[00:00:28] Jay: Hi everyone. Welcome to The First Customer Podcast. My name's Jay Aigner. Today I'm lucky enough to be joined by Eric Gremminger. He is the CEO and Co-founder at ERP Health. Eric, how you doing buddy? Good to see you. where are you based out? You're in Philly somewhere, right? Old City. Alright. and you really enjoy, parking after the snowstorms. I heard that was one of

[00:00:52] Eric: It's interesting. It's an interesting puzzle to, yeah. Figure out. It's an adventure though.

[00:00:57] Jay: An adventure. Okay. that's one way to put it. All right, well, where did you grow up and did that have any impact on you being an entrepreneur?

[00:01:05] Eric: Yeah. I mean, I grew up, Delaware County for the first part of my life. Then we moved out to Chester County, Kent Square for, high school and. Yeah, I mean, it was a great childhood. I guess I got to see a lot of kind of entrepreneurial type people. my mom was a teacher actually, but she had a very kind of, I think, unique perspective on teaching.

She was always encouraging her students to try new things, to bring various, I guess, skills into the curriculum. And I'll just share a particular story. I can remember her being so excited and now this is going back a while, you know, before. Kinda rap music was as big as it is and she kind of convinced her class to turn a project into a rap song.

And I just, you know, little things like that I was blessed to, to witness growing up. So I guess that always made me want to think a little bit outside the box. And I would tie that to entrepreneurship. So that's about where I grew up. But definitely within my family dynamic, there was a lot of creativity.

[00:02:07] Jay: Sure. continues to be a theme that educators have, entrepreneur children. I meet so many people who's so many, I mean, I, it would ha I'm gonna have to run the numbers eventually because there, there has to be a good 50% of the people we talk to have some education people

[00:02:26] Eric: the researcher needs to know the correlation

[00:02:29] Jay: Yeah. Well, we'll figure it out. we'll do a side project, we'll do a side study, and we'll see if we can find something. All right. what was the, there you go, dude. I would be honored. what's the first business you started? Was it ERP Health?

[00:02:41] Eric: No, actually the first business that I started was called Better and Better Fitness and Personal Development. So I have a personal training background, I love it. And then I have a psychology background. That's what my degree is in, right here from Drexel University. Shout out to Drexel Go Dragons.

But, I would do bootcamp style classes and I would have them do positive affirmations at the various. So if it was battle ropes, they would say something and the goal was to combine the mind and the body to help, to recondition some existing patterns, that people have primarily worked with people in addiction.

It was a lot of fun. so that was really the first entrepreneurial venture that I stepped into. Interestingly enough, what I do now can actually lead a little bit back to that.

[00:03:29] Jay: was it just you, like, tell me more about this business. Like what was the mo how were you making money off this? Were people paying you to come to

[00:03:34] Eric: I,it was a side job, so it wasn't a full-time gig, but, but yeah, basically standard boot style or, bootcamp crisis. So small group would probably pay. Somewhere between 35 and $40 to participate. So you wouldn't get one-on-one training like you would pay 120 bucks for, but you would show up to this class and essentially get a really good workout and, hopefully leave there film a lot better than you came in.

So, you know, it made a little bit of money, definitely covered itself. I would buy the equipment based on what I brought in, but it wasn't, you know, it was as much a passion entrepreneurial venture as it was, you know, Moneymaker,

[00:04:16] Jay: Okay. Well, I mean, I think the passion ones are kind of where we learn a lot of the learn, a lot of the,

[00:04:23] Eric: you learn so much. Yeah,

[00:04:24] Jay: it's like you, you get a lot of the initial, rust off. You know,

[00:04:28] Eric: think It was a good lesson too, as an entrepreneur. I mean, I wasn't at a point where I could just quit everything and start something new. So this allowed me to kind of learn to kind of cultivate certain skill sets that were. That would definitely benefit me later in life, but also have the security blanket, the health insurance, the things that, you know, I wasn't gonna have.

So it was, you know, it is a nice starting point if you are thinking about enter entering into entrepreneurship, but you aren't in a position where you could just say, let me just go for it. You know, this, there are ways to do it and.

