Beyond Hormones, The Business of Wellness
Running a hormone or wellness clinic is rewarding — but let’s be honest, it can also feel overwhelming. That’s where Beyond Hormones: The Business of Wellness comes in.
Hosted by Jody Layne, co-founder of Accelerated Medical Practices, this podcast is here to help providers build thriving, profitable practices without losing sight of why they started. With over a decade of experience in marketing, sales, and business development — and after working with hundreds of clinics — Jody brings both expertise and encouragement to every episode.
You’ll hear candid conversations with clinic owners who’ve been in your shoes, expert interviews with professionals who share tools and wisdom to help your practice grow, and Jody’s own insights from years of working behind the scenes in the hormone industry.
If you’re ready to feel more confident, more supported, and a little less alone on the journey of business ownership, you’re in the right place.
Beyond Hormones, The Business of Wellness
Ep #72 - A Tribute to Jack Latvala: The Hardest Job I Ever Loved
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This is not our usual episode.
On my mom's birthday — twelve years after losing her — I found out my first boss and my mentor, Jack Latvala, had passed away. I hadn't spoken to him in over twenty-five years. But the second I heard, twenty-five years of memories came flooding back, because this man is one of the reasons I'm an entrepreneur at all.
Jack Latvala was a former Florida state senator and political power broker, and before any of that — the man who hired a twenty-two-year-old copywriter he'd never met off a single phone call. He was also, by every definition, a tough, demanding, sometimes inappropriate boss who taught me more about business, integrity, and building a career than almost anyone else in my life.
In this episode, I'm telling you the stories: the intercom scream that changed how I work forever, the $100,000 mistake that taught me about honesty and checks and balances, the campaign nights that taught me how to celebrate a win, and the complicated truth about a man who was both generous and deeply flawed.
This isn't a hormone clinic episode. It's not a business tactics episode. It's a tribute — and an honest look at how the people who shape us rarely fit into neat categories.
What we cover:
The 1992 phone call that started it all
Why "failure is not an option" almost broke me — and what it built instead
The $100,000 envelope mistake and the lesson in ownership
How Jack quietly took care of his lowest-paid employees
Learning to be "at choice" instead of a victim
The complicated, honest truth about his legacy
We'll be back to our regular programming next week. Thanks for listening to this one with me.
This podcast is powered by Accelerated Medical Practices, where we believe hormone and wellness care should be both life-changing and profitable. If you own or run a clinic and are interested in being a guest on the show, please complete the form here and let's connect! Or email Jody at Jody@AcceleratedMedicalPractices.com.
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Welcome to Beyond Hormones, the Business of Wellness, the podcast for hormone and functional medicine providers who want a thriving, predictably profitable practice, and maybe a little less stress along the way. Hi, I'm your host, Jody Lane, and I've worked with lots of clinics in marketing, sales, and business development, and I have seen what works and what doesn't. And here's what I believe hormone and wellness care should be available to everyone who wants it. And while providers know the medicine, many struggle with the business side of their cash practice. And that's where I come in. See, this podcast is here to share real strategies, real stories, things you can implement in your practice right away. So I am so glad you're here. Come on, let's go. Hey everybody, it's Jodi here from Beyond Hormones. And this episode is going to be different, so bear with me for a few minutes. I'm going to tell you a story. In the last week of my senior year at Stetson University, I'm standing in the political science department office, not my major, but I was waiting on my friend Jake Bever because we were going to go grab lunch that day. The phone rings. Someone in the office picks it up and calls out, Does anyone in here need a job after graduation? Well, I said, I do. And that was it. That was my entire audition. A Stutson alum was on the other end of that call looking for a copywriter at a political direct mail firm that he owned. I knew nothing about politics. Nothing. Luckily for me though, Jake ran the Student Republican Party Committee at our school, so we spent that lunch with him cramming me on everything from party platform to who's who, handing me reading material like it was about to be my final exam. Well, I walked into that interview a few days later, completely underprepared. And I remember thinking to myself, even just sitting in that room for the first 10 minutes, that something about the way this man carried himself told me that this was going to be the hardest job of my life. Well, he offered me the job on the spot. I was 21 years old, bright-eyed, and I had no idea what I was walking into. That was the beginning of my relationship with Jack Latvala. Now I'm telling you this story because last week, on my mother's birthday, a woman who's been gone for 12 years now, I found out that Jack passed away. I hadn't spoken to him in over 25 years. I actually don't stay close with many of the people from that chapter of my