From Sales Pressure to Wellness Purpose: Building a Business That Gives You Control and Impact

Free Agent Podcast with Meg Schmitz – Guest: Jonathan Chizever, Hydrate IV Bar Franchise Owner

Meg Schmitz
Welcome to or welcome back to for you regulars, the Free Agent Podcast.

Many of you know me already, my name is Meg Schmitz. The discussion here is all about free agency and taking control over your financial future. The mission of my show is to share inspiring conversations with real people who took the leap into self employment, business ownership, franchising and freedom. From corporate refugees and executives tired of the desk job, to entrepreneurs and investors looking to share camaraderie and inspiration through their own business journey. My podcast aims a spotlight on real people who stepped into the unknown took control over their destiny and became their own boss.

Today I have the thrill, the pleasure of having Jonathan Chizever join me. Just a couple of interesting tidbits here. I recently interviewed your business partner, your partner, partner, Sahara. And so we had a lovely conversation about Hydrate IV Bar. And I am now a founding member of your location in Madison.

Jonathan Chizever
Happy to have you. 

Meg
And so as Sahara and I were talking, she said, oh my gosh, you’ve got to talk to Jonathan. There’s so many interesting overlaps with our, I think with our careers and our personal interests. So by way of introduction, because I don’t do much of an intro of you, why don’t you talk a bit about who you are, what you do and how is it because we didn’t work together with your franchise investment, how is it that you and Sahara fell into the… Well, I guess she did tell that story, but you tell it from your point of view. How did you fall into business ownership? 

Jonathan 
I love that. Seeing the same story from different angles.

So, yeah, I, I won’t bore you with my whole life story, but for a lot of it, when I was young, I always thought I would go into law. And so then I was at school. At a certain point, familial financial situation dictated that I had to just drop out and figure it out. And so I’m in the process of figuring out, slash doing that. And I’ve been in sales my entire adult life. So I from there hopped into jewelry sales. Then for the last seven years or so, I sold cars and now I’m selling drugs legally.

And it’s really exciting.

Meg 
okay, so one of the hardest jobs in the world, and I don’t know anybody who says, oh, I love buying cars, but that it molds you into the type of person. So you’re, you’re very socially engaged and I think most current car or even jewelry salespeople.

Jonathan 
Yeah.

Meg 
You’re engaging, you’re solving a problem. I think jewelry sales is kind of exciting because get people who are coming in and maybe they’re getting engaged or whatever, and it’s, it’s more fun probably than cars.

With you and Sahara now moving into business ownership, just give me a little, a little history on. Did, did you want to own your own business? Is this DNA? Is it in your genetic code?

Jonathan 
So I wouldn’t say it’s in my genetic code. Throughout my family, there’s maybe a little bit of business ownership actually of any family members of which I’m aware none of them own franchises. And so this just kind of naturally progressed. And I, you know, I think it’s poetic and really cool in a way that our stories and where we came from are so different and we both arrived at exactly where we’re supposed to be, which is the same.

Sahara, of course, she’s incredibly intelligent and I don’t think I’m dumb, but, you know, my grades never quite reflected, certainly the academic success, which she has worked hard and earned. And so I’ve, you know, like worked in, like I said, always sales. And for Sahara, she has had different experiences in sales, but they’ve been quite different than, you know, what I’ve done.

With any form of sales, if you’re doing it ethically, I believe that you’re basically solving a puzzle, like figuring out what is going to help someone achieve what they want to achieve, that you have access to, to help them achieve it, and then helping them overcome their own decision thresholds for moving forward with that. And so, you know, that’s what I’ve done for basically in my entire adult life.

So with Hydrate, we both had kind of, from different perspectives, this idea brewing up before we had even talked about it together, because it’s something… And a little bit more backstory is like, I’ve had a lot of family in healthcare and she’s of course worked in Take the leap. And so we’ve both seen up close, without being necessarily fully inside of it, how our healthcare system is something that’s broken and there’s a lot of fabulous and truly well-meaning people within it, but it’s a system that is in and of itself pretty broken.

And so what I love about this business and what makes me so excited about it and able to sell it to people is that it’s just this positive and productive subversion of that system, allowing people to take control of their own health rather than having to wait until they’re feeling bad and interacting with that healthcare system. So with regard to specifically having my own business and doing my own thing, that I think came a little bit more naturally for me.

