Join host Tom Jackobs on the Heart Led Business Show, merging compassion with commerce. Dive into insightful chats with visionary leaders prioritizing humanity over profit.
In this episode, Tom talks with John Mekrut from The Balanced Brain about running heart-led businesses valuing people over profits. Explore John’s journey from neurofeedback, driven by compassion for his daughter, and his choice of changing lives over money. Gain insights on a primal paleo diet, balance, and heart-led missions.
Tune in as Tom and John discuss conscious capitalism and heart-centered entrepreneurship, leading you to fresh perspectives.
In This Episode:
John Mekrut, a visionary business leader discusses the intersection of compassion and commerce, defying the status quo in business leadership, and strategies for conscious capitalism.
About John Mekrut:
John Mekrut, a dedicated father, found a new career path inspired by his daughter’s transformative journey with neurofeedback training. He trained with experts like Sue and Siegfried Othmer and Dr. David Kaiser to refine his skills in qEEG analysis.
At The Balanced Brain, he merges neuroscience with mind-body practices for holistic wellness. Collaborating with healthcare pros, he delivers tailored care. Outside work, he loves sci-fi, woodworking, and cooking, cherishing the rejuvenating nap. Prioritizing well-being, he helps others discover themselves through neurofeedback training.
Notable Moments:
02:27 – The Journey to Neurofeedback
07:23 – The Challenges of Running a Heart-Led Business
09:52 – The Unique Approach to Client Relationship
Memorable Quotes:
- “I love the phrase, conscious capitalism.” – John Mekrut
- “We’re about elevating human experience.” – John Mekrut
- “It comes through in your delivery as well. You can see and hear the passion that you have for delivering this service.” – Tom Jackobs
Connect with John Mekrut on various Social Media platforms:
– Discover a transformative approach to mental health with The Balanced Brain’s integrative Neurofeedback program. Explore the link to discover the journey towards holistic healing and unlock your full potential today. www.thebalancedbrain.com–
-For valuable perspectives on business strategies driven by compassion, explore further at Tom Jackobs’ website today.
Next Steps:
Subscribe to The Heart-Led Business Show on:
- Spotify
- Apple Podcasts
- YouTube
- Tom Jackobs Business Page
- X (Formerly Twitter)
Teasers & Announcements:
- Next Episode: Get ready for the next episode featuring Nikki Nicholas – a subconscious expert smashing negative thoughts! She’s a bold coach with a heart of gold, guiding people through life’s toughest challenges.
- Special Announcement: Discover the “What Why What Why” Sales Framework customized for Health and Wellness Practitioners. Elevate your sales within 90 days with honesty and integrity. Access your complimentary training here: https://go.businessleadmaximizer.com/script-training
- Enjoy the show? Share your thoughts with a review! Leave a review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify to support us. Your feedback helps spread the message of heart-led business leadership. Thank you!
Episode Transcript:
Catch today’s convo transcript below! Dive in, discover gems, and never miss out!
Welcome to the Heart Led Business Show, where compassion meets commerce and leaders lead with love. Join your host, Tom Jacobs, 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.
Welcome back ladies and gentlemen, business bosses, and those with hearts as big as their dreams. Welcome back to the heart led business show. I am joined today with John Mekrut, who is a avid science fiction lover of both books and movies, and is hooked on the Discovery Channel, and is also a skilled woodworker, having made a lot of his own furniture,
loves to cook, and currently follows a primal paleo diet, which I would love to hear a little bit more about.
And like myself is very good at power napping. So welcome to the show, John, from the balanced brain, a neural feedback training company. Thanks for joining today.
My pleasure, Tom. Thanks for the invitation. I love the phrase, by the way,
in the intro, I love the phrase conscious capitalism. So thank you for gifting me with that.
Yeah, the AI is pretty good at making up those words, I love leveraging AI to speed things up. But tell me a little bit about your primal paleo diet and how that’s maybe different than just regular paleo.
