What if you could turn a personal health challenge into a thriving, heart-led business that not only transforms lives but also shifts the wellness industry? 💡
In this episode, Meredith Oke, founder of the Institute of Applied Quantum Biology, shares her inspiring journey from overcoming chronic fatigue to creating a business that blends passion, purpose, and cutting-edge science. We dive into her bold decision to transition from a for-profit model to a nonprofit, the science behind circadian rhythms, and how to balance serving others with running a sustainable business.
🎧 Don’t miss this fascinating conversation on health, business, and quantum biology!
Key Takeaways from this Episode
- The essence of a heart-led business
- Turning personal challenges into impactful ventures
- The intersection of light, health, and technology
- Transitioning from profit to non-profit: A strategic move
- The power of pricing and valuing your service
- Navigating criticisms and staying true to your mission
- Offering tuition assistance: Balancing generosity and business acumen
About the Guest
Meredith Oke is the Executive Director of The Institute of Applied Quantum Biology, where she brings cutting-edge health education to the public. She’s also the host of the Quantum Biology Collective podcast, connecting experts and everyday people in the fascinating field of quantum biology. In addition to her work in quantum biology, Meredith offers private and group coaching to help women elevate their lives and careers.
Additional Resources
Website: www.appliedquantumbiology.com/welcome-page
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/meredithkellyoke
Youtube: www.youtube.com/@QuantumBiologyCollective
Instagram: www.instagram.com/meredithko & www.instagram.com/quantumbiologycollective
Podcast: https://qbcpod.com/
TikTok: www.tiktok.com/@coach_meredith
Facebook: www.facebook.com/QuantumHealthTV
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Up Next…
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Explore the Dialogue’s Treasures: Unearth the insights within! Delve into the profound wisdom woven throughout our conversation.
Speaker: 0:01
Welcome to the Heart-Led Business Show, where compassion meets commerce and leaders lead with love. Join your host, Tom Jackobs, as he delves into the insightful conversations with visionary business leaders who defy the status quo, putting humanity first and profit second. From heartfelt strategies to inspiring stories, this podcast is your compass in the world of conscious capitalism. So buckle up and let’s go. Let your heart guide your business journey.
Tom Jackobs: 0:39
Fun and facts with our glowing guest, the lively luminary, the wizard of woo, Meredith Oke. She’s the stellar skipper at the helm of the Institute of Applied Quantum Biology, enlightening us earthlings faster than a comet crossing the cosmos. On this episode of the Heart-Led Business Show, we’ve died down the rabbit hole to unfold how her quantum quirkiness is ruffling the fabric of science and snarling the sunbeams of success and carving a charismatic custodian in the infinite sky of entrepreneurship. Prepare for a pulsating pile of passion as Meredith mesmerizes us with her magnetic musings. Welcome to the show, Meredith.
Meredith Oke: 1:19
Thank you, Tom. That is probably the most delightful introduction I have ever had.
Tom Jackobs: 1:25
I am really honored have you here as well. The chat GPT went a little overboard, I think on the alliteration there, but I think it encapsulates everything that we’re gonna be talking about today. So, I’m really excited to really dive into everything that you’re doing and learning more about your heart-led business but first, the first question I always ask everybody is, what’s your definition of a heart-led business?
Meredith Oke: 1:46
Heart-led business is any business that is meaningful to the person who’s running it? So I think it would look different for everybody, but if you’re following your intuition and your passion that’s what makes it heart-led. Like, is your heart in it? I mean, assuming you’re not causing harm in any way or being dishonest in any way, it could really be anything. You know, you could be, I think, a heart-led plumber. You could be whatever it is that you have an expertise in and that you feel good that you want to be doing. But it’s like, if you feel that, that inner intuitive alignment with what you’re offering to the world.
Tom Jackobs: 2:28
Yeah, love that definition. And especially the alignment your passion and what you’re all about as well. That’s, that’s so, so accurate. I love it. Thanks. Thanks for sharing that your definition of a heart-led business. So tell us a little bit about your heart-led business and what inspired you to start it.