life, but somehow within 12 hours, several people reached out and told me about his passing. So this episode has nothing to do with hormone therapy or growing a cash pay practice, but it does have everything to do with how I became the entrepreneur who built a practice. See, Jack Lat Valda is one of the reasons that I run a business the way that I run it today. And I think there's something here for you too. Even if you've never worked a single day in Florida politics. All right, let me back up and give you the picture. The company was called Direct Mail Systems. It actually still exists today. And it's run by my dear friend Michael Milligan. We did direct mail for political action committees, state Republican parties, candidates up and down every ballot imagined. Now remember, this is 1990s, so Republican Party looked a little bit different. Also, remember there was no internet. Of course, there was no AI. So my first job as a copywriter, and uh the man I reported to at the time, Mike Poczak, told me repeatedly that I was a terrible writer. So after a few months, I got moved to account executive, which in that company really meant project manager. I was responsible for every aspect of a direct mail job, from copy to design to print to mailhouse, all the way to the mailbox. Every piece, every design that was assigned to me, my responsibility. I worked 10-hour days, six days a week. I didn't know if I worked more than the average project manager. I had nothing to compare it to. That was just Jack. You see, Jack Latvala had the highest standards of anyone I'd ever met up to that point. He knew his business cold, genuinely, deeply knew it. And candidates all across the state fought to get him on their campaign because if Jack Latvala was on your team, there was a really good chance you were going to win. Here's the thing about Jack, though, failure was not in his vocabulary. These days, I talk to my clients all the time about failure. It's data. You fail, you learn, you adjust, you get better. But that is not how Jack operated. Mistakes were not an option. And he had a temper to match that standard. I remember it was just my first couple of months working there. He told me to do something. I needed a phone number, and instead of digging up a phone book, remember, there was no internet, no cell phone, no computer sitting on my desk. I made the mistake of asking his secretary, Sherry. Now he heard me and he came out of his office yelling, why are you asking her? She hasn't have time for you. Go figure it out for yourself. Well, I went and I tried again, but it still wasn't fast enough for him, and he started in on me a second time. I ran back to my office almost in tears, and I could hear him pounding down the hallway toward my door. And I know he could hear me crying through it because he turned around and he went back to his office. But instead of dropping it, he picked up his phone, called me on the intercom, and continued to scream at me. Now, I know that how that sounds, and I'm not going to sit here and tell you that any of that was fine because it wasn't fine. But here's what happened inside of me. Underneath the tears, in the exact moment when I heard him screaming, I decided right then and there that I was never going to put myself in that position again to be caught unprepared. So from that day forward, I do complete work. I don't cut corners. I find my own answers before I go looking for someone else's time to give them to me. Now I'm a huge believer in collaboration, but guys, there is a difference between collaboration and laziness. And Jack, he taught me that difference. Yes, the hard way at 22 years old through an intercom. Would I recommend that management styles to a single practice owner listening to this now? No, absolutely not. But I'd be lying to you if I said it didn't work on me. All right, here's another one. After some time, I got promoted. I got bigger clients. And one time I ordered a hundred thousand return envelopes for the Republican Florida Party fundraising mailer. And I ordered the wrong kind. I ordered the postage paid version, which meant the party was going to be on the hook to cover postage for every single envelope that got sent back. And that was not in their budget. And reprinting all of that was going to cost the company thousands of dollars. And I did not have thousands of dollars. And at 22, it could have been millions of dollars. So after a long night of thinking, I decided I was going to walk in the next morning with my resignation letter already written. I got to the office like before seven. I walked into Jack's office. And remember, this was a man who did not receive bad news calmly. And I said, Jack, I need to tell you what happened. Here's what I did. Here's what it's going to cost. And I can't fix it. So here's my resignation. For all you longtime listeners, you know how much I love working in the hormone clinic space. And I want every one of you to have the best clinic possible. So if it's okay with you, I'm going to pause this podcast for just one quick second and share quickly about a product of ours that I think is going to make a real difference for you. And it's called Practice Automation System. Now, first I want to share something that I had to learn the hard way. If you're struggling to get patients, your marketing probably isn't the problem. It's what happens between when someone raises their hand interested and actually gets someone on the phone. That's where the problem lies. That's where most clinics are losing money and they don't even know it. Does this sound familiar? A lead fills