

Providing Tools and Services to the Wellness Industry

The Masters Circle

Fitness Education—Training an Army of Wellness Professionals

Staking Your Claim in Wellness Finance

Getting Started

Become an Investor in Wellness

The Wharton Secret

Staking Your Claim through Your Religion

Visual Wellness—Affordably Eliminating Preventable Blindness

Epilogue: Unlimited Wellness

Why Wellness Is Unlimited

Stem Cells—The Heart Surgeon Who is Trying to Make Heart Surgery Obsolete

The Opportunity to Do Incredible Good

The Importance of Sticking to Your Plan

Why God Created Frequency

The “Invisible Hand” behind Wellness

Appendix A: Fat: What Is It, How Do We Get It, and How Do We Define It?

Appendix B: Shifting from Sickness to Wellness Medical Care

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Index

Copyright © 2002, 2007 by Paul Zane Pilzer. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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ISBN: 9780470106181

To J. I. Rodale (1898–1971)

PREFACE

The Revolution Continues

What’s New in The New Wellness Revolution

The Wellness Revolution (Wiley, 2002) was the “shot heard round the world” for the wellness industry. It defined wellness as an industry—linking hundreds of thousands of disparate service and product suppliers with a single cause. It showed like-minded scientists, fitness providers, businesspeople, food manufacturers, restaurant owners, wellness product distributors, doctors, and others focused on disease prevention and antiaging that they were part of a worldwide revolution—not just lone iconoclasts inside their chosen profession or industry.

Following the publication of The Wellness Revolution, I was called the “economist turned wellness guru” by the New York Times. I received an honorary doctorate for the role played by the book in helping Congress pass Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) and other healthcare financial reforms—reforms that now allow wellness-oriented consumers to save money on their health insurance and finance their wellness. And my book was published in 12 languages and became the focal point for an international wellness community—thousands of people contacted me to share their wellness experiences and/or to tell me about new business opportunities in this exciting, soon-to-be $1 trillion industry.

As a restless writer and economist, I’ve always preferred to move on to new frontiers after each book or project. But in this case, my publisher and editor convinced me to write this revised edition, because so much has happened in wellness in the past five years. Some of these events happened as I predicted, and some I missed back in 2002.

The Wellness Revolution foresaw the meteoric rise of wellness from $200 billion in 2002 to $500 billion today, and that Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), which began in South Africa and were spreading worldwide, would soon become universally allowed for U.S. citizens. However, I missed how quickly governments around the world would embrace wellness food standards, and I miscalculated the voluntary conversion of many sickness and food industry providers (including, to some extent, McDonald’s and Wal-Mart) to wellness and healthy food offerings. I also missed the extent to which the bifurcation of the United States and the other developed nations would continue into wellness “haves” and “have-nots.” While millions of people embraced wellness during the past five years, millions more turned the opposite direction—the percentage of overweight Americans alone rose from 61 to 65 percent and the increase in diet-related diseases like Type 2 diabetes now make the United States look medically like a third world nation.

These trends have kept us on track to meet or exceed my original $1 trillion prediction for the wellness industry, and have greatly accelerated the need and opportunity for more wellness entrepreneurs.

Sir Isaac Newton said, “If I have seen further than others it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”1 Since I began tracking the wellness industry back in 1996, my giants have been the wellness revolutionaries I first began profiling in The Wellness Revolution—men and women pioneers in wellness who had already made a major difference by 2002. People like:

Frank Yanowitz, the wellness cardiologist who created a business specializing in preventing heart disease versus just treating it;

Jill Kinney, the fitness expert who built a $100 million fitness club business that delivers exercise at the workplace; and

Steve Demos, the “soy wonder” who founded SILK soymilk and assembled the first billion dollar national wellness brand.

Their stories, along with an update on where they are today, are in The New Wellness Revolution.