For Sahara, you know, she’s worked very hard at a number of different, very taxing jobs. And a lot of them she was working as hard as she is now, and she’s working insanely hard now, and they were paying well. You know, we’ve always been very fortunate, you know, always have to put things in perspective. But, I mean, for her input, she was not getting enough, at least financial output. And for me, you know, so that grew in her.

I feel like a little bit of… I don’t want to say disgruntled, but, like, it definitely bred the inclination towards doing her own thing. And then for me, I always worked like it was, again, a more natural progression. I started in an environment where, in jewelry sales, I had an hourly wage, and that was most of what I got paid. And then I’d get some pretty marginal commissions on what I sold.

And I really like jewelry. I really like cars, too. But if I had to pick, I think the jewelry was more fun, for sure. And then moving into cars, you know, that was… And fully commissioned. So I was guaranteed $7 an hour or so for hour that I was clocked in. So, you know, I mean, you can… I don’t know if you can call that much of a base. And then anything that I made was fully commissioned.

And so that, I feel like… And like you said, it really teaches you a lot of sales skills that are so universally applicable. And it also teaches you a lot about rejection, because I always joke with people to lighten the mood, that it’s like coming to the dentist, except there’s no laughing gas or anything to make it more pleasant. At the car dealership, the coffee was not that great. And so in that, it was kind of like running my own business within another business entirely, paid on what I produced and got out what I put into it.

And I was fortunate to be at a good place and doing that. And then from there, the progression to having a risk that was more than making no money. But losing my money was just natural because there’s greater risk and greater reward in doing your own thing and wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.

Meg
It is. It’s great to hear the backstory for both of you.

The… That disgruntled… It’s a word that you used with Sahara. And… And this is happening routinely, that I hear from people who are employed that they don’t want to be employed, they want to be self-employed.

They’re tired of the boss. They’re tired of… Well, in particularly for you in different commission jobs when they change your commission structure. Yeah. There’s nothing that will lose a good salesperson faster than them feeling like they’re getting screwed.

So now you’re going to be in control of the… I understand you’re under construction, is that correct?

Jonathan
Yes. So we’re almost completed with construction. Our completion date as it’s scheduled, which, fingers crossed, we have not run into any massive delays. Great thing about a first-generation space is that it’s a longer road, but it’s a more predictable one. We’re not finding any old pipes behind the walls that have to be replaced or anything like that. So then we are on track to open in March.

Meg 
Excellent. So you had mentioned, I think your family has history in healthcare.

Jonathan 
Yep.

Meg 
And you decided not to go into it. I have the same thing. My dad is a surgeon, my mom is a nurse, hospice nurse. And while I grew up with a very high touch patient care, I didn’t want to go into healthcare. What led you to not follow what your family’s… I was going to say your upbringing. 

Jonathan 
Yeah, no, absolutely. So my dad was a surgeon as well, actually, and so he’s since retired. But I saw growing up we moved different places and I mean we’re all imperfect human beings and he’s not either. But there’s a lot of great things about him.

And in his journey in healthcare, he would wind up, by no fault of his own, working in places where the healthcare systems were really broken. And I just saw how stressful it was. And you know, we’d move around different places because he would stick to his own morals and then wind up leaving one healthcare system to go to another and then find that it’s also broken. And I mean it’s really, it’s really an admirable job. And you know, there’s certainly people who do well in healthcare, but anyone who’s in healthcare always tells you like, oh, don’t get into this for the money.

And I mean, it’s hard to believe because, you know, I think of doctors and I think, you know, stability and they are comfortable and do well and that’s certainly attainable. But there’s a degree of that that’s outside your control. And in certain ways he was dealt not the best hand while doing a lot of the right things. And I never found myself gravitating towards that path.

So in addition to that, I also had a little bit of diagnosed ADD through school. So, you know, healthcare is also, you know, especially to become a doctor, very academically demanding. Yeah. And it’s a lot of school and it’s a lot of making no to little money before you come out and start making good money, while you’re also, with very rare exceptions, saddled with some massive debt.