It’s a blend. Yeah. I unfortunately lost my gallbladder a year and a half ago. In a gallbladder attack, so I can’t go fully keto, which is would be probably a preferential diet, but the lack of a gallbladder makes digesting fats extremely difficult. So I’ve had to cut back on some of that, but primal paleo, it’s, they’re very similar in intent. It’s more low carbohydrate is another way to think of it. For probably more commonly understood, also an excellent diet, lots of oils and fats, a lot of fat because fat is where it’s at. It’s really the, one of the basic fuels, certainly for the brain is designed to run on fat more than on sugar. And that’s where we get into trouble.
Awesome. First, I’d love to know from you what your definition is of a heart led business.
I fell into the neurofeedback business out of an experience with my own child who is on the spectrum. I’m not even sure if she is any more, let’s be honest, but 20 years ago, she certainly was and had all of the, Exhibitions of dysregulation that someone on the spectrum can have.
She had a lot of the characteristics of challenge and the predictions for her future were grim. We’re going to have to support her for the rest of her life.
She’s going to live in a halfway house. She’ll never have a job. And we’re like, what are you
talking about? , it started in that space in my own heart, this is my child, I need to find an answer for her. That’s not what these people have described. And it ultimately, circuitously led me to neurofeedback and seeing the changes in her, I gravitated towards this is something that really interests me. I developed a passion for it because I was doing it with her and bonding with my daughter around this particular invention, we did many, I’m not going to just say it was the one and only thing, but it certainly in my view, retrospectively was the most important thing that we did with her. And my developing interest in it turned into a passion and I was doing something else entirely. I was in show business as a talent agent and I just said, I got to leave that behind and I have to go towards this for a lot of reasons. Truthfully, in , my experience in show business was also heartfelt.
I liked actors. As human beings, unlike most representatives who don’t particularly like the actors who view them as a commodity and that was my friction. So even then I knew , that I can’t be in a business that views a human being as a commodity. But fortuitously this experience with my daughter showed up at probably the exact time that I needed it . It showed me that there are people out there and the clinicians that we ran into at that time were those people, they were people who had devoted their lives pretty successfully to this mission of taking this technology to people for helping people. That’s it. Neurofeedback is not a lucrative industry to be in. There’s a an adage around it, if you want to make a small fortune in neurofeedback, start out with a large one. And I think that’s true, because the folks that I know who have invested their own time and money and sweat, going to the FDA to get clearances on devices and all of that, have spent literally millions of dollars out of their own pockets. To launch these products to make sure that they’re safe and effective and all of that. And so that they’re delivering to the clients that come to them a product and therefore a service that is safe and effective. And that those millions of dollars will never be recouped by those people. There’s just not enough. So it literally is investing your life’s sweat into something that you passionately believe in and any small business owner can. Has probably similar stories about the capital expense needed to set up a business, whether it’s a service or a product or whatever you’re doing, there’s an enormous amount of money that’s outlayed to get yourself set up to deliver the thing that you deliver. And in truth, can you ever really recoup all of that? Probably not, but you do it anyway, because it’s the right thing to do. It’s what called you to do this in the first place, almost all the people that I know well in this industry of neurofeedback, neuromodulation neuro training, whatever you want to call it, all have a personal story like mine, the Othmers who I trained with initially, Susan and Siegfried Othmer, their experience was their son who had epilepsy. And they sought out something back, this is 35, 40 years ago now they tried to find an answer and they found one, a lovely woman in Santa Monica, California, who was doing this crazy thing with putting wires on people’s heads and yada, and it seemed to have an effect on reducing his seizure activity. So every, most of the people, and they were both physicists, they had nothing to do with this industry whatsoever. And and they developed this this large company out of it and, they’re not rich.
There’s no pot of gold there. There just isn’t. So you better, if you’re going to be in this, you better be leading with your heart because it’s not going to satisfy the cold heart capitalist. Bottom line oriented kind of person. It’s just not there. A lot of other industries. You can be in pick one of those.