But, equally significant, since 2002 I have become aware of hundreds more wellness revolutionaries—people who have also made a difference in the wellness industry, and in doing so, have greatly enriched our world. Some of these wellness revolutionaries include:

Peter and Kathie Davis, cofounders of IDEA and ACE, who organized 20,000 fitness professionals into a cohesive international force that brought professionalism, standards, and accreditation to the fitness industry;

Information pioneers like Tod Cooperman and Joseph Mercola, who built enormous web-based businesses by simply supplying wellness information to tens of millions of consumers worldwide;

Chiropractors like Fabrizio Mancini and Bob Hoffman who, along with other leaders in this 100-year-old international profession, are returning the chiropractic industry back to its wellness origins;

Entrepreneurs like Patrick Gentempo, who are using the franchise and distribution methods of fast-food companies to build national wellness franchise businesses;

Medical doctors who are trying to put themselves out of business, like Russ Reiss, a heart surgeon who seeks to eliminate the need for heart surgery through stem cell research; and

Nonprofit professionals like Geoff Tabin, who has taken the most popular operation in the world, a $3,500 antiaging cataract surgery, and made it available to millions of people in the third world by using contemporary technology to reduce the price to $20 per surgery. As the wellness revolution enters its next stage, similar opportunities to make wellness affordable to the masses, just as Henry Ford did with the automobile, are appearing in all parts of the wellness industry.

Since 2002, the list of wellness revolutionaries, my “giants,” has expanded one hundred-fold. As I stand on their collective shoulders I am able to see clearer into our wellness future. I wish I had room to tell you all of their stories, and I apologize to the many whose stories did not survive the editing process into this book.

These wellness revolutionaries are the true heroes of the wellness revolution. Whether you are an experienced wellness professional looking to grow your business, or you are reading this book in search of a new business opportunity, their stories will provide you the inspiration and the information you need to capitalize on the great opportunity ahead:

The opportunity to make an incredible fortune by doing incredible good in the greatest industry on earth—wellness.

The Next Millionaires—Wellness Entrepreneurs

If you are an entrepreneur, or are considering becoming one in wellness, there has never been a better time in history to own your own business.

When I was growing up in the 1950s, millionaires were fictional characters in television shows like The Millionaire or in comic strips like Little Orphan Annie. Nobody actually knew or saw a millionaire. Even on The Millionaire the “millionaire” John Beresford Tipton never appeared on camera. I remember asking my dad to go out to dinner and hearing his reply: “What do you think we are, millionaires?”

But by 1991, the amazing U.S. economy had produced 3.6 million U.S. households that had a net worth of $1 million or more. Then, in just the next 10 years, the number of millionaire households doubled to 7.2 million. It took the U.S. economy 215 years to create the first 3.6 million millionaire households, and then just 10 years to create 3.6 million more.

As explained and predicted in my 1991 book Unlimited Wealth, what happened in the 1990s was the beginning of a 40-year period of international economic growth. From 1991 to 2001 U.S. household wealth tripled—from $13 trillion to $40 trillion—and a similar expansion occurred in every developed nation except Japan.

There have always been periods of economic growth and wealth accumulation, but in the past this often meant that the rich got richer and the ordinary person didn’t stand a chance. What was so unique about the 1990s was the enormous number of new households that shared in this wealth. But the 1990s were only the beginning:

The 1990s were the beginning of a period that will be known one day as The Democratization of Wealth, not just in the United States, but in every nation from China to Europe.

As you will see in this book, because of fundamental changes in the world economy, in technology, and in new legislation favoring the individual over the organization, we are just beginning a period of democratization of wealth that would make Karl Marx stand up and cheer. But even Marx couldn’t have fathomed what is happening today—for we are not taking from the rich and giving to the poor, we are creating new wealth in which everyone who chooses to can share.

Today, more than 10 million U.S. households have a net worth of $1 million or more. By 2016, there will be 20 million U.S. millionaire households. Each household represents approximately 2.5 people, meaning that 50 million Americans will soon live in a household with a net worth of $1 million or more.

Number of U.S. Millionaires, 1991–2016

Millionaires are the fastest growing minority in the United States and the developed world today.

And as you will see throughout this book, as people become millionaires, or just increase their wealth on the way to becoming one, the most important thing they desire with their newfound wealth is wellness.

The more people increase their wealth, the greater proportion of their income they spend on wellness.

Is It Nature, or Nurture?—It’s Neither

One of the most fascinating parts of my research is discovering who is becoming a millionaire today—becoming a millionaire seems to have less correlation each year with your race, religion, country of origin, or even your parents or your education.

When the Forbes 400 list of the richest 400 Americans was first published in 1981, it contained 12 Rockefellers, 10 Morgans, 6 Astors, and other family names that had become synonyms for American wealth. Twenty-four years later only 40 of the original 400 (or their children) remain on the list, and none of these family names are in the top 10. The top 10 today possess 32 percent of the total wealth of the top 400 richest Americans.

