Adam Torres and David Kostroub discuss Artic Elevation.
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Show Notes:
Listen to Longevity Leadership Conference coverage. In this episode, Adam Torres interviews David Kostroub, Founder of Arctic Elevation explore franchise innovation at Medspa Space at the Longevity Leadership Conference.
About Artic Elevation
Arctic Elevation understands firsthand the challenges of facing overwhelming health issues. Founder David Kostroub endured years of pain and frustration as traditional healthcare failed to provide answers. His journey from suffering to healing inspired the creation of Arctic Elevation—a place where wellness is the top priority.
With a deep understanding of what it means to feel limited by the body, Arctic Elevation has designed a comprehensive cycle of treatments to help clients reclaim their health. More than just providing cutting-edge care, the team offers a partnership rooted in personal experience, dedicated to helping each individual feel their best.
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Full Unedited Transcript
My name is Adam Torres. I’m the other co founder of Mission Matters and I am excited about this next speech. So Victor Schrock mentioned some of our clients from the audience and some had are going to be attending and Victor Castro. I’ve been working with Victor now. Victor, how many times have you been on the show?
Like 234 over the last how many years? Yeah, time flies, right? So I get this call from Victor one day and he talks and he tells me about his son. I didn’t know his son was an entrepreneur. Then he tells me about the company and I’m like, okay, yeah, we good. You guys gotta come out, we gotta talk about this.
I want people in LA to hear about this. And I want to record this content, so let me get into some of the the intros here. But excited to have David here, who is Victor’s son. So David Kustrub and Kiana Kustrub, his, his other half, when I was working on the intro, I asked her, what do you do? She says, everything.
So you’ll see why in a moment. So we’ll have some fun there. But David’s a visionary. Amy, he’s behind. Arctic Elevation, and this is the company he’s going to be talking about today. It’s a performance health and wellness center offering the most advanced and effective wellness treatments for the whole body for the whole body.
And he has over 10 years of experience in the healthcare sector, fighting his own battles as well, which he may bring up as well. And again, he’s the founder of Arctic Elevation, so put your hands together for David and Kiana Costro.
Thank you. Well, first off, thank you to everyone for having us here involved with the conference. So my name is David Kaushub and I’m joined here with my beautiful wife, Kiana. We are with Arctic Elevation. So I founded this company, Arctic Elevation. We’re a performance health and wellness center.
We provide the most effective and advanced wellness treatments for whole body ailments. And our mission is to advance longevity and pursuit or promote of a pain free life. And so, the inception of Arctic Elevation actually started a very long time ago