out your form. Your front desk is busy taking care of patients, so they get back to them in a few hours or maybe the next day. They call the lead once. They don't pick up, so they leave a voicemail and they move on. The person never calls back, the lead goes cold, and your ad spend just vanishes into thin air. Practice Automation System is the solution that we built to solve this exact issue. Within five minutes of someone filling out a form, the leak gets a text. They get nurtured by email for as long as it takes, and your team gets assigned follow-up tasks based on how much time has gone by so that they never let anything fall through the cracks. We have used this foundation of this system inside my own clinic, where we grew to over a thousand patients, four providers, and 23 staff members in just seven years. So you know what? We know this works because we've used it ourselves and we have helped clinics all over the country roll it out too. To find out if Practice Automation System is the right fit for your clinic, just go to accelerated medical practices.com slash automation. That's accelerated medical practices.com slash automation. All right, let's get back to the show. Well, he sat back in his chair and he said, Thank you for coming to me. I already knew. Go back to your desk. We'll reprint them. I'll handle it. Two things landed for me in that moment that I still teach today. Number one, slow down. Working fast is not an excuse for working sloppy. That's why I always talk about checks and balances all the time with clinic owners. You can fix a bad social post in five seconds, but you cannot fix a hundred thousand printed envelopes. Some mistakes don't have an undo button. So build the checks and balances in before you need them. All right, number two, honesty is the whole game. If I would have gone in there and blamed someone else, if I had been looking for a loophole to hide behind, Jack would have lost it. And I probably would have lost that job in a second. Instead, I walked in head up, owned it completely and offered the only solution I actually had. And that's not what happened. Not the mistake, the ownership part of it. And I want to tell you a different side of Jack because this job, it would make me physically sick some Sunday nights, just thinking about going in on Monday. And in that same building, during our busiest seasons, the hourly workers, the ones running the folding machines and the cutting machines, people with genuinely hard lives, some of them on food stamps, some single moms with zero support. Jack would walk through that back room, busy as we were, and hand out $100 bills. If one of those employees ended up in the drunk tank on a DUI, which happened on occasion, Jack was their first phone call and he would go bail them out of jail. I didn't clock it at the time because I was young. But that was my first real education in something I now say in almost every episode of this show. Culture matters more than any product you sell. We had people running those machines for 20 years, doing genuously unglamorous work for modest pay. And they stayed because loyalty is a two-way street. And Jack, for all of his hard edges, held up his end of it. Now, fast forward a couple of years, and Jack decided to run for the state senate. And I became his unofficial campaign manager. Although I never really got the title, I used to joke to say that I should have just been called his campaign slave because that's closer to the truth. On call, I was on call every hour of the day, every day, seven days a week. A phone call at 11 p.m. on a Sunday night because he changed his mind about something, in the office by 8 a.m., out by 11 at night, no thank yous, no time for gratitude because there was no time to do anything but focus on the campaign. I was actually furious about that arrangement for a very long time. I thought, how dare he treat me like that? It took me leaving the business. I couldn't see it while I was inside of it. Maybe I was too young, maybe I was too involved. But when I finally walked away, I realized that I was at choice. Jack never apologized for who he was. He was a winner, and winners do whatever it takes. He offered me, this young girl, an opportunity, and I took it. So I was gonna sit there afterwards and complain about the terms, and I kept doing it? Absolutely not. I chose to be there. And some of the things you choose in life aren't fun, they're not comfortable. But if you choose them, and that distinction is everything because being at choice gives you peace. Not being at choice makes you a victim. Yes, I was a victim plenty of times in that office because I was young and I didn't know better. But once I understood being at choice, I've used it in every single area of my life since. It's the difference between resenting something and being grateful for it. I also learned to celebrate the wins with Jack. I learned that the night Jack won the primary. See, we were all crammed into this restaurant in Palm Harbor, the one him and his wife at the time practically lived at. And we were waiting on results from someone who was stationed at the supervisor of elections office because, again, remember, there was no internet. And the second the news came in that he won, every single person who had worked for that man through every ounce of yelling and hardship forgot every bit of it for at least an hour. And we just felt pure joy. We earned that hour. Now, Jack ended up winning the general election too, but we didn't know that at the time. But we celebrated the primary like it was already over because we worked our asses