Meredith Oke: 2:45
So this came, this business and it’s funny that you asked that because I’m actually in the process of making it this piece of it anyway, making it into a non-profit because it came to be out of my own personal health journey. So my background is in coaching and consulting career coaching, life coaching, I’ve done all different kinds of things I’ve worked, you know, as a full time coach at a business school, I’ve worked doing maternity leave coaching for women in finance and I’ve done life coaching just out of my own business. And so I had a quite a, you know, expansive background in coaching, but I came up against a health challenge that led me to do some research around the effects of light on our biology that really helped me because I was doing all the food and all the supplements and all the meditation and all of the things that all of these wonderful practitioners and we’re, you know, we’re telling me to do in order to overcome my chronic fatigue and it wasn’t moving the needle. And then I kind of stumbled Well, I didn’t stumble. I went into meditation and asked the universe to show me where I needed to go and I remembered flashed back to an interview with a doctor who was talking about the importance of light and so I dove into that and it was really complicated and kind of hard to understand, even though the application of it was very simple. And I just kept thinking to myself, why don’t more people know this? Right? Like, why don’t more people know that reading your phone or your iPad before you go to sleep is like, basically toxic, you’re poisoning yourself doing that and why aren’t there, you know, and so it became my mission to create an organization that made it, made this information that was quite challenging for me to track down and figure out accessible to more and more people. And so even though it was not my background at all, what the strengths that I brought to the table were like having the vision and understanding that information needs to be accessible if it’s ever going to be meaningful to people. And so I found the subject matter experts to teach the science and I created an organization that brings it to people and makes it a little more straightforward it
Tom Jackobs: 4:53
I can imagine just bringing in quantum and probably some physics and light and all that would probably deter a lot of people from really diving deep into it and really understanding what it all is and what it does to us as humans. So tell us about kind of that transition into, you know, out of the coaching and into the full business and then why you’re deciding to change it into a non-profit organization.
Meredith Oke: 5:19
I started out I also, I should say before I became a coach in my early career, I worked as an entertainment and interviewer in the media, and so I, I did have that background, so I also pulled that, that piece into it and I just started interviewing. My husband and I would go on social media and just find anybody who seemed to have a grasp of this knowledge and I would reach out to them and I just started interviewing them. And I started a little membership where we put all of these interviews and was like very nerdy just for people, there was a small community of people online who really wanted to know more. As that grew it became clear to me that like, what was really needed, education for practitioners, right? So health coaches or naturopaths or anyone who is seeing clients or patients, there just needed to be a way for them to learn the fundamentals of light and health because I interviewed so many people, I pulled in the people who were the best teachers, and we created a certification. And then we went and we applied to the American Naturopathic Association and got accredited by them, weren’t just some random internet outfit. You know, we wanted to make sure that we, it, you know, that it was clear that we had very, you know, high standards in terms of what we were teaching and what we expected from people and as it grew, you know, I sort of reached a place with it where I was like, okay what do you want to be? Because it wasn’t really a business like doing, you know, you can, I mean, online education is definitely a business, but just the way that this was forming and it just, but it wasn’t really like a school. And so, I went back to the heart-led, right? And it was like, I didn’t start this to as a way to make money, there are much easier ways to make money than teaching the intersection biology quantum physics to people who are like, what are you talking about? So I did it because I saw a need and I knew that need wouldn’t be filled by the institutional education that exists from at least a decade, if not more, and maybe they would ignore it completely and it would never get taught. So, I started it because I saw that need. It’s pretty, it’s a pretty challenging to run and it just had the feel of community more than business and it attracts people, you know, people that it attracts, they really are there, you know, they really want to learn from a heart-centered place, right? They’re just they’re people who want to be of service to their clients. And so I also have a background you know, doing a lot of high level volunteer work on the boards at some of the schools my children attended. So I had also pulled that piece in, which was like a vision of a non-profit educational organization. And I had some understanding of how those work. So I decided to take the certification and turn it into a non-profit organization. And we’re in the process of applying for that as well. And then I kept some pieces of it. There’s a membership and a podcast all that, and that will stay in an LLC. I know that like the theme of this show is like, I’m a heart-led person and I need to make money. And this was really like a huge tension. So this is my, at the moment, my, where I’ve landed and sort of how to work that out while keeping the spirit of what I started.
Tom Jackobs: 8:22
Yeah, absolutely. And do you feel like going down the non-profit or incorporating as a non-profit? Which, you know, I’ve started a few non-profits in the theater world when I was doing that. Which does not necessarily mean you don’t make money. In the non-profit, you still need to make money to fulfill the mission of the non-profit. So starting the non-profit as a way of educating others, just totally makes sense to me because that’s kind of the, what non-profits are, but they also need to make money at some point as well. So what’s the business model of the non-profit in conjunction with the LLC that you have set up? How is that going to work out for you? Do you think?