Yeah. And I never saw that as an attractive endeavor, at least to me. And also I think that’s part of… You know, it’s funny, you hear so much about ADD and ADHD and its context in the business world, and it’s something that if people figure out how to harness and use productively, I mean, it’s just a slightly different way in which your mind works. And so that never did me well.

In school I’d always have great test scores and then very mediocre grades. And then in sales, it was perfect. Especially the short sales cycle things that I was engaged in. It’s like, oh, this has some immediate gratification, high dopamine. And a lot of things catch on fire.

And when everything’s on fire, that’s when I tend to do the best. So it can be troublesome with things such as doing laundry, which are not necessarily urgent or going to hurt anyone, but when you have to do things to help keep other people happy and keep them from being mad as well, then it makes it a little more urgent and gives you some incentive to figure it out. So I think I always thrived in that environment partly because of that specific way in which my mind’s always worked.

Meg
And so what is great for you, and it’s also been a nice byproduct for me. Neither one of us ended up going into healthcare, but we were raised to see…

And I did too. My gosh. My dad quit medicine because EPIC, because EPIC charting system came along. He’s old school. Want to do it his way. He was going to quit, which… So he, he, he signed off at the beginning of, I think 2001. Yeah. But I saw both of my parents struggling with healthcare, the healthcare system. I thought maybe like you, I don’t want to go into that, but I want to find a way to help people feel better in some way.

And so with what’s great for you, with hydrate and talk about all the different services, because there’s a myriad of ways for you to. And Sahara not to have the mantle of financial responsibility for medical school. But now here you’re able to help people like me, founding Hummer, to feel better?

Jonathan 
Absolutely. And we’re so excited. Now we have. Our nurses are not only licensed as they have been before we even met them, but signed off by our franchisor. They’re very intentional about the way that they open these spas and see too that they’re managed. So we’re incredibly fortunate that we found a wonderful franchise. And so now everything is. Even though our brick and mortar location is still in the oven, we are able to provide services. So you want to get an IV soon? We actually just had our first IV supplies arrive today. We have the ability to do injections now. And so we’re actually capable of providing services already which we could not be more excited about.

And so with everything we do there, it’s intended as a spa and it’s intended as a wellness product. It’s not intended, of course, there’s an intrinsic and important medical component to it, but it’s not intended to be overtly medical. And what I love about it, you know, like I said earlier, it just allows people to take charge of their own well being rather than having to wait and be reactive.

So we don’t even relative to what’s standard in our industry, we don’t have a myriad amount of offerings. Like, we have a pretty intentional menu.

It’s very common and I can only imagine. And so we have just IVs, vitamin injections, and all of our IVs and our nutrients that we do in either of these types of services. There’s stuff that’s already in your body, with the exception of two prescription meds that we use incidentally, if someone’s not feeling good. So it’s also stuff that we don’t get enough of. And I mean, if people are nutrient deficient, vitamin deficient, hydration deficient, all of us could drink more water and we don’t eat what our body’s designed for. This allows us to fill in the gaps of what modern life allows us to actually get into our bodies and what our bodies are designed for. And I just think it’s really beautiful in a way.

Meg
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the two of you were on vacation somewhere where you tried hydration. 

Jonathan 
That was part of our origin story. So, you know, as I mentioned, like, we’ve neither of us are from Wisconsin. We, we’ve been in Madison. I’ve been here 10 years, Sahara’s been here seven. So we’re more or less naturalized, but we’re also not native. And of course, you know, we’ve been fortunate to travel different places and where she’s from in Florida, this has become very popular. In California, it’s big. Arizona, it’s growing. Colorado, where the franchise is headquartered in, it’s becoming very popular.

And in Madison, we didn’t really see much of an offering for this. There’s some places and, you know, like I said, we don’t have myriad offerings. We have a pretty intentional menu. Most places that do this, it’s sort of an ancillary product and it’s offered along with Botox and all these different med spa products. And we have our hands so full with making sure that we intimately understand everything that we’re doing and how to do it correctly to the highest standard.

And if we were to do four times more things, I even pre-opening, I’d probably have no hair left. So we really just want to be intentional about what we do and then do it well.

