#637 Reviv Your Body: How Biomechanics Shapes Health & Wellbeing with Ken Leaver

What if your jaw, posture, or bite were silently impacting your mood, energy, and long-term health?

In this fascinating episode of Talking with the Experts, Rose Davidson interviews Ken Leaver, the founder of Reviv, a biomechanics-based wellness solution that’s changing how we treat chronic issues—mentally and physically.

Ken shares how his company has helped over 15,000 clients experience faster recovery, improved focus, and reduced pain by addressing a surprisingly overlooked part of the body: dental biomechanics. By understanding how jaw alignment, bite mechanics, and posture affect everything from your nervous system to emotional regulation, Reviv has created a ripple effect of wellness that starts from the inside out.

You’ll learn:

• How dental biomechanics are directly linked to mental and physical health
• Why chronic pain and fatigue may be rooted in your body’s mechanical misalignment
• How Reviv’s method is offering rapid results—and how you can benefit too

Ken also shares insights from his entrepreneurial journey—leading startups, building health-focused brands, and operating as a Fractional COO for a solar tech venture. With clarity and purpose, he breaks down the science of alignment, showing how strategic support to the body’s natural flow can restore wellbeing across every area of life.

Whether you’re battling burnout, chronic pain, fatigue, or just looking for a sustainable way to feel better daily—this episode will reshape the way you think about health.

🎧 Ready to realign your body and boost your vitality? Don’t miss this powerful episode with Ken Leaver.

🔗 CONNECT WITH KEN

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenleaver/

Website: https://getreviv.com/

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Transcript

Intro | 00:01
Welcome to Talking With The Experts. Here we discuss all things business, by business owners, for business owners. Here is your host, Rose Davidson. 

 Rose | 00:11
Hello, welcome to Talking With The Experts. I'm your host, Rose Davidson from rosedavidson.com.au. Talking With The Experts is all about business by business owners for business owners. You can find it on all podcasting, streaming platforms and on YouTube. And today my guest is Ken Leaver. And we're going to be discussing about how to bootstrap your business. And his business, Reviv, is apparently making a lot of money. 
 So we're going to be talking about We'll just see how he goes. Now, Ken's journey has taken him across the globe from strategy consulting to being a CEO to leading product teams at high growth companies. He's launched and scaled six startups of his own. 
 So when it comes to understanding how to grow a business from the ground up, Ken is a seasoned expert. Currently, Ken runs Reviv, a direct-to-consumer brand focused on dental biopsy. Mechanics and health. Alongside this, he's acting as a fractional COO and head of tech for a venture-funded solar startup, showcasing his ability to balance multiple high-impact roles. Ken, welcome to Talking with the Experts. I am excited to find out how you bootstrapped this business and how you're making a profit already. Thank you. 

 Ken | 01:24
Yeah, thank you, Rose. So I think this was a classic one of, Something that was never really meant to be a business. It was, I had a health issue for about 10 years, and it was a very big passion of mine. And I decided to create a sub Slack about it in the summer of last year. 
 So about a year ago. And I was just writing that. 
 And then a couple of posts did really well. And then a friend of mine was like, hey, Ken, like, why not just sell? 
 You know, if you think a mouth guard is going to help, just create one and sell it. So I quickly went to Alibaba, saw something that was relatively cheap, did the minimum MOQ of like two or three hundred. And just would. I created like a very basic Shopify site and linked to it from my sub Slack. And sure enough, Like one of my next posts went semi-viral on Substack and we were selling, like we sold out almost. And I was like, wow, these things actually sell. 
 So why don't I double down? And so we, you know, we were more and then we designed our own one. And, you know, and now we're about nine, 10 months on and we sell. Probably around 400 a day now. Shopify has been the oldest channel. But TikTok shop has been explosive. 
 Like, I almost think we could do a million dollars a month just on shop, just on TikTok shop US. Like, it's crazy what's happening on TikTok shop. And we're just trying to keep up like the biggest issue we have is not growth. It's just where do we get the cash like working capital? 
 So that's, but yeah, and it's been profitable every month except one. And I'm kind of the sole employee. 
 So I work in this way that everyone's a freelancer and I just pay them for what they do. So, and it works quite well. 

 Rose | 03:23
So what is Reviv? What does it do? 

