My professional goals and dreams center around preserving the integrity of Asian medicine and expanding it to have a positive impact in society, while creating stable opportunities for practitioners. My experiences growing up in San Francisco, in the outer Sunset, a predominantly Asian neighborhood, greatly influenced my purpose and direction. My mother’s from Bangkok, Thailand, and my father, an Italian American, has been chronically ill for most of my life. My family primarily used Asian medicine in the home growing up. Since a young age I have been passionate about eastern medicine as a vehicle to make a positive impact in my community. I have studied martial arts since age 7, and as a teenager I began to informally study traditional Asian medicine. This led to many years in acupuncture school as an adult, where I gained a deep knowledge of acupuncture, herbs, qi gong and Chinese practical nutrition. I have focused my career on creating opportunities for my fellow Asian medicine practitioners and the people I grew up with. In the last 15 years, I have traveled around the U.S. and the world, studying different community and business models on a shoestring budget. Being resourceful and learning from people with varied backgrounds has been invaluable as I have integrated lessons learned into concrete strategies to improve my hometown. Out of this accumulated knowledge and experience I have developed a structure of a business and community model based in natural medicine.
Great Health is a Traditional Asian Medicine company focused on providing Corporate Wellness packages designed to improve the overall health, productivity, and innovation of our client companies. Our Holistic Wellness Plans draw from the 5 Branches of Traditional Asian Medicine: Acupuncture, Asian Bodywork Therapy, Chinese Herbal Medicine, Eastern Nutrition and Movement Arts. We work to integrate our Wellness Services directly into the workplace. We started Great Health in 2012 to create sustainable opportunities for practitioners who are often underpaid, and because we saw the need for direct human connection—a human touch, someone to listen—within the corporate setting. Our clients are companies, ranging from 200-500 employees, generally in the tech, legal, accounting, and advertising industries. Over our three years in existence we have proudly stayed true to our values, choosing to take our time to build our company with integrity rather than jumping at just any financial opportunity. We put the health of our team and our clients before profit for profit’s sake. We have encountered challenges as we work to convert Traditional Asian Medicine into the corporate setting, while preserving the integrity of the medicine. Looking forward, we aim to launch in San Francisco this Winter, 2015 and relaunch in Chicago in 2016. We are developing long lasting relationships with our clients to create happier, healthier workplaces, and ultimately be a leader in the field of Asian medicine.
This loan will allow us to launch the company after 3 years of painstakingly building the team and the structure while staying true to our vision and values.
$1000 – Set up the business entity
$2000 – Web Development to update our website and make it more interactive so that we are more attractive to potential clients and more user-friendly
$2000 – Insurance necessary to operate our business professionally – we’ve gone through a painstaking 2-year process to secure a comprehensive quote that addresses our needs properly
$2000 – Hire Administrative Help (we have someone already lined up) – this will free me up to manage other aspects of the business and ensure that our clients are well taken care of
$2000 – Hire Operations & Management Help (we have someone already lined up who we’ve been training quite in-depth and would like to bring on as a partner. This money will allow him to not be dependent on his other employment so that he can focus more on working with us as we launch)
$1000 – Equipment (we still need a couple more chairs and a few more uniforms to have a full allotment. This is to provide a better environment for our practitioners so that they don’t need to transport their own chairs and save the wear and tear as well. It also ensures a level of quality for our clients)