But, rather than the rich getting richer, all of the top 10 on the Forbes 400 list were born poor or middle class, and only two of the top 10 finished college. Having an Ivy League education and/or being born into great wealth may even have a negative correlation for great financial success.

Moreover, it appears that many if not most of the people on the Forbes 400 list have something else in common—a brother or sister who is as great a failure in life as they are a success.

Several recent U.S. Presidents have a degree from Yale and a brother who has been to jail (or close to it). Donald Nixon, Billy Carter, Roger Clinton, Neil Bush—none of these people were either nurtured or natured to fail, and most had the same family upbringing and educational opportunities as their successful sibling.

Achieving great success today is no longer mostly determined by the color of your skin, your country of origin, or even your individual parents. Great success is now, more than ever before in human history, about making a choice. Of course your education, your parents, and other factors outside your control play a role, but the largest determinants of success today are the choices you make.

If you have read this far, you have already made your choice—the choice to either become one of, or help create more of, the next 10 million millionaire households that will be created in the next 10 years.

There are many paths to success you can choose. It is my hope that you will choose a business or career in the emerging wellness industry. For as you will soon see, starting or building a wellness business creates the perfect storm of opportunity to make a lot of money and to do incredible good.

What Are Some of the New Wellness Trends Highlighted in The New Wellness Revolution?

As expected in a revised edition written by an economist, the numbers and projections have been updated. But there is more to this revised edition than just updated forecasts. Here are a few of the new trends in wellness:

1. The wellness revolution began in the United States, but is growing even faster internationally.

The Wellness Revolution, published in 2002, was focused solely on the U.S. domestic market, where the modern wellness movement began. Yet this book has been published in 12 languages, and unit sales overseas, particularly in Asia, have exceeded sales in the United States. While the modern wellness industry may have begun in the United States, like so many other new products and industries originally made in America, it is now growing even faster outside the United States.

The New Wellness Revolution is written for people around the world.

2. Wellness today is primarily a grass-roots movement driven by individual entrepreneurs and small businesses.

In 2002, I wrote mostly about the larger $100 million wellness companies, since that is how I originally became acquainted with the wellness industry. Yet the majority of wellness sales, then and today, are made collectively by individual entrepreneurs, direct selling professionals, chiropractors, osteopaths, other health professionals, and small businesses. This is because becoming a wellness customer requires a paradigm shift on the part of the consumer, and direct person-to-person contact is the best way, and sometimes the only way, to make this paradigm shift in a person’s thinking take place.

The New Wellness Revolution explains why the majority of opportunities in wellness still await the individual entrepreneur or health professional, and how new management techniques and forms of business organization (like direct selling and franchising) can allow such individuals even better technology than if they were part of a large corporation. This will continue for at least another decade, until wellness is a mature industry and the majority of wellness consumers are not new to wellness.

3. Some large sickness-oriented food companies have switched sides and joined the wellness revolution.

When I wrote The Wellness Revolution, in 2002, some of the worst sickness-oriented food businesses were milk dairies. Following the book’s publication, the world’s largest dairy, Dean Foods (U.S. sales $10 billion), purchased one of the best wellness food companies in the world; Steve Demos’s $300 million WhiteWave, Inc., the maker of SILK soymilk. Yet, as explained in Chapter 4, rather than destroying SILK and its quality wellness product line, it looks like WhiteWave and its wellness philosophy have taken over at Dean Foods.

The New Wellness Revolution explains how this turnaround in thinking at Dean Foods and other large food companies is only the beginning, and how this phenomenon is increasing rather than decreasing wellness opportunities for everyone, particularly wellness entrepreneurs. As explained in Chapter 2, once a consumer has his or her first wellness experience (like drinking soymilk), he or she typically becomes a voracious consumer of more and more wellness products and services.

4. Retailers and restaurants, formerly known for only sickness-industry products, have similarly switched sides and joined the wellness revolution.

In 2002, most wellness food retail sales were through designated wellness outlets like health food stores and wellness restaurants. While the number and sales of these wellness outlets have increased, the majority of wellness food sales is shifting to traditional retail food and restaurant outlets.

