Tim Hipp started Wellness Solutions in 1999, and it was great. “I was the guy who didn’t have to sleep,” he says. “I was always on.” However, between 2008 and 2012, his health took a turn because of Lyme disease. The debilitating u-turn meant it took him days to recover from a workout, a difficult change for a man who was used to having endless energy. “With Lyme you have constant inflammation, you have constant fatigue,” says Tim. “Every day you feel like you have the flu.”

His condition inspired him to create a place to help people beat pain and fatigue. RxR3 Recovery Lounge isn’t just for athletes. “Everybody suffers. Pain [and] fatigue equivocate themselves to poor performance,” he explains. Some folks make millions of dollars off of one great idea, but they can’t do that if they are too fatigued to work on their idea. If he can help them get there, that’s awesome. If he can help a mother not to have a short fuse with her kid who just spilled the milk for the fifth time, he’s thrilled. “That’s the continuation of giving over and over again,” says Tim.

RxR3 Recovery Lounge

“Our overall goal is to meet people where they are,” says Tim. Pain doesn’t discriminate between gender, race, or age. Everybody suffers from pain, so that’s where they start. Beyond that, they look at challenges with energy and fatigue. Aging clients also look back on what they were able to handle when they were younger. “We try to help them recognize that age is just a number and re-energize them,” he says.

Pain begins in the brain.”The brain is getting signals from the body of what it needs,” says Tim. Pain is a feeling, and the brain sometimes reacts with overkill. To clean the brain, he usually has people start with the float. “That’s sensory deprivation. We’re floating in ten to twelve inches of water [and] 1,100 pounds of Epsom salt,” he says. The water is the same temperature as your skin, so you no longer have to thermo-regulate yourself. There’s no input, sight, or sound. “Within fifteen to twenty minutes, blood pressure on average drops fifteen points,” Tim says. When you sleep, the brain uses glia cells to clean itself. “When you’re in that relaxed state [in the float,] you’re not asleep, but you’re not really awake, either.” The brain cleans itself while you float, and when you come out of it, the injury that you thought was really bad might not be that bad anymore.

Another thing RxR3 provides is oxygen. “We don’t look at oxygen as a nutrient, we just take it for granted,” Tim says. “And we’re not really good breathers.” Giving the body oxygen and pressurizing the system to push oxygen deeper into the tissue changes everything.

In addition to the sensory deprivation float and the oxygen, clients can take advantage of a sauna, cryo, and whole-body vibration.

Helping Others Help Others

“I’m not a biohacker, I’m not trying to create a superhuman,” Tim explains. “I’m just saying that what we’ve established over the past 40 to 50 years as average is really below average. I’m trying to raise and arrive us all at a new norm so that I can be a great neighbor.” If his neighbor needs help carrying a 500-pound couch, Tim wants to be able to say yes. “I want to be able to give everybody who comes through our door that ability to say yes,” he says, even if it’s just for picking up a child, loading groceries, or simply being active. Everybody is below the line because the norm is below the line. Tim wants everybody to be at the line, and excelling past it. That’s living versus existing. Getting up, going to work, eating, going to bed, and then hitting replay isn’t living. True living is what you can do for others. “If I care more about you than I do myself, that’s living,” says Tim.

Tim’s superpower is perseverance and endurance, but he contends that every entrepreneur and business owner must have those things to make it. Another superpower is the desire to help others. “If I can help someone help somebody else to help somebody else, it’s that length of chain,” he says. “I’m okay staying in the background. I like being a secret superhero.”

The Bigger Mission

We’re running on a break-fix model. Tim wants to change mindsets to help people look at healthcare differently. “I can’t schedule break-fix. I don’t know when something’s going to break,” he says. “But if I can schedule maintenance and keep things going, that’s a game changer.” Being break-fix and reactive instead of proactive also means we’re heavily prescribed. Doctors want to give people opioids so that they no longer care about the pain, but that doesn’t fix the pain, and it often causes the patients to nosedive. “Reset the pattern,” says Tim. “Go from existing to living.”

You can learn more about Tim and RxR3 Recovery Lounge at the website.

Doneen Hoffman

You’re at a point in your life where you’d like to move into an assisted living home, but you’ve got a huge house with 40 years’ worth of junk stored up to deal with. Oh no!

You’re an empty nester and your large house feels a bit too quiet without the pitter-patter (or thud) of teenage feet. It’s time to downsize. But you’ve got 20 years’ worth of accumulated stuff to get rid of. What a pain!

That shiny company across the pond has offered you a great job and you’d love to take it, but how could you possibly get rid of all your stuff in time to hop on a flight and get there? Help!

You could panic, you could live in your big creaky house and just continue to dream of a low-maintenance condo, or you could turn down great opportunities. Or you could call Doneen Hoffman, founder and owner of Estate Professional Services, to come and deftly remove the stress of accumulated stuff from your life.

Doneen specializes in estate sales, clean-outs, and appraisal services. All you have to do is separate what you want to keep from what you don’t, and she will handle the rest.

The Real-Life eBay

Like eBay, Estate Professional Services works with a buyer, a seller, and someone in between to buy and sell cool stuff. Unlike eBay, there’s no need to pay for shipping and handling, and Doneen sets the prices as opposed to the selling being done auction-style.

There are three ways to get rid of items in your house. One is a liquidation company, which isn’t great for the client because they will give you the lowest possible price for your items, then turn around and re-sell them for their profit. The second is an auction company, which isn’t great for the client because not only do some of them charge to store the items, but everything starts at 99 cents. Your $3,000 table might sell for $5, and there’s nothing you can do about it. The third is estate sale companies like Doneen’s, who set the prices and handle everything for you.