 Ken | 03:28
So this is what's interesting about it and why I think it's done quite well is Reviv itself. We sell two different mouth cards and they're kind of like, They almost look like boxing guards, but they're more for sleeping and protecting your teeth and anti-clenching and grinding. And you'll find a lot of mouth cards that are relatively similar on Amazon or wherever. There's nothing new about selling a mouth card like this. But what is new is my story. And my story was the one that, you know, 10 years ago, 11 years ago in 2014, I had TMJ, I was diagnosed with TMJ in 2013. And I had been given like a dental splint from my dentist and I chewed through it. And I just moved to Vietnam and I went to a new Vietnamese dentist, and I asked him to make a new one, and the new one didn't work quite the same. 
 And then he asked me, like, hey, he was a TMJ expert, and he said, hey, let me adjust your contacts or your teeth. And I let him do it as I was checking my phone. I didn't think anything of it. And he like drilled quite a bit off my teeth. My cusps of the back teeth. And I'd say within a month, I had brain fog so thick. That I couldn't retain any information. And I was 37, right? 
 Like I'd been an adult for quite a while and lived my life relatively healthy and everything. And then the single incident, like, So I couldn't retain any information. I had asked to be demoted two levels of my job and I was still awful because I just, you know, like if you told me something was out of my head. Two minutes later, it was Carrie. But I became like, I went from a social guy my entire life to being a hermit. And my neck and my body changed. I looked like I'd aged about 10 years in like two months. And I stayed like that for about six months. 
 And then it was my journey trying to figure out why did this happen? Like, why are my teeth so important? How did that trigger? And I figured it out after almost a decade of going up and down, as I was trying different things on myself. And I realized that like the way your teeth come together are very important for human health in general and that wearing a simple mouth guard has a massive health benefits beyond just protecting your teeth or keeping you from clenching or grinding. 
 You know, there's over 20,000 people that bought a mouth guard from us. We have hundreds of you know, Screenshot of testimonials of people fixing things like Your crazy things like people coming out of OCD, people coming out of ADHD, people coming out of... 
 Like I have one guy that pretty much fixed dementia. People are trying to fix cancer. 
 And then lots of people that have already fixed sleep apnea, like brain fog. I think we've killed brain fog about 30 times. We haven't lost against brain fog once. It sounds crazy. And it's really just a mouth guard. But... It's this story and teaching people that like, and The other thing is it straightens your teeth. All right, so just wearing a simple mouth guard will expand your palate. Which a lot of youngsters want, and it'll straighten your teeth the natural way, whereas braces and aligners are really damaging. 
 So we're educating about people about that. And probably like 30, 40% of people are just like people that were damaged by braces or liners or and are now fixing it with us and have even straighter and more aligned teeth. 
 So, yeah, it's like this education that a simple mouth guard does a lot more, which is behind... Why we're growing like this. 

 Rose | 06:58
It's an online shop basically that sells these mouth guards. 

 Ken | 07:03
Well, I would say that we're a bit more. So we're a paid community. 
 So the reason that I'm able to collect all this data, is we have a school community which has a little less than 2000 people, so we sell paid access. It's about $10 a month. And so people are sharing their stories and that's where I get all these testimonials and things. 
 And then people can pay for me to track their journal. So about 1600 people have paid for me to track their journal. And every week I read their journal entries because they're It's kind of like it's a lot harder than you would think to sleep with a mouth guard. 
 Like, you know, your teeth hurt, your gums hurt. You start having headaches, all these things happen. You got to just like coach them through it. 

 Rose | 07:44
Yeah, okay. So I guess starting bootstrapping, which maybe people don't know what bootstrapping is, but that It's where you start with no money and you just sit there. That way he's damed. 
 Yeah. Right. 
 So how did you go about doing this other than your sub Slack articles and opening a shop? What else did you do to be able to generate a profit so quickly? 

 Ken | 08:13
So I mean, it was a part-time business and I was doing this fractional COO role that you mentioned. So that was keeping the bigger income coming in. 
 You know, so I could make sure that I didn't have to like live off my savings or something. So I would say that took the pressure off, right? 
 And then like, My only costs were the cost of a Shopify site, you know, the most basic plan was the cost of the inventory. And then I wasn't even paying for ads at the beginning because my Substack was free. 
 So... You know right from the first month even though our sales were not huge we were profitable And then when I bought more and more, We started doing paid ads on Meta, but they were profitable. 
 So, you know, even like when we were running things through ads, they were profitable on the first order. So as soon as we saw, wow, like, We can advertise this thing and make profit on the first order. 
 Like, then you can just scale. Then it became a question of, like, how much can we scale just on meta? And we kind of like plateaued. 
 And then we said, all right, let's look at TikTok shop, let's look at Amazon in the US. And now we're on all those channels. And so it was just this gradual kind of testing with relatively low amount of money and me using very inexpensive labor, like people from, you know, Pakistan and Philippines, mainly to do some of the operational work like customer support and pushing out content. 
 So this is kind of how we did it. And one thing I think is interesting. 
 So I had been contracting for four or five years And I was this fractional COO. So I had implemented into a VC backed company. Start up in the Philippines, this system that I've been using where we use ClickUp, which is this Australian like project management tool. And so the way I've been running teams for a number of years, which is how I run Reviv, is that we use a system that I called everything is a task. And so literally everything in the company, like ClickUp is this, you know, like folder structure. And we have things for marketing, for sourcing, for operating, all these different buckets. And anything that anyone does in the company is a task. That gets assigned and then like there's a status and then the other world is like anytime anyone works on a task, it needs to be an update to the task usually as a comment, and I'm following those updates. And so by using this system. They allocate time and therefore cost to these tasks. And I don't pay for any latency. I don't have like any employees. I don't pay anyone to set them out. And it ends up being super efficient. We don't have any meetings. 
 Like, the other thing is, our rule is we don't invest into relationships or culture. Which is very antithesis because I'd grown up in the corporate world and I'd seen how like I used to work in these big offices and people would hate each other. And I might even like, there'd be like two people. I knew them both. They were great people and they would hate each other. And like, that would affect the old, like how the whole office worked and like who took sides on why it was awful. And I was like, when I build my own companies, I'm going to get rid of this thing. And nobody's going to know each other because Politics for me are a weed that grows on this fertile soil called relationships. And if nobody has a relationship, like there's no weed called politics. 
 So that's how we operate. 