For while until that other one supersedes the job

[00:05:11] Jay: Yep. I love it. I'm a consulting evangelist. I think everybody should do it. Consult, freelance, have a side thing, do it, like do something on the side, and then it'll grow into something or it doesn't. And if you find out it's not for you, you just wanna, you know, make some extra money on the side, great. But,it's a great gateway, drug to entrepreneurship, you know, just getting out there and doing some side hustle stuff and doing

[00:05:31] Eric: I look back so fondly on those.

[00:05:35] Jay: So what was next? So, I mean, this was, you know, you graduated, it was, I mean, not gonna say that it was, maybe it wasn't your ideal landing spot, but like, what, you know, what were you doing nine to five that was like, kind of related to what you went to school for? Like you're still kind of fresh outta Drexel.

You kind of doing this thing on the side, like what were you doing in that space?

[00:05:55] Eric: So we might wanna go back a little bit 'cause I went back to Drexel,as an adult, you know, and finished my degree. August 4th, 2010. My life basically hit a rock bottom moment after about a decade of struggling with addiction and mental health conditions. 32 years old, nothing really to my name and had to essentially build a life for myself, with the help of so many people.

But until I could get the addiction under control, like I wasn't gonna really be able to make any, you know, positive difference in my life. So. August 4th 2010 is kind of when my journey started, you know, and that's my sobriety date. It's something that I take a lot of pride in. And went back to Drexel after five years of being in recovery, learning about myself, understanding, you know, things about myself that were leading to certain patterns in my life.

finding, like I said, a group of people who are willing to help me through sharing their experiences and taught me how to be vulnerable, taught me how to, put other people first and make a positive contribution or try to, you know, and kind of leverage your experiences that were, you know, negative and try to turn them into a positive.

So I didn't go back to Drexel until my mid thirties. And, you know, I went there with a very specific intention to learn and understand diagnostic criteria or psychology. Like I wanted to understand like what drove me even better, you know, like what drove me and then how I could leverage that information to help other people.

While I was doing that, I was working at a company that, serviced molding for Home Depots. which was a temp job that led into like a full-time job that I absolutely loved. And, it was interesting. I would have to drive. I had an area where I would go to Home Depot and essentially straighten up the molding aisle and my territory, and I worked my way up to this area manager, which by the way, when you're kind of starting off, like earning things, like working hard and getting into the next layer, it was doing so much for my confidence,

[00:08:19] Jay: you know, as a person, which I didn't have those things.

[00:08:21] Eric: Like I wasn't somebody who. I did great in high school. Went to college, went to grad school. There are plenty of those entrepreneur stories out there. Mine is not that story. Mine is like literally school of hard knocks. Get the crap kicked outta you. I take full responsibility. My decisions led to a lot of that, but yeah, I found myself going back to school at the same time working this job.

So I would drive to Albany, New York as a for instance, which is part of my territory. I work nine to five on the way. Driving out there, and this is going back a little bit, I would buy these CDs at Barnes and Nobles of like motivational messages and education and just like, was kind of reconditioning my mind.

And then I would work nine to five, I'd go to the hotel, I would plug in the computer, you know, take the psychology courses online, which, you know, they more or less had just started at that time. And then I finished my degree and A different job.

[00:09:24] Jay: I've come to not love the phrase, there's a lot to unpack there, but there's a lot to unpack there. there's, I to stay, Moving and focused. First of all, congratulations. We talked about,our shared connection of August 4th. That's my birthday. So I feel like the universe has brought us together.

you know, we have to be friends now. There's nothing we can really do about it. we kind of have to be friends at

[00:09:46] Eric: A.

[00:09:46] Jay: but we share a special day, me, you and Obama. but, you know, I've heard this story before. and you know. This, you know, it's 2026. I mean, that was a long time ago.

my question to all of that and kind of leading back into kinda more of a business thought and personal as well though, is like, you know, you have all these wins and you get back on track and you're doing all this stuff and you're like, you're going through recovery and you're like, kind like you said, you're learning to win stuff again.