What Estate Professional Services does differently is understand that there may be items that clients are on the fence about whether or not to keep. Those clients have an option to have the item sold, but only if Doneen can get a certain price for it. It gives them more control and more flexibility, and no one’s $3,000 table stacked high with years’ worth of memories will go for a paltry $5.

Marketing a Sale

Doneen uses social media to reach her buyers. She takes pictures of the items she’ll be selling and posts them on estate sales websites. She creates a FB event for the sales. “It’s a soft media marketing before the sale, then the week of the sale is when we really push the marketing, where it goes on Craigslist, it gets pinned to the top of our Facebook page, it goes out to all the local Facebook yard sale stuff, everywhere,” she says.

Social media works well because she has over 6,000 followers on Facebook and her buyers and clients alike can post reviews of her services, which leads to more buyers and more clients. “People coming to the sales are the younger generation and the middle-aged generation,” Doneen explains. “The older generation is the downsizing.” Younger and middle-aged people also tend to be on social media.

Her marketing strategy has worked so well that last year, she had to turn down work left and right. She may have to do the same this year. “I’d rather have quality versus quantity,” she says. “I want to have a good sale, and if it’s a big sale, I want to make sure that we staff it correctly.” Over-committing to sales isn’t good for anyone involved.

Keeping eBay at Bay with a Personal Touch

The next big thing in the estate sales industry may well be online auctions. “I see a lot of that,” Doneen says. “But I like more the personal, going inside a home.” Sometimes sales have to be online, however. Some gated communities don’t allow estate sales. Calling them in-home parties instead can wriggle around the stringent rules for some HOAs, but not all.

As for Doneen, her future is going to involve continuing to get more qualified staff on her team and gaining more sales. She has everything else already in place.

Get Cash if You’re a Client, Find a Bargain if You’re a Buyer

Clients and buyers alike can find Doneen at her website, Facebook, or through estate sale websites such as estatesales.net and estatesales.org.

Nick Mann

The impact of a teacher who encouraged Nick Mann to try out his elementary school’s running program has stuck with him his entire life. It’s no surprise then, that Nick’s passion is impacting his community’s youth. It’s easier to establish healthy habits from a young age than it is to switch to healthy habits when you’re older. Often for adults, it takes a bad event or negative health news to inspire them to get their lives and fitness in order. What if he could inspire a generation to have their lives and fitness in order in the first place?

Filling a Need

When Nick decided to open his business, he knew he wanted to impact youth as well as adults. “I see a lack of services of a high-quality environment,” he says. “We see not only obesity in adults, but childhood obesity. Kids are on their phones or playing video games. They’re not outside being active, being healthy.” The food industry isn’t in the business of helping with that, and it all adds up to a real need for health, fitness, and quality for youth that isn’t being served by anything else.

Now, after three years of knocking on middle and high school doors and talking to school leaders to get things rolling, Nick has summer camps and after-school programs for the youth of the community.

It’s easy to confuse ‘after-school program’ with ‘daycare.’ Don’t do it. “I’m not rolling out balls for them to play with, with no real structure,” Nick says. “We teach leadership and teamwork.” Your kid is going to sweat, learn, and be a better person.

The progress is not only physical, but also emotional and mental. Nick had a kid who started the program as extremely overweight and unable do a sit-up five months ago. When a new kid started and was struggling, that kid was the first to walk over and help him. That kid is now doing extra sit-ups with the new kid to make him feel comfortable. “A kid had compassion for another kid in the realm of just being a human,” Nick says. “That was worth more than anything.” That’s why impacting the youth of the community is his passion project.

A Memorable Kid

Kids with disabilities can easily fall through the cracks. Sometimes they’re actively pushed through the cracks. Nick is not interested in the cracks. “I gave a scholarship to a young man who was profoundly deaf and was unable to play sports,” Nick says. “A lot of coaches wouldn’t give him the opportunity because they couldn’t communicate.” That kid’s teacher was one of the members of Nick’s gym, Occoquan Bay Performance. She brought him in, and signed for Nick and his coaches on the first day. But Nick knew the kid didn’t need the signing. “I’ll demonstrate, he’ll figure it out,” Nick says. And he did.

One day as they were just throwing a football around the gym, that left-handed kid threw a spiral across 5,000 square feet. The great potential and untapped abilities were astounding. A few months later, he made the wrestling team at his school, and after Nick was able to attend a match, he came up and gave Nick a big hug. “I was like man, this is what it’s all about,” Nick says. “Impact.” And years from now, when that kid is in a nursing home, Nick wants him to be able to think back to one day in a gym throwing a football around when it clicked for him that he could do anything he wanted.

Establishing the Lifestyle

“I’m super excited about the youth program,” Nick says. “[They] work really hard and they love the after-school program.” The program meets for three days a week, which is great for kids who haven’t done much fitness before, but many of them wanted more. They have so much energy. So Nick started inviting some of them to Occoquan Bay Performance on the after-school program’s two off-days. “I’m excited to see that program grow,” he says. “I would love to just have youth everywhere.”

The program has kids as young as eight years old. Nick loves that they are able to establish a lifestyle and mindset of health and fitness in kids that they can carry forth for years to come. “That’s the biggest impact we can make,” he says.

Learn More 

Find out more about Occoquan Bay Performance at the website, or find them on Facebook or Instagram. Follow Nick on Facebook.