If that’s your, if your desire is to have a Lamborghini and a private jet, this is not the business for you.
But even with that said, you still need to eat and, have all the shuns, the transportation, habitation and, provide for the family. So how do you balance that capitalism aspect and then being a heart led business owner?
I guess it’s look at it historically, there’ve been people providing services for millennia. Whatever the local shaman, he would take payment for his or her service, so you have to just come up with a level of transaction.
I guess that works for both parties. The tragedy of what I do is it is expensive to deliver. The equipment is expensive, the overhead, our rent is ridiculous, you go down the list. So there is an actual overhead to all of this. We pay our staff people pretty well. We’re not paying minimum wage. Could I do it differently? Sure, I probably could do that. I don’t want to. I want this to be an environment that’s engaging and comfortable and people like it, but yes, there’s an overhead. I try to explain it to people and they say, how much is this? Think about this, you’re going to spend six months with us. This costs X to deliver. I just can’t get around that. And the tragedy again of what we do is that there are people who literally cannot afford it. And how do we manage that?
I’m not been successful yet. I’ve looked at ideas of setting up a nonprofit arm so I could take, corporate and personal donations to help subsidize folks who can’t afford it. That’s an option to do social media fundraising.
No, but truthfully, we’re all looking for ways to help people pay for this relatively expensive service. Having said all of that, the cost of the challenges that people come into our world with are expensive as well. They’re just not as visible. If you’re struggling with focus and attention challenges in your work or in your in any aspect of your life, there’s a cost associated with that and economic cost.
They’ve done actual studies on this and how much less people make. Over their lifespan when they’re struggling with some kind of brain health slash mental health challenge. And it’s a lot so you have to you know But it’s a hard it’s a hard one to quantify for the human being you’re speaking to so this is gonna cost you $300,000 in less earned income over your lifespan. So in relative terms what this costs at this particular moment is a small sum, but really, am I going to be that much better?
Yeah, but you have to go through the experience to understand that.
Yeah. Absolutely. You had said something earlier that I took note of that not treating the customer as a commodity and the story about having maybe a cheaper rent, being able to just funnel people through. I see this, like this conveyor belt of customers coming through.
They get the nodes on their head, they go through and blah, blah, blah. And it’s just, it becomes this almost like a commodity. And that’s opposite of what you want in your heart led business. You want that experience. You want them to actually get the result of what they’re paying for versus just come in and pay me some money. I think people could make tons of money if they go down that route, but then the experience and the real value isn’t there. Is that what you were thinking?
It depends how you set up your business, you can set it up to deliver maximum profit, or you can set it up to cover costs plus a profit. That’s reasonable for you as a human. Our goal is to have an experience with a client that is meaningful to them and to us. We really like our clients. We really get involved in their lives. We know a lot more about them sometimes than even they know. Just because we’ve seen the inside of their head.
And that’s always that’s a fun and mystical part. I have to say that’s a sidebar, but that’s a fun part of what we do. When we do a QEG on somebody and we do a review call of the findings we’ll say something just within it, we noticed this or that, is this something that you chat and they’ve never told us before. Oh yeah, I have dyslexia. Oh this little spot right here. Yeah, that would probably account for that challenge for you. And they never told us about it. So for them, they’re like. Oh, my God. Wow. This guy’s. I said no, it’s not. It’s not a crystal ball. It really isn’t. It’s basic brain dynamics.
We’ve seen it hundreds of times. That’s why we ask these questions. Is this a challenge for you? It’s not 100 percent accurate all the time, but it’s accurate enough that it blows people away when we tell them something that they have not yet revealed to us. I literally could do, I never have to meet the person and I could probably run down a list of 12, a good 12 or 15 items that I know looking at the map are probably challenges for them, even though they’ve never said, five words to me. But again, it’s not magic, it’s brain circuit behaviors, and we’ve seen them repeatedly over decades.