 Rose | 11:27
All right. It's an interesting concept because, you know I used to do some... At Tool Scene 4, for a company in Melbourne and they, you know, you had to be at a meeting every morning and, you know, you had to tell where you'd... 
 You know, where you, what kind of work you'd done and how you'd progressed with a particular task. And it was really time consuming. You just couldn't get on with your day without going to this meeting first. And To me, I found that I couldn't work because I was being micromanaged. And there's nothing worse than being micromanaged. 
 You know, you just can't get on with your day. And so your concept sounds absolutely brilliant. 

 Ken | 12:14
- Yeah, and I would say like, There's two sides to this, right? One is that I sit in no meetings, neither does anyone else, which is great. 
 Like I used to sit in, I was like a pretty senior person in a couple of companies and I would sit in meetings like 90% of my day. I wouldn't get anything done. And meanwhile, like things are just, you know, backlogging up, sitting, waiting for you. But the other thing is, About micromanagement, I've managed teams for 20-something years. I've managed hundreds of people the old way, and now I've managed hundreds of people this new way the last four or five years. I get so much more detail about what they do. 
 So in some ways, like you can look at like, I'm micromanaging times 100, because the rule is everything is a task. Any work anyone in the company does is a comment. 
 So they literally have to account for everything they've done. And I'm following most of it. But when you find out, when you operate this way for a while. 
 Like people love it, you know, like, It's almost kind of rewarding when you do work, you put in a comment. I do what's called micro adjusting. If you're kind of starting to slow down a certain path or you have a question, there's no point like you don't. You just put in a comment like, hey, I'm not sure whether I should do this or that. I'm clearing my. Notifications pretty much real time, like every hour or two. 
 So they get unblocked and they don't waste their time doing the wrong thing. And nobody does something that is not prioritized because that used to happen all the time in these big companies. 
 Like someone's working on something that's not that important. Now, like it's very clear, like a status either prioritized or it's in backlog. 
 So I know that all the money I'm spending is creating value. Like I'm not paying a single salary cent on something that's not prioritized and creating value. 

 Rose | 13:52
Yeah, I think maybe some people could take a leaf out of your book, perhaps. 

 Ken | 13:58
I like, I'm telling you, I consider myself a decent manager the old way. But you couldn't drag me kicking and screaming to work the other way. 
 Like, I think I could like there's not a single manager I've worked for or with. That using this system, I don't think I could blow them out. 
 Like, it's just like different level. I'm like, dealing with so many different things. I can manage like 40 people at the same time. Without even like going home on time. It's crazy, man. 

 Rose | 14:23
Absolutely. Maybe you could sell that concept. 

 Ken | 14:28
Yeah, I mean, I decided I thought about doing that. Like, this is why I kind of did sell that concept, right? 
 Like I, the reason that they hired me as the fractional CEO at this venture backed, you know, they raised a couple million dollars. Was to implement the system and it worked great. 
 You know, of course, I didn't have full like there was a CEO so I could I didn't have the full Leaverage, so I didn't do it exactly the way I wanted but like I've implemented this in tech companies in Southeast Asia a few times. And it's worked great, but like, It never worked as well as when I had my own company. I could do it exactly the way I want. And so now I just, he's like, all right, I can either like, charge a relatively small amount to other people.. To implement this system in their company, or I can create like, I plan to create Reviv into like at least $100 million company. 
 Like I'll get a lot more value doing this than like teaching a bunch of other people to do. 

 Rose | 15:20
It. Absolutely. Absolutely. If you want to find out more about Reviv, you want to go to Ken's website at get Reviv.com saying, and get Revivd, Reviv is the R E V I V. 
 So you don't put an E on the end, but otherwise you won't find it. So go get Reviv.com or you can find Ken on LinkedIn. Now you want to share something and promote something from your website. Came. 

 Ken | 15:47
No, I think people like if you have, if you're interested in the health stuff, you know, I have a sub Slack. So Reviv reviv.substack.com. I think there's a lot of interesting articles and that's kind of like where to wet your feet and see if this is applicable to you. 

 Rose | 16:01
Wonderful. Thanks for sharing about your concept about work and how you bootstrap this business, because it is very interesting. Thanks for joining me. 

 Ken | 16:11
Thank you, Rose. 

 Outro | 16:13
You've been listening to Talking With The Experts, hosted by Rose Davidson. Make sure you have a look at our back catalogue over at talkingwiththeexperts.com. And be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don't miss out on any episode. We look forward to your company next time.