Right? My question is, what do you do when that kind of wears off? Like when you know, you've been making these wins and you've been doing these things and you know, we've all been, you know, entrepreneurs have been doing it for 10 plus years. Like, we've had tons of wins. Like no balloons come outta the ceiling when like, something big happens.

No, you know, there's no parade in your office when, like some, you know, you win a client or whatever, it's like it's a moment in time. You move on, you're onto the next thing. how do you kind of stay excited or motivated or like keep those like. Juices flowing, you know, those receptors kind of firing to get that next rung on the ladder.

You know, after you've just kind of done it so many times over and over again. What keeps you still kind of going to the next thing?

[00:10:53] Eric: I mean the mission, I really, it might sound a little bit kind of corny. I don't mean it to because like there, I have developed over the years strong business acumen. I do understand and appreciate kind of unit economics and I have my eyes on the numbers at all points. But when I get a report from somebody, a treatment center, I just got one the other day, super excited, a large treatment center in Delaware County, validated their outcomes using our technology and found, and this is a MAT program, which is Medication assisted treatment.

Lot of stigma around it.. their program lifted employment for this population, satisfaction with employment. 'cause they get them jobs by like 90%. And I mean, this dude called me stoked Jay. I mean, it wasn't about business. It wasn't about how he is gonna leverage this to get more funding and that's all there, like, this was a personal call, you know, of like how excited he was. He got to help these people and he could play a role in reducing stigma. I mean, I get those calls. I also, you know, do public speaking as it relates to like, sharing my story and try to prevent, high school kids from going down a similar path. So I've done that for so long where I'll get almost like these little drips, like an email, a phone call, a text, and it's not related to business, it's related to mission.

It's related to like. People's lives are changing, you know, as a result of, you know, primarily them. But something that I did to support that

[00:12:31] Jay: Yeah.

[00:12:32] Eric: and like that to me, is the best. And then aside from like that systems, like I've learned to love systems, not outcomes. If that makes sense. Like there's structure to my day, how I start my day, how I end my day, how I am as a father, and then what I do the minute I get here to the office.

And if I hit those system milestones, like I said, I'm gonna do this and I do it, it might not produce an outcome right away. It might not be the exciting, massive, dopamine hit when we just signed a multimillion dollar contract. but it's, it keeps me going like it's little mile markers that I tend to set up in my head where I'm like, as long as I hit this, I feel accomplished.

[00:13:24] Jay: Yep.

[00:13:25] Eric: It's, That's been helpful for me. So, and it's interesting because, and you've probably dealt with that, I'm sure you talked to entrepreneurs who will verify this, even when you get the multimillion dollar deals or like the big deals that you've been waiting so long for a three year sales cycle, you're excited for like an hour.

[00:13:45] Jay: An hour max. An hour

[00:13:46] Eric: Yeah.

man. Like it's not even, yeah. you hear you help somebody and you like kind of that, and you're holy crap.

[00:13:54] Jay: No, that's cool. I do like that. And I think that's a great answer. all right, well, tell me about ERP Health Man. where did it come from? Where, how did it get started? Like, tell me about the first customer. let's dig into a little bit and we hear what it is and where it came from.

[00:14:06] Eric: Sure a little bit about US Philadelphia based, outcome tracking, measurement based care technology. I started doing this work in 2014 actually in pen and paper format. Really just with a simple desire. I wanted to help people who were struggling with addiction like I once was, and I'd go around locally here in Philadelphia, would literally knock on treatment center doors.

And if they'd let me in, I'd set up this easel that I used to carry around and this poster board, and I would passionately explain to them, why I believe, that feedback informed treatment, which is what we were calling this back then. And, my program, this program that I created, could help to personalize care.

and save lives. Ultimately, that earned me the nickname Easel Eric, here in Philadelphia. Few people call me Easel E for short. Eventually, a few providers gave me a shot and the process would go like this. We would engage patients on a weekly basis with these pen and paper assessments. They would complete them, the clinicians would collect them.

Each week, they would fax them to me. So we're going back a little bit now. I would get the facts. I'd research the findings, put together a statistical analysis by hand of where that community needed the most help, and then I would send the results back to the clinical team so they could integrate that information into care to ensure the patients were progressing.

