Kristen Pluger

I think one of the biggest things for me is coming from a single mom household and a lower-income family growing up where I was kind of limited in my beliefs of what I could accomplish. Through a lot of refinement of God working through putting me in the right place at the right time and giving me challenges to build my confidence, I was able to overcome some of these things and be put in rooms that I didn't really think I would have ever been in. It was really the determination to keep going through my career but also really opening up my eyes to what I could accomplish. My beliefs were a little bit limited coming out of college. Being determined in the roles that I had and saying yes to the next opportunity, and yes and yes and yes, eventually led me to building skills and going down career paths that I really had no experience in. That led me to be able to wear a bunch of hats to eventually open up my own business. There are so many skills that I've learned in my previous jobs that have really just led me to be able to tackle this. I think if I hadn't had those experiences, this would have been much harder and much clunkier in the first year of launch. Because of my past experience hiring people, managing a team, and building programs from scratch, all of that led me to be able to launch this in a very quick turnaround time and have it be successful.

My advice would be don't rush it. There's so much learning that happens in the 'I'm not where I want to be yet' moments. I think sometimes we just want to get on to the next thing, we want to have that 'I've finally made it' moment, but there's so much to learn and absorb and gain from the hard moments where you're not exactly where you want to be. What kind of attitude and mentality do we bring in those spaces? Because I think that shifts the opportunities down the road. If we approach it with gratitude for being where we are, even if it's not where we want to go, I truly believe that more doors will open down the line because of being thankful for what we have in the moment and not rushing it, and trying to just be the best that you can be in the position that you're in. That doesn't mean that we don't reach for the next goal and all of that, but I think there's just something so amazing about the learning that happens when you're not quite where you want to go.

Challenges would be that there are a ton of at-home devices that people can get, and while they're great, there are also some risks. We have a medical-grade bed, so there's a lot of education that has to happen around what is the difference between that versus a red light panel that you're going to order off Amazon or something like that and get delivered to your home. There's a ton of backed research and science that go into this prescriptive treatment of the red light bed that we have. It's a lot of educating clients on how is this different and how do we know that this is going to maximize these results. We have 5 different programs that we offer, and the education really comes into how we've rooted that in science and how the bed actually doesn't just turn on and stay on. Each of those red light wavelengths is doing something different during their therapy session. Explaining that to them and having them understand that this is not just a device they're using at home, this is actually a medical-grade therapeutic treatment that's really going to maximize their results. That's a pretty big challenge. There are so many devices on the market that sometimes people get the paralysis or they don't understand why they can't just order one off of Amazon and have the same results that we would get here. Another challenge is that people don't want to make the lifestyle changes. It's not a magic bed, it does great things, but we also have to change lifestyle. It's reframing that mindset that it's not a magic bed that I'm going to go lay on two times and then I'm going to be in the perfect body that I want or have no pain. I think those are some of the challenges - that we live in kind of a quick fix universe right now where people want that instant gratification, and it still does take some time even though we do see great results the first couple of sessions. We're in a very unique spot in a very small little farm town, so just speaking from a competition standpoint, there really isn't competition here yet. But I know in bigger cities there are those pieces where you can get tons of different red light options around and deciphering which one is best.

My faith in God is super important to me. When people meet me and work with me, I want to make sure that first I'm an ambassador for Christ and I am showing up in a way that would point them to God. That's super important to me and that pretty much runs every part of my life. I really value honesty and transparency as I work through people, setting realistic expectations and goals with them. As a family, faith in God is really important to us. We try to help and show up in a way that reflects that. On the family side of things, we're teaching our kids about helping others that are in need, honesty, and noticing things while we're out in public. Like, did you notice that there was someone at the park that they didn't have anybody to play with? Let's go play with them. Just kind of building in those values to them I think is really important.