Meredith Oke: 8:59
So when I had this idea, I actually wasn’t sure, but a lot of those questions got answered based on what non-profits are legally allowed to do. So, and yes, to your point, a lot of people are like, Oh, you’re turning into a non-profit. So like, like how are you going to live? And I’m like, no, you know, to your point, like a non-profit, you still bring money in, you still pay people’s salaries. It’s just, you know, you’re not looking to have like a huge profit margin at the end of it. And you’re allowed to, you know, able to take and things like that and not be taxed, yes. So, those questions were largely answered, yeah, by the legal framework of having a 501c in the United States. Which is that you can’t have any, anything that links out on your non-profit organization. You can’t link down to anything where someone else gets paid as a business. So I have a whole piece where it was like a membership and people refer to each other and we have a practitioner directory so people can find in that links to their private, to their websites to pay for their services and the lawyer was like, no, none of that can go in. So that made the decision a little easier because I was like, I don’t know, should I put everything in there? Should I not? So the so the non-profit is education and research. So the next goal would be, will be funded by the tuition for the certification and from private donations and then ideally we’d like to start doing research. There’s a ton of research on how harmful circadian dysregulation is it’s implicated in every major chronic illness. There’s not a ton of research on how helpful being circadian optimized is, right? Like, so people look at the bad effects, but our people are really interested in like, you know, how do people’s labs change? How do sleep change once you do these things? So that’s the next step. That’s going to be really fun.
Tom Jackobs: 10:39
Like how we can overcome, because, you know, those light sources aren’t going to go away. You know, Apple’s still going to be making every single year and, you know, we have TVs, we have lights all around us. So is part of that research figuring out how we’re going to live with the light and adapt as humans with it?
Meredith Oke: 10:57
That’s already something that we look at a lot. So the best way to, to mitigate You know, light, you know, basically you want as much as possible, the light signal going in your eye to match what’s happening outside. So if you’ve got an iPhone in front of your face while it’s dark out, that’s a huge mismatch and so the best way to rectify that is to wear those really funny orange lensed glasses. They actually really well.
Tom Jackobs: 11:18
Should wearing them right now.
Meredith Oke: 11:21
You know, if you’d like to read before bed, like maybe switch to a book with like a low, with a lamp that’s on a lower setting as opposed to reading off of an iPad or something like that. So there’s lots of ways to mitigate it because yeah, we’re not going back. We live in a, we live in a technology centered world and there’s a lot of benefits to us, it like what we’re doing right now, know it’s really late for you in your time.
Tom Jackobs: 11:42
Oh, no, like we spoke pre show in our introduction that, yeah, I do shift my time. It’s almost like shift work. So, you know, I’m working from, you know, 8 PM until 2 AM and just told everybody only works six hours a day, which is okay, right? I tell myself, and maybe I’m lying to myself as well, that I’ve been able to make that shift because I just sleep a little bit later in the morning, but I got to tell you, not always is my sleep very good, either. So there’s got, you know, and there’s a lot of shift workers now as well, and in the health and wellness industry, especially, that need to find a way to kind of correct that circadian rhythm. And is that primarily, can you do that through light? Can you change that?
Meredith Oke: 12:20
Yeah. Yes, you can. So shift work is interesting because it’s actually listed as a carcinogen by the World Health Organization. That being said, if you understand why you can to, you know, you can definitely mitigate the effects of it. And there, there’s research that’s come out recently that shows that it’s actually better to do what you’re doing really where you want to have if at all possible to schedule your shift, some of your sleep overlaps with darkness outside and so the most detrimental would be that you know to sleep all day and stay up all night so that phase shifting is really come in and that’s research that came out of the believe the Navy, the US Navy they started because they’re sailors were getting all messed up, so they started doing this around, yeah and then also while you are awake to sort of mitigate the, light around you, there are also yellow lens glasses. And so, cause the orange lens glasses, great to wear in the evening before bed, but they will make you sleepy, right? Like, so if you’re in the middle of your shift, you wouldn’t want to do that because it’s sending sleepy time signals but the yellow lens glasses are a nice option for daytime for everybody and for the time that you’re meant to be awake. If you’re in front of all the screens and the lights and everything, it’ll just take out it’ll detoxify that light a little bit.
Tom Jackobs: 13:36
There a certain frequency of yellow and orange that optimizes that?
Meredith Oke: 13:41
Yes. What we’re wanting to do is what the glasses do is they actually block the blue frequency because the blue light, blue light in nature is only like from the sun. That’s obviously only during the day and even then, like in the middle of the day, like sunrise and sunset, there’s not much blue the spectrum coming out of the sun. So when your light, when your eye is receiving that blue light, it’s very stimulating, which it’s meant to be because you were, because up until five minutes ago, when we invented light bulbs and screens, you never had any other signal except when the sun was out. So what those, yellow glasses do is they just minimize it a little bit so that you’re not getting that huge stimulate, you’re not getting as stimulated as much.