off and we felt like we deserved it. I think about that a lot now. Everyone in entrepreneurship talks about the grind. No one talks about stopping to actually enjoy the milestones as you are hitting them. Now, not everything about Jack softens with time, and I'm not gonna pretend that it does. I remember working a mandatory Saturday over Labor Day weekend with a hurricane bearing down on Florida. It was going to be my first hurricane without the safety of my family around the corner. We were all required to be at work on Saturday, or you're gonna lose your job full stop, no matter what you need to do to prep for your house. And I was so annoyed about that. But in the same breath of that selfishness, Jack came to me and he said, Look, if you're scared, I'm gonna pay for a hotel room so that you feel safe. That was Jack. Give and take, always both hands at once. I left direct mail systems after he won that Senate seat. He actually asked me to go to Tallahassee with him, but I just couldn't do it. I'd seen enough of that world by then to know that it wasn't where my values lived. So I went and I worked somewhere else for a while. Then I came back when his friend Rocky took over the company. And eventually, Jack again, because he took over direct response marketing, a company in Orlando. And that's where I met Chuck Barnett. Chuck was the company's president. Now, when I first got there, Chuck and I could not stand each other. Then one day we realized how much we actually had in common, and we ended up leaving together to start our own agency, Barnett and Murphy. Now, I've talked about that company on a several occasions, so you may remember that. We grew that company to over $3 million. And because of that company, I hired a guy named Jamie Lane. And if that last name sounds familiar to you, it's because, yes, he's my husband. So Chuck is responsible in a very large way for a huge piece of my life. And Chuck would never have been in that building if Jack hadn't taken over direct response marketing. It's a straight, unbroken line from a phone call in college, from a phone call in a college office in 1992 to the family that I have today in 2026. And that is not something that I take lightly. He was unemotionally logical, sharp on policy. And underneath the bravado, he genuinely cared whether things were fair for regular people. And he also, by his own admission and by plenty of others, treated people, especially women, in ways that what I want to be honest with you about the rest of it too, because you're gonna hear this if you go looking to do some research on Jack. His political career ended up in a little bit of a disgrace. There were allegations of misconduct toward women when he ran for governor. And I'm not gonna sit here and say that it wasn't true because I was a young woman working in Florida politics in the early 1990s, and I watched how a lot of very powerful men treated women at the time. And it wasn't okay. But both things can be true at once. Jack would have made such an incredible governor. He was smart and unemotionally logical. He was sharp on policy. And underneath that bravado, he genuinely cared whether things were fair for all people. And he also, by his own admission and by plenty of others, treated people, especially women, in ways that don't hold up today and maybe shouldn't have held up back then. And I'm not telling you this story to defend him. I'm telling you this story because he's a real, complicated, difficult, generous, brilliant, flawed human being who happened to be standing on the other end of a phone call the week I graduated college, and he changed the entire trajectory of my life. You don't get to pick the parts of a person's impact on you. You get all of it or none of it. So if you stuck with me this long, first of all, I want to say thank you. You don't know Jack Latvella, so not quite sure why you stayed. And you know, most of you are never going to, right? And it's not gonna change a single thing about your Thursday. But he changed everything about my life. I would not be a podcast host, I would not be an entrepreneur, I would not be sitting here today talking to you if I hadn't been standing in that office on that particular afternoon when a stranger asked if anyone needed a job. So to everyone I worked alongside at Direct Mail Systems, I hope your lives are good. I love you and I miss those years with you. To Jack's family, his children, his grandchildren, I'm so sorry for your loss. Thank you for sharing him with the rest of us for as long as you did. And Jack, thank you for who you were in my life. Thank you for the legacy you left behind, all of it. The parts that were hard to watch, and the parts that built me. I'm going to miss you. We'll be back to our regular programming next week. Thank you for listening to me, guys. Take care of each other out there. Thank you for listening to Beyond Hormones, the business of wellness. I hope that you're walking away with fresh ideas and real strategies you can use to grow your practice with profit and purpose. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to follow the show so you never miss a conversation. And if something you heard today resonated with you, do me a favor, share this episode with a friend or colleague. It's one of the best ways you can support the show, and it might be exactly what they need to hear right now. If you want even more tools and support, go ahead and head over to accelerated medical practices.com. Until next time, keep doing the work that matters. Your patients need you, and I am cheering you along every step of the way.