So in Madison, as I mentioned, there hasn’t been much of an availability for this type of service. IVs. People have been trying to do IVs for about 400 years. I think the first attempts were in the 1600s. And then IVs in their current form as we know them have been around for roughly 100 years. And this particular type of business, because I like nerding out into the history of things. The first, from what I can understand and find and pouring through the Internet, the first iteration of this type of IV spa or IV bar was in Tokyo in around 2008, where, you know, people work immensely hard in Tokyo. The US is not an easy place to work, but it’s crazy over there.

And so naturally people were dehydrated, overworked and underslept. And the IVs can be beneficial in all of those circumstances. And I think that place has since closed. Then in the US and what this is traditionally associated with is, of course, hangovers, which it is fabulous for. Vegas was where the first one started to open up. Naturally, people, I’ve heard, can make bad decisions there. And so, you know, in our travels we’ve been aware of this.

Actually none of them hangovers, which we’ve certainly had in our day, but norovirus, food poisoning, just general being sick. Covid, all of these things IVs have helped save us from. And I feel like one of the flashpoints, or like our big bang of really pursuing this seriously, it actually was in Vegas. We were out there for a music festival and we were both a little bit sick before we were going. And, you know, we’re like, we’ve already spent the money, booked these tickets.

Like, let’s just mask up on the plane and, you know, be diligent not to get anyone else sick, but let’s go try and figure this out. And then one of the first things we did once we arrived was get some IVs, and immediately we felt better. And immediately we were just living a different existence than we were prior to having the IVs. And then we were able to enjoy the trip, have some wonderful memories, get to the music festival, do everything we planned on. And without the IVs, that would not have gone that way.

And so then once we got back, it’s also, I love traveling because you always get a little bit more of a perspective, and Vegas is certainly an interesting place. You just see so much. Like, there’s such a beautiful entirely of the spectrum of life. Like, you see, you know, and it’s really sad, but you see people on the streets, and then you see people that are just treating money as if it’s something that is in no way finite, all at the same time.

It was kind of a perspective checker for us. And, like, we never wanted to get into this just so we could make a bunch of money. Like, we. I firmly believe that you can’t sell anything that you don’t believe in. And you have to be passionate about a business if you want it to succeed enduringly.

And we. It kind of clicked for us. Like, we saw this is something we’re really passionate about. And we also have both had a lot of, you know, building feelings of wanting to do our own thing. And then from there, we started researching it more. More intentionally and with a lot more seriousness. Like, we kind of tossed around the idea, talking about it at times. And so then we started thinking about. At first, we’re like, okay, how do we start this? And then we’re like, franchise.

This is way too much to undertake. I could only imagine just starting your own hair salon, let alone an IV bar, where you need a medical director, registered nurses, different licenses have to adhere to medical compliance standards. It’s a lot. And so the franchise definitely made it much more attainable than it would have been if we decided to try and reinvent the wheel with this.

So we talked to basically every franchise out there for this. And after a lot of research, we found that this was just the perfect fit for what we were looking to do in terms of the vibe of the space, the intentionality of the menu, and also that one of the Founders has roots in Madison, even though the brand is based in Colorado. One of the owners of the franchise is actually from Sun Prairie, which is just right. Madison. And so we’re like, that’s just so full circle and so inescapable.

It’s amazing the way that it all just kind of fell together.

Meg 
The couple of examples from my personal life that have come up recently. I am 62. My hormones are, have fallen off a cliff. My doctor asked me at age 60 after doing my full blood workup to go and talk to my gynecologist about hormone replacement.

I just saw her the other day. I’ve been doing the Biot pellet insertion and so she was reading off my, my blood labs and she said, gosh, look at this. You’re really deficient in vitamin B12. Okay. And so I told her, I told her about you, about being a member.

She’s like, oh, this, you’re going to do hydration. This is, this is so good for your body. I said, story number two. I told her, last year my three year old dog was diagnosed with advanced chronic kidney disease. 

Jonathan
Oh no.

Meg 
And she’s at some point not gonna live. Well, I took her to Madison after my vet didn’t have more solutions for me. So I took her to the specialty clinic who prescribed, prescribed, recommended two different things. Yeah. And one of them was IV hydration.

So we do subcutaneous every other day. The rate she was going in October, she should have been dead by Thanksgiving. And she’s still alive today. That’s amazing. So I’ve seen just as you and Sahara experienced, it’s so simple and yet it is a phenomenal game changer to your health.