Tom Jackobs: 14:25
Oh, that totally makes sense. Cool. So now that we’ve educated everybody on like therapy, let’s go back to the business side of this.
Meredith Oke: 14:31
Okay.
Tom Jackobs: 14:31
The LLC then you have set up for the Coaching, I guess, and interaction and networking and all that with the practitioners and that I would imagine, you know, this is my little business brain gears running here that you could then make donations from the LLC into the 501C3 as well, which makes a lot of sense well as in terms of business and you know, looking at tax advantages as well. So it’s very smart. I like that. Very cool.
Meredith Oke: 14:57
Totally by accident.
Tom Jackobs: 14:58
Tell us about some the challenges that have come up and challenges or triumphs that, that you found that have come up from having a heart-led business and really kind of leading with that with the heart.
Meredith Oke: 15:08
Yeah. I mean, In my personal experience and in my experience as a coach, people who are heart-led, who are really service oriented, right. And they just want to help other people. We tend to get a little tense around paid, right? So, I think that tension has been one of the biggest challenges. So a lot of the time when I worked as a coach, there was like an intermediary between me and the client, right? Like I had a, I worked for a consulting company or I worked for a school and so they paid me and I was just, I just had this pure client interaction. And there were, you know, I did a lot of work, not as a coach, but sort of as a mentor as well. That was totally unpaid. And I’m like, very comfortable in that, right? Like that’s my comfort zone and I feel really good there. And I’m just, I’m all heart centered. I don’t have to think about that. It’s all taken care of. All I have to do is send my invoice in or get my paycheck, right? And so to make that, to make this shift as a coach and as starting a business I had to get okay with people paying money. And what I noticed, and I’m not alone in this because I see all of my practitioner clients doing the same thing, right, is like we massively over deliver compared to what we’re charging in the beginning. And then after a while, we’re like, we start to burn out. We start to feel. You know, for me, the biggest red flag that we’re doing that is you start resentful of your work, right? And then it’s like, what, okay, what’s going on here? It’s like, I’m doing too much and not getting paid enough. And, you know, I’m going to be totally honest and vulnerable with you, Tom. Like I’ve put my family in like some very insecure moments because of my unwillingness to really say, to really like charge what it’s worth and about a year and a half into the certification, we doubled the price. And I thought I was gonna, I thought I was gonna die, right? Like, so, but there was no other way to do it. And for the quality of what we offered and we had different, you know, I had revenue shares with, the, with with the lead faculty and, I looked at the marketplace and what else was out there and the price point, and I’m like we need to do this and my biggest fear was that people were going to get upset. They’re going to be like, I can’t believe you’re charging that the science, you know, because there’s a whole bunch of people who are like, the science should be free. And I was like, science is free, but if you want it structured into a curriculum and taught by somebody with experience. Put out into modules that you digest. It’s not free. And my biggest fear was realized there were a little, there was a small group people who had a total tantrum.
Tom Jackobs: 17:38
Yeah. Did you find a shift in the people that purchased before the price increase and after the price increase in terms of like how serious they were?
Meredith Oke: 17:48
I did. And I think that’s something that we overlook when we are afraid to charge what we’re worth or to charge the experience or the program is worth, right? Like we overlook the fact that there are a lot of people who are like, well, it can’t be that good if it’s only cost this much. We overlook the fact that people don’t commit and invest themselves in the same way they would. If it, you know, they’ve had to, if they had to really like, pay money that they felt, you know, it’s like, oh, it’s only this, you know, whatever. And so I’m sure, you know, everybody listening to this has probably had that experience on both sides, charging and buying things. So it absolutely up leveled who showed up. It upleveled how seriously we took it. Cause I think there was a part of me as well that that’s like, Oh, you know, just, like a hobby. I’m just doing this to be of service. It’s not really, I don’t really need to make money. I don’t, really, you know, you know the story. That’s probably why he started this podcast. You know, it was a lot of that. And then, so, so raising the price not only up leveled the person who was attracted to take it and the commitment that they showed up with, it up leveled my commitment to making it keeping it really good.
Tom Jackobs: 18:58
No, that tracks completely with my own struggle with money and raising prices in my fitness business and the others that I’ve had on the show as well that I remember, you know, dreading like, like you did to increase prices with existing clients in my fitness business. And so I had this really nice letter, sent it out to all the clients and, you know, I think it was a 10 percent price increase just across the board. And, you know, it just laid out the reasons why, and I think once people understand why the price needs to go up, you know, electricity is going up, you know, cost of living, I haven’t raised your prices in five years, you know? And I think I got one, one, one person just was, you know, went off the rails as well. But when you think about it, how do we allow 1 percent or 0. 01 percent of the population to dictate how we run a business? And yet, yet us as business owners and especially heart-led business owners, I feel have that huge negative bias that the moment that we get that one negative comment back, it’s like, Oh, we got to change everything because one person complained. Have you experienced that or am I the only one?