In 2005, McDonald’s began selling a fruit and walnut salad, and overnight it became the country’s largest food-service consumer of apples, requiring an estimated 54 million pounds of apples per year. McDonald’s has a great tradition of solving social problems, and now this worst offender (e.g., “Super Size Me”) is poised to become a major wellness contributor. In the 1970s, McDonald’s become the first major employer to embrace hiring and training inner city youth, after many in America had given up on them. In the 1980s, McDonald’s reengineered its operations to be able to hire senior citizens in selected markets through innovations such as flexible hours and large-button cash registers. This slumbering giant, which feeds more than 46 million people every day, has been awakened to wellness.

At the beginning of 2006, Whole Foods Market (sales of $7 billion) was the largest wellness food market. But on March 26, 2006, Wal-Mart (sales of $275 billion) opened its first organic foods Super-center in Plano, Texas, and simultaneously began featuring wellness products in all of its stores. By the time you read this, Wal-Mart may be the world’s largest wellness food retailer.

All of this bodes well for the wellness industry, and particularly for wellness entrepreneurs, because this greatly increases the acceptance of wellness products and distribution outlets for mass-market wellness produce. Despite the recent growth of wellness to a $500 billion industry, most consumers have still yet to have their first wellness experience, and the numbers of overweight and obese have continued to rise.

5. This switching sides phenomenon is generally not taking place among sickness-industry (e.g., traditional medical) providers.

Unlike the $1.3 trillion food industry, the $2 trillion medical industry has not embraced wellness and shows few signs of doing so. While there are exceptions, for the most part U.S. hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and health professional organizations are either ignoring wellness or fighting it whenever it crosses into their territory.

The traditional medical or sickness industry is fighting a losing battle. Like the railroads at the beginning of the 20th century, which saw their industry as trains versus transportation (and subsequently lost out to trucks and automobiles), the sickness industry is poised to lose out to wellness.

When the automobile first came out 100 years ago, most people saw it as just a carriage without a horse or a train that didn’t require rails. A select few realized that the horseless carriage was not like a carriage or a train, but represented a new industry that would fundamentally change almost every aspect of American life—people like Henry Ford (autos), John D. Rockefeller (gasoline), Ray Croc (drive-in restaurants), Howard Johnson (roadside motels), and thousands more became the billionaires of their day and the leaders of our society. A similar opportunity awaits entrepreneurs and health professionals who realize that wellness is a new movement, a revolution, rather than a single healthier item of food or alternative medical treatment.

While everyone reading this book might personally wish that traditional medicine would return to its Hippocratic roots and embrace wellness, the stubbornness and shortsightedness of many traditional medical providers has created an enormous business opportunity for wellness entrepreneurs and professionals.

6. Thousands of new wellness products and services have come to market, some of which I predicted back in 2002, but, frankly, many of which I didn’t expect to occur until at least 2012.

In 2002, I expected that in about 10 years DNA- and other scientifically-based tests for targeted nutritional supplementation would become universal, adding legitimacy to the then-$80 billion vitamin business. But I far underestimated how fast legitimacy would come to the wellness diagnostic industry. In 2004, a DNA-based swab kit to identify vitamin deficiencies became available for $10 per test. In 2005, a $10 million, room-sized, fingertip-reading light scanner that reads antioxidant levels was redesigned into a booksized unit and made widely available for less than the cost of a laptop computer—already 10 million people have had their antioxidant levels measured with this portable device.

Moreover, as also explained in Chapter 10, another new development, stem cell research, holds great promise for wellness. Although scientists still don’t know exactly how stem cells work, medical professionals are using them to rebuild damaged organs and to slow down the aging process.

The New Wellness Revolution explains how these and many other new products are legitimizing the wellness industry by applying medical testing techniques and pharmaceutical-grade manufacturing standards to wellness products and services.

7. In the United States, from 2004 to 2007, enormous changes occurred in health insurance that now allow employees and individuals to invest in their own wellness, and to keep what they don’t spend on sickness today for their future wellness (or retirement) tomorrow.

In 2002, I correctly forecast that Congress would have to make Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) universally available for all Americans—but I didn’t expect it to happen so quickly, nor did I expect that my work would play a role in helping convince Congress to take action.