Simply hydration plus vitamins. And obviously there are other things that can be put in there, but it’s the simplest, most holistic way. Non invasive, non pharmaceutical. 

Jonathan
Yeah. 

Meg 
To take care of your health. And, and it doesn’t matter what your age is. Yeah.

Jonathan
It seems like such a no brainer. And it’s, I mean, it’s, it’s crazy. And that’s why we saw, especially with Madison, so, you know, like there’s generally two types of people that we see as clients for this business, one of which are people who feel bad and want to feel okay again and then people who feel good and want to feel optimized and so on the feel bad end, of course you have, you know, kind of the traditional stereotype of the hangovers, but then on the people who feel okay and want to feel better, the founder of the entire franchise, when she first started a hydrate. She. Well before she was, she was a Broncos cheerleader.

She saw all the guys in the team were doing these IVs all the time. This is like 10 years ago. So this was a common thing. Yeah. And so then she’s like, maybe I could do this.

And then, you know, two, three dozen stores later, people are doing it. And I mean, it is so simple. And it’s also, you know, like I don’t want to in any way portray myself as an expert, but I love reading into this stuff. And I think you have on one end of the spectrum people that are so anti modern western medicine and I think that’s unproductive. It’s like sometimes you need open heart surgery and it’s very important that you have a person who can do that.

And then on the other end of the spectrum you have the people who are so against anything that is like even vaguely outside the bounds of what’s been done for years and years. And I think that’s such a restrictive and unproductive way to approach things. And that’s what breeds the sort of reactive healthcare system that we have rather than something that genuinely allows people to be healthier. So you know what we do, I don’t see it as a replacement for ever having to go to the hospital. It’s something that can help you not have to go to the hospital as much.

And I don’t think anyone would want to go to the hospital more. And especially in Madison. Madison’s a very active city. We have the Ironman, we have, of course, college athletics. People ride their bikes when it’s negative five to work.

I mean, people are very active. And I’ve also heard there’s some drinking here. So I mean, it’s like it seemed like a no brainer that this should be all over the place here. And I mean we’re happy to see other places have opened up in the time that we’ve been on this journey where there’s. We have a very blue Ocean mindset.

There’s 700,000 people in the metro area here and I haven’t personally checked, but I believe all of them to have veins and I would guess most of them don’t drink enough water. So I mean there’s. It just seems like an abundance of opportunity with this business and way to really help people. 

Meg 

I am so excited. I’m actually going to be very close to Sun Prairie later on this afternoon for, for my own medical journey and I’m going to do everything I can for as long As I can to as you and I open this conversation. I don’t want knee replacement surgery, but something’s going to give at some point. But between, as you said, I feel, well, now I want to optimize what I’ve got for as long as I can. And that’s why between the gynecologist and the other surgeons and medical care, I don’t want to be that guy who’s in the hospital with. I came from medicine.

My. Dad, the doctor, my mom, the nurse. I’m. I’m anti medicine.

I think when you grow up and see it and how. How much of a disservice is done. Our, our systems are all backwards. In Asia and China, doctors, the whole role is reversed and the who. Who pays whom is completely different there.

But have you, have you traveled, have you been at all to China or Ben. To anybody who here in the United States who’s using any of the.

What’s the word I’m looking for? They’re like alchemists. They’re. 

Jonathan
Yeah, I know there’s like Reiki. I’m trying to think of the names for the other things.

Like there’s, I mean, Eastern medicine. It’s. It’s funny, it’s been around for thousands of years and a lot of it. And I think it’s certainly by design to an extent certain stratospheric financial incentives lie in different places. But it’s, it’s funny how it hasn’t been a lot of it studied in the way that, you know, the things that we typically see done in a hospital now are.

And I think that it’s kind of this mindset that again, by design, modern health care breeds into people and breeds into the health care workers and doctors to be very against anything like that. Like this very. I understand being, you know, conservatism relative to compliance is certainly not a bad thing to have, but I don’t think that’s necessarily incompatible with having an open mind. And so, I mean, it’s funny. Like, I see and I personally, I’ve been fortunate to generally have pretty solid health throughout my life and I hope I have a lot left.

