JR Burgess (HealthOvators)

JR Burgess is the CEO of HealthOvators, a consulting agency that supports physicians and medical professionals in building a proven model of healthcare that is outcome-driven, affordable, sustainable, profitable, and desperately needed to help patients restore and regenerate health.

Born four hours outside the Twin Cities in the sparsely populated town of Keewatin, Burgess enjoyed growing up in a community where mining for iron ore was a major staple of the local economy.

“Life on the Iron Range is both beautiful and sad. Socially, you know everybody, but one can also get easily bored as a young child or teenager if you don’t like nature,” Burgess mentions.

“For people like me, fun revolved around partying, sports, hunting, and fishing. That was life, and it was good.”

Burgess was so enamored with life in Keewatin that after graduating high school, he was content to remain in the 1,068-person city and follow in his dad’s footsteps by joining him in the business of building water towers.

“I didn’t know much different outside of life in Keewatin. My dad built water towers, so I had traveled around a bit, but half of my friends had never even left the city,” Burgess recalls.  

In theory, Burgess had the employment prospects to forever remain in his hometown, but after his first year outside high school, things changed, and he later found himself enrolling at St. Cloud State University to pursue a college degree.

Right away, Burgess was faced with taking remedial courses because he didn’t earn stellar grades in high school, but with a smattering of naysayers back in Keewatin discounting Burgess’ academic pursuits, the Iron Range native was driven to reshape his future.

“Hearing the criticism from back home was enough motivation to go prove people wrong. In one sense, I could see why some people didn’t think I could handle college, but I thought people had mislabeled me and were writing me off too soon,” Burgess explains.

“And after I found out that the professors at St. Cloud State weren’t mean or forcing me to attend class, I ended up breezing through college.”

Armed with a bachelor’s degree in marketing, Burgess hadn’t even considered a profession in the medical field, but later on, after suffering an Achilles injury while playing rugby, Burgess met Dr. Joel Baumgartner, who practiced PRP (platelet-rich plasma injections).

During Burgess’ office visit, the two began talking about medicine, fitness, general health, and a litany of other topics.

Before the visit was over, the doctor and Burgess had developed a strong camaraderie, to the point that Dr. Baumgartner enlisted Burgess to help him grow Rejuv Medical, a medical fitness platform.

“Right away I was working 100-hour weeks. The passion caught me. I didn’t have kids at that time, so it became my identity and driving force,” Burgess says.  

“The doctor also sent me to every mastermind he could find to learn marketing, business, leadership, communication, public speaking, and technology.”

Over time, Dr. Baumgartner’s investment in Burgess began yielding significant dividends.

“Piece by piece, we grew,” Burgess says.  

“We went from a 1,000 square foot office, to 6,000, to later a 28,000 square-foot model. Soon after we started licensing our model, and by 2019 we were the top volume stem cell clinic in the country, and now we have over 100 locations around the world.”

As Rejuv Medical continued to proliferate, Burgess’ confidence and sense of fulfillment increased, but by 2017, the immense workload Burgess was tackling had begun to exert its will on his body.  

“My body started to break down,” Burgess notes.

“I had Lyme Disease, and my wife just had our fourth child, and then one day I was in the ER thinking that I was having a heart attack.”

Needing a reprieve from his exhausting schedule, Burgess made the bold decision to sell his shares in Rejuv Medical and walk away from the company.

In turn, he then founded HealthOvators, a consultation company that specializes in implementing regenerative lifestyles, plus offering functional plant medicines and patient-centered doctors whose aim is to achieve world-leading outcomes for their clients.

One might assume that starting HealthOvators would be just as time-consuming as his last role, but Burgess maintains that his new position grants him more flexibility and freedom.

With HealthOvators, Burgess is also more selective about the types of doctors he works with, in the sense that if each parties’ philosophies don’t align, they don’t collaborate.

“The doctors I work with need to have the right intentions because, for me, the primary focus that HealthOvators takes when it comes to care is restoring and regenerating health, without drugs or surgery as the first line treatment,” Burgess says.

His approach won’t win him any favors with mainstream medicine or big pharma, two entities that reap tremendous profit when doctors write prescriptions or recommend surgery to a patient.

For the record, Burgess is not anti-medicine or anti-surgical procedures.

He simply believes that these treatments should be explored only after a patient has exhausted all the options that they can personally control.

“Our body has this amazing ability to regenerate and heal itself, which is why my goal is always to transfer the power back to the patient,” Burgess explains.  

“Yes, I can do a regenerative injection, or a functional lab test or surgery, but I’m also a big advocate for people eating better, exercising consistently, sleeping eight hours, and taking care of themselves emotionally.”

In that sense, Burgess is reluctant to term the current healthcare paradigm a broken system.

Rather, he believes that most people simply don’t know what they don’t know.  

“It’s no secret that the healthcare system is designed to make an awful lot of money and to keep a customer for life, so we absolutely have to teach people how to take their power back, and that’s why I work with practices and visionaries that are looking to help patients take control of their health, so that ultimately they can have whatever they want in life,” Burgess says, before emphasizing just how important it is for people to free themselves from the proverbial matrix big medicine has them entangled in.  

“Most people are unhealthy because they are in trauma and don’t know how to get themselves out, and the healthcare system doesn’t want people to know how to help themselves either.”

All this is why Burgess will spend the next several years continuing to educate and support as many people as possible, but he also is mindful of where he is at in life, and therefore will do what is necessary so that his life doesn’t become toxically inundated with work.

“I was always so focused on getting to 500 locations, changing the world, and making millions of dollars,” Burgess says.

“But now it’s about making progress along the way, having peace of mind, and living a life of service to others by using my best gifts to help people who are ready to improve and optimize their health.” QS

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