Meredith Oke: 20:03
Yes. All the time with everything, right? Like we do, we put, give feedback forms at the end, right? And it’s like, everybody’s giving like four and fives out of five to everything, and then there’s one person who gives a two, and then I look at the comment and it’s like they had some totally unreasonable expectation that was way outside the scope of anything but I still am like, whose comment am I thinking about? like that.
Tom Jackobs: 20:25
Like put way more effort into an energy into that than into all the great comments that you got. Yeah.
Meredith Oke: 20:33
Yes. And the same with the pricing, right? Like it, it’s the same thing. It’s like, I’m thinking about, you know, this small group of very stodgy people who are like, that shouldn’t cost this and that shouldn’t cost that. And it’s like, they’re never going to buy anyway. They’re never going to invest. Like people who think like that don’t understand the value of investing your time and your resources and your energy into something of value, into a program of value. They’re just out there scanning the world, listening to podcasts endlessly, which is great. I have a podcast, do it. However, right? Like you want serious learning and training. You have to pay for it. And the people who are the most complaining and resentful of the money part aren’t the people who are ever going to invest anyway. And yet, so why am I allowing those people to drive my financial choices? Like It’s very, because I’m heart-led and I feel everything and I feel them. They come into my bio field, they come into my body and I can feel how they’re feeling…
Tom Jackobs: 21:33
well, exactly. And it’s all, I think it all comes down to what we prioritize our spending on. And for some people it’s not a high priority. And yet they wanna complain that it’s too expensive because it’s not a high priority for them. And I think us, as heart-led business owners, we have to just understand it’s not about us, it’s about the person that is, you know, upset about the price. Now, with that said, there are people that truly cannot afford some of the services that we offer and, you know, how do you kind of work with those folks or reconcile, you know, the prices that you charge and still potentially helping those that really cannot afford a service?
Meredith Oke: 22:14
yes, because there are those people. And so we do have an application for tuition assistance, and we do one or two per cohort. Usually it’s with a person who either work works for a non profit or has a non profit type business. I tend not to award those, that tuition assistance to people who have a practice, because I do think if you’re seeing, you know, if you’re meant, if you have a business, then you should be able to budget to have some continuing education once a year and I don’t think my skipping, my making that easy for you not to do is helpful for you in the long run. So I’m very, I get a lot of requests and I do help out people, but it’s, I’m very specific about who and how, and it’s usually for people who are, as I said, like working in a non-profit capacity. Yeah, so in terms of tuition assistance, I really have two, two areas. I said one, but there are two. And one is people who work for a non-profit and one is who are students. So they haven’t start, they haven’t started working yet, because as I said, I don’t think if you have an active business and you’re coming to me saying, Oh, I can’t afford your training. I’m like, well, you should probably invest in some business training or marketing training. So your business is at a place where you can afford to invest in continuing education in your subject matter area.
Tom Jackobs: 23:36
Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of businesses, and I did this as well in my fitness businesses, looking at ways of giving scholarships as well, instead of just discounting the price of the program, you know, we still want the value to be there, but for somebody in true, truly a need is, you know, setting aside a few scholarships or like you said, tuition assistance. And so I think that’s a really good compromise to help people that truly have the need. And the desire to, they have need for the financial assistance, but they also have the desire to help people and go through the training. So I think that’s a really good compromise to have.
Meredith Oke: 24:09
Yeah. And for me, it’s like, I think you’re making a point, right? Like, it’s differentiating between the need and the, you know, I just can’t afford it, right? Like, if you just can’t afford it, but you’re running a business, then your priority right now should not be learning quantum biology. Your priority should be learning how to run your business so that you can afford the continuing education that.
Tom Jackobs: 24:30
Yeah. That’s awesome. Well, Meredith this has been just an amazing conversation. Thank you listeners for watching or listening to the show, depending on what platform you’re on. I know we definitely appreciate it. We’ll provide all of those links down into the show notes. That’s a pretty amazing and if you could do me a solid favor and do what other smart and considerate listeners are doing and sharing this show with a friend or a loved one who could use the advice that we’ve shared on today’s show. And until next time, lead with your heart.
Speaker 2: 24:59
You’ve been listening to the heart-led Business Show, hosted by Tom Jackobs. Join us next time for another inspiring journey into the heart of business.