So it’s a pretty small sample size so far to go off of, but I have certainly seen secondhand and heard of places that are, you know, doing all these things that I guarantee most doctors would look down upon. I mean, it’s like the same thing. I see Cairos. Like there’s this whole like how doctors view Cairos. It’s hilarious.

And you know, my neck hurt. A few years ago and spoke to my dad, Bruce, briefly that I was going to a Cairo. He’s like, you’re an adult, you can do what you want, but I wouldn’t do that. And, you know, there’s definitely bad Cairos out there and there’s definitely bad doctors. But I think that there’s been this intentionally bred, like, polarization where these different professionals that specialize in different things that at their core, complementary with each other, wind up for different reasons, having it sort of imprinted into their mind that their thing is at odds with the other thing.

Meg 
Yeah, I definitely grew up with the same parents, the same mentality. And like you, keeping an open mind, though, the older I get, the more active I want to remain. And so, I mean, it’s kind of interesting, frankly, being here in Wisconsin. People look at me and go, you’re not from here. I don’t dress like it, I don’t look like it, I don’t have the body shape, you know.

And so when I went, I got my first diagnosis for my knee and my foot in Illinois at the medical system where my dad had been active. And both of those surgeons were on it. They were like, let’s get you in, let’s get you scheduled. I came up here because it’s my right foot and my right knee. And that’s not a plan.

You can’t do two surgeries, major surgeries like that, without a plan. So I went to Madison, two different surgeons. Now we, now we have a plan. We’re delaying everything. And everyone who’s looked at me at University of Wisconsin, Madison looks at me like, you are so tone, you are so in shape.

You are, you are not our typical patient. And I see the engagement and the excitement from these physical trainers. Yeah. So I was really delighted when I was talking to my gynecologist the other day and she’s like, all over hydration, just loves the whole idea of alternative therapies, which this is. And there’s, as you know, scientific evidence for the benefit of these things.

So I’m really excited that you’re opening in Madison and that I’m going to be able to. Well, now that you’ve got your, your products, you’ll be able to, you’ll be able to do your pop ups.

Where, for people who are listening, who are from the area, where are your pop ups going to be until you open?

Jonathan 
So we’ve had a number of them so far, the ones that we have on the roster. And Sahara has been amazing at this. Like, she is. It’s funny. Like I’ve been in sales my entire adult life and I am nowhere near as social as her. She’s just wonderful at reaching out to different businesses and getting these partnerships and stated.

So right now I believe on the schedule we have we’re doing one with Tricky Foods coming up soon, we’re doing one with our bank which is Park Bank.

We have in the works we have one with a local, the joint chiropractor location, a few different gyms, Alloy Fitness in Middleton, F45 Madison Fitness Collective. And I don’t have the notes in front of me so I’m probably missing a couple and I want anyone listening as a representative of any of those businesses to know that I, I’m not shunning you. I just don’t happen to remember it’s. 

Meg 
Yeah, well, I’m catching you off, off guard and on the fly. 

Jonathan
Oh, totally fine.

Meg 
It’s. If I recall on the website for Madison those pop ups were listed so what would coming up towards the at the end of our, our interview where and I’ll put it in the show notes because you provided it but just verbally. How can people get more information about your location?

Jonathan 
So it’s incredibly easy and you can find it on our social media if this sounds like too much to type, but it’s not a lot. Hydrateivbbar.com/locations/madison and then that will have a section that says where to find us.

And then so that’ll show all the events that we’re doing. And so any of our pop ups, all of them are listed on there and a few of them as a disclaimer are at, you know, for example, apartment buildings where it’s a resident event. And so they’re, you know, they might require some membership but most of them are fully public. And then if anyone has any interest in checking any of these out, they can reach out to us directly. We’re very communicative. Whether on socials we’re pretty easy to find. We make a point of that.

Meg 
Excellent. Well, I can’t wait to get started with y’all.

And since I’ve seen it firsthand with my, my darling dog who’s still with us. 

Jonathan
And I love that. That is such a beautiful story. 

Meg
Thank you. I can’t wait to see the location. And I did talk to Shahayra about the possibility of coming to Image Studios in Wauwatosa to do a pop up at one of our studio spaces. I remember that. Yep. So we’re, we are in motion and on the way and I so appreciate your time today. 

Jonathan
Likewise.