Now that three phase system engage research progress, that's actually what ERP stands for. It's how we got our name. I was lucky enough to meet my partner, Nick in 2017. He was one of the owners of a treatment center that was licensing this program that I had. But he is also a programmer by training and he had spent his career actually building behavioral health technologies and he is like, look man, I see your passion for helping people, but let's be honest, if you're doing this by hand.

Maybe you could help hundreds of people. If we turn this into a technology, we could help millions of people. And that's what led to the creation of Grow in 2019, which is our enterprise grade outcome tracking platform currently being used nationwide by some of the largest addiction treatment and mental health providers to facilitate measurement based care, promote health equity, and position their organizations for value based contracting.

Yeah, started. I'll pause there and see if there's any questions. That

You're good. That was, you were rolling man. You were good. I think the most impressive thing is that you were still getting things by facts in 2014. if,

and interestingly I was still doing, per the better and better fitness and personal development and still going to school. So I was kind of learning as I was going, but just fun facts, like in personal training. It's like table stakes. If you're gonna help somebody to have a baseline measurement to work off of.

So we call it just a scale. It's like get on the scale. You wanna lose weight. I put together an exercise program, you come in two weeks and step on the scale. And I know if my program works, the fact that it wasn't being done in clinical settings was almost mind blowing to me. I was like, this is just basic, you know, like

[00:17:10] Jay: yeah. Right.

[00:17:12] Eric: that was, interesting.

[00:17:14] Jay: So who was the first customer?

[00:17:16] Eric: Our first customer was called Slow Recovery, and this will be interesting too from an entrepreneurial standpoint. So we raised a bunch of money. it's 2019, we're ready to take over the world. We launched the company officially 2020, and then the pandemic

[00:17:34] Jay: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:35] Eric: and you're just kind of watching. Run rate.

[00:17:39] Jay: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:41] Eric: And we decided to do a LinkedIn blast and we're like, okay, well, you know, people are communicating virtually. We can't go out and do a road show or anything like that. let's do a LinkedIn blast for like 500 bucks.

[00:17:55] Jay: Sure.

[00:17:55] Eric: found this service and a guy reached out from the, Pacific Northwest, Portland, Oregon, and he is like, yeah, that sounds super interesting.

Can you gimme a demo? So. Give him a demo in my garage and he is like, can you fly out here and present this to my clinical team? Now, this is 2021 at this point, early 2021. So you could fly, but it was weird, man. I don't know if you flew. During that time they had all these, like you had to wear a mask obviously, but it was every other row.

It was like,

[00:18:27] Jay: Wow.

[00:18:29] Eric: so I fly out there, do a presentation, for their clinical team. Then the guy was, in recovery and he an AI guy. He is like, you wanna come to this meeting with me? And I'm trying to just get a yes. I'm like, gimme a yes. So I go to this meeting with him, and then afterwards we go out the pizza and it's almost like it wasn't getting talked about, you know?

And I'm towards the very end of the night, I'm like, what do you think about the tech man? Can you, are you willing to buy it? And he is like, yeah, definitely. And he shake my hand and that was our first deal.

[00:19:00] Jay: Wow.

[00:19:01] Eric: Interesting point. They're still a customer to this day. and they recently actually just, made an acquisition.

So they're a growing organization, but they used our technology to get a significantly higher negotiator rate for co-occurring conditions, with one of the major payers out there. So.

[00:19:21] Jay: So what I mean it, what's the material difference or is there between a customer you guys would go after today and that first customer

[00:19:31] Eric: Well, we've evolved a lot since then. we recognize that an important first step is aligning with addiction treatment providers and mental health providers and getting them to, to measure the impact that they're having, but. Access is an issue with payers. So people were kind of coming to treatment centers where maybe they had good outcomes for a certain profile of people, but not for another profile of people.

So we wanted to solve for that. And we actually built a technology where we're able to go further upstream into the population, work with insurance companies directly, offer health screens to their members, and then based on their demographic type and diagnostic type. Match them to the treatment centers that are the appropriate fit for them using, an algorithm.