As an analytic, we know what’s going on. Our interest in the experience with the client is about them, because people say are we going to do another map at the end so he can see how my brain changed? I said, yes, we will. But what’s important here is not whether or not your brain circuits changed, they will change to the level, to a degree that we don’t know what’s important in this is how do you feel, how are you more capable now of going out in the world and being successful at whatever you want to do. Without being pushed, around by, forces that are beyond your control. We all know that, but to have the stability and the resilience to walk through this life confidently and have appropriate behaviors and have relationships that make sense that’s really what’s important here.
We’re not about, we’re not about really fixing brain waves. We’re about elevating human experience.
It’s interesting like when you put the customer first, and really that is all about heart led, right? Is your thinking more about them than what’s coming back to you in the end, which I think is just really beautiful way of running a business.
Yeah.
out there, there are a few our industry has not been for good or bad, hasn’t been. Glommed onto by, venture capitalists, and again, because there’s no patentable product here. There’s no patentable thing. There’s no drug at the end of the development pipeline that you’re going to make a billion dollars with, it is a service business, like millions of others. And I don’t think there’s enough level of profit in it for, to interest venture capitalists, to be honest with you. The mill idea, or the factory model, doesn’t really work very well. The people who do this, and are professionals at it, I’d have to have a certain level of training and they’re coming out of health care writ large.
But most people who are doing this are psychotherapists. These are not widget makers who decided they’re going to do neurofeedback one day, so it, the translation is not easy for anybody to make.
You really have to be 90 percent of the way there, even to think about doing this.
Heart led where it’s at. It just, it comes with the territory. Again, if you’re a psychologist, why would you be a psychologist? If you didn’t have that sensibility, that innate sensibility, I want to communicate with people and help them through difficult times.
It comes through in your delivery as well. You can see and hear the passion that you have for delivering this service. And I think that’s a really beautiful. Thanks for being a heart led entrepreneur, heart led business owner. Oh, I think we need more people like you, John.
Tell us how we can learn more about you and the Balanced Brain.
Visit our website. That’s the easiest way. Tragically, we’re a brick and mortar, so there’s nothing remote about what we do. We can’t do it on zoom. We can’t do it over the internet.
That’d be interesting.
Yeah, well, and in fairness, there are people who do it can be done. The challenges are daunting, but it can be done.
And it’s one of the unfortunate problems around neurofeedback and neuromodulation delivery is it’s not very available outside of major metropolitan areas. I’m on all kinds of social media. I’m on LinkedIn.
I’m on Facebook, and I’ve been dabbling with Instagram. I haven’t dabbled with Tik Tok yet and it looks like we may not even get the opportunity. We’ll find out what happens in Congress this week.
But I’m on most of the social media platforms. You can certainly reach out that way, or you can shoot a message through our website but it is, unfortunately, for folks listening, this is a Los Angeles experience. .
I’m definitely going to come see you the next time in LA, which might be as early as June or July of this year. I would love to come get my mind read by you quite literally.
I’ll make sure not to scare the audience. We’re not reading your mind. We’re really not. And that is, no, that’s a common fear that people have in here. Oh, you’re going to know what I think. No, we don’t know what you think. We just know how your subconscious brain circuits behave.
I don’t know the content. At any point in this experience, I have no idea what the content is. You can have dark thoughts, joyous thoughts, doesn’t matter. I don’t know what they are. I just know where the circuits are going.
Cool. John, thank you so much for being on the show today and as a message to our listeners, make sure that you are subscribing to the YouTube channel. If you’re finding this on YouTube if you could swing by and do a little rating and review, that definitely helps get the word out and have more people become heart led business owners and get that support that they need to keep doing what they love to do.
You’ve been listening to the Heart Led Business Show, hosted by Tom Jacobs. Join us next time for another inspiring journey into the heart of business.