The New Wellness Revolution explains how and why three million Americans have already opened HSAs, and how more than 11 million Americans are now covered by employer-provided Health Reimbursement Arrangements (HRAs). HSAs and HRAs allow employees a 100 percent income tax deduction for many of their wellness expenditures, and they allow people to keep for their future wellness tomorrow what they don’t spend on sickness today.

HSAs, HRAs, and other Consumer Directed Healthcare (CDH) vehicles allow consumers to choose their own health providers—putting chiropractors, osteopaths, naturopaths, and other wellness-oriented providers on an equal basis with traditional sickness-industry medical providers. This leveling of the playing field between sickness and wellness providers began in South Africa, and is now taking root in every developed nation—because governments finally recognize that preventing disease and supporting antiaging are the only solutions to the rising medical costs that threaten their economies.

8. In 2005, the cost of providing U.S. employees sickness-industry health benefits exceeded profits for the Fortune 500 largest corporations—and stockholders worldwide are questioning whether to continue funding many once-viable corporations, like General Motors.

While everyone has talked about the rising cost of employer sickness-industry expenses for decades, 2005 was the watershed year—the year in which rising sickness-industry expenses went beyond just reducing profits to actually threatening the very existence of major U.S. employers. Employers en masse have realized that the only long-term solution to rising sickness-industry expenses is wellness—programs that increase fitness and prevent disease from occurring in the first place.

The New Wellness Revolution explains the enormous opportunity for local wellness entrepreneurs to provide workplace wellness programs in their own communities, starting with weight loss and smoking cessation programs for employers powered by HRAs.

9. Despite the growth of the wellness industry from $200 billion to $500 billion in just five years, and the resulting millions of new wellness industry consumers, the untapped market for wellness has actually increased in size. In the United States alone, the number of overweight adults increased from 61 to 65 percent during the past five years, and childhood obesity grew 10 percent, from 27 to 30 percent of children.

When I began writing about obesity and overweightness in 1996, I never thought this epidemic would be even larger more than ten years later. Although millions of new consumers every day embrace wellness, millions more remain outside the reach of the current wellness industry and become more overweight, malnourished, exercise less and/or continue to smoke.

The New Wellness Revolution explains how the population of every developed nation continues to divide itself into two opposing socioeconomic groups—those who are fit and healthy and take care of their wellness, and those who don’t. This terrible phenomenon has catastrophic economic and social consequences.

The contractual sickness-industry obligations to solely former employees now threatens the viability of many U.S. school systems and the ability of local and national government to provide basic human services. In the United States alone, this unfunded local and state government obligation to provide unlimited sickness care to former employees now exceeds $1 trillion, and the resulting scandal will make the $300 billion S&L scandal of the 1980s pale by comparison. The scandal may even be worse in Europe and other developed nations.

10. I’ve joined the wellness revolution as an entrepreneur.

In 1999, I founded a company to spread wellness by reforming health insurance. This company became part of Steve Case’s Revolution Health Group in 2005, and today supplies wellness-oriented health benefits to millions of people through their employers or through Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club stores.

In 2006, I founded a similar company focused on distributing similar wellness-oriented health benefits through wellness entrepreneurs and financial services professionals. This new company, Zane Benefits LLC (www.zanebenefits.com), is already making a difference on hundreds of college campuses and with thousands of entrepreneurs and employers, by getting consumers better, safer, and cheaper wellness-oriented health insurance.

Action Plan for Entrepreneurs and Wellness/Health Professionals

At the end of each chapter you will find a section called Action Plan for Entrepreneurs and Wellness/Health Professionals. This is meant for new entrepreneurs or for people currently employed who are contemplating striking out on their own. I do not want to imply that my suggested Action Plan is the only one you should follow. My objective is to illustrate how great an opportunity there is in wellness, and to stimulate your mind to apply your own background, education, and life experiences to becoming an entrepreneur in the wellness industry.

Paul Zane Pilzer

Park City, Utah

Notes

1. In a letter to Robert Hooke, 5 February, 1675/6, quoted in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, new ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1986), 176.

INTRODUCTION

Why Wellness Is the Next Big Thing

In the twentieth century, our lives were revolutionized by things like the automobile, airline travel, the personal computer, and family planning. In those cases, initial discoveries led to the birth of empires and to unprecedented individual wealth for those entrepreneurs and investors who got in first. The next big thing of the twenty-first century has begun, and it promises to similarly revolutionize our lives and offer opportunities for tremendous wealth building over the next 10 years.