And that really has been a game changer for us both from a, obviously that's vertical integration and we're looking at, a completely different, very large market with population health management, but being able to have fidelity to that core mission to make sure people are getting right care, right time, right place.

Truly not just saying it like it, it sounds cool to say that, but when we have an African American female, 35 years old with alcohol use disorder using our technology, you know, at the payer level and we're able to in seconds list the top five treatment centers who have efficacy data related to that, profile.

The likelihood of them getting the help that they need goes way up. Right? So that obviously from a mission perspective is great, but when you look at it from a total cost of care perspective, like the insurance companies are looking at it like the cost savings is massive. And then at the same time, you're incentivizing the provider to do great work because they're getting more referrals.

So anytime you're looking at healthcare, you wanna look from an alignment perspective, right? There's patient that's a stakeholder. Providers are a stakeholder, and the payers are a stakeholder. And what we've been able to do, is service these customers across the board, you know, in a seamless way. So that's been an interesting evolution.

Again, if you would've asked me in 2019 that I would, that was definitely not on the bingo card to say the least. I don't even think I would've known what that meant, like things didn't exist at that time. So, stickability is important in entrepreneurship. Stick with something long enough, like things did.

[00:22:12] Jay: with ability, for sure. All right. I have one more question. Non-business related. I'm gonna put a stipulation on this one for you because, it's all we've talked about non addiction or recovery related, either just Eric being Eric, if you could do anything on earth and he knew you wouldn't fail, what would it be?

And you see why I have to say the addiction recovery? 'cause that was an easy one for you. You know, you could have just easy said that, but what, anything on earth you knew you couldn't fail.

[00:22:39] Eric: Anything on earth and I couldn't fail. Huh. That's a great question. If I had unlimited resources and I could do something and I couldn't fail and I know it would work, I have a theory that you drive up and down 95 here in the Philly area, and it could be, I would wanna take all of I 95, wherever you see these stupid billboards, and I would put positive, motivational, uplifting messages.

I would take a baseline of people's generalized happiness, perceived happiness before I do it and after I do it. And if I couldn't fail, I think I could change and uplift the mindset of people like

[00:23:27] Jay: You can't fail in this scenario. So it's a successful experiment. But I will say this is probably one of the most doable, answers I've had. Like, this seems possible. I feel like you could, you just have to knock off Pond Lee Hockey for the 75, you know, billboards as you're going into the city.

But, if you could get any space there.

[00:23:44] Eric: I think if I can't fail. Like that just always seems so cold to me. You know, I've done a lot of cool things, so I don't, I can't, I don't know if that was a good

[00:23:53] Jay: Yeah. I love that dude.

[00:23:54] Eric: the one

[00:23:55] Jay: can I tell you that

[00:23:56] Eric: So

[00:23:56] Jay: it's never been said before, so you definitely win that one for sure. At a

[00:24:01] Eric: think about these things. These are the things I think about.

[00:24:03] Jay: You know, 250, 260 episodes. you know, I think that was the first time. So if you wanna hear more about anything they heard, you know, recovery wise or just to talk to you specifically, what's the best way for them to reach out to you directly?

[00:24:15] Eric: Email me directly, ejg@erphealth.com.

[00:24:20] Jay: Beautiful. And if you wanna find out more about ERP Health, what's the best way you got an app to go online, you go, where do you go?

[00:24:29] Eric: ERP health.com would be the best way to, to find us and contact us.

[00:24:34] Jay: Beautiful. We'll link all that stuff together. Eric. you know, I'm sure you hear it a lot, you know, very inspirational, motivational story. But what I found most interesting about this call is it was about business, but. You almost have to like pull it outta you because you're so in your words, mission driven that you know, even some questions that could easily be answered about business or about something else, you kind of just fight,to not always be talking about the things that you're so passionate about.

And I find that very, endearing and very cool. And I think, you know, just like. Having a passion like that burning underneath, I would imagine, you know, has taken you very far and will continue to take you very far. It's a cool thing and I thank you for being on today. Very cool story. people reach out if they need anything and then, we'll see you again soon.

All right. Thanks for being on buddy. See you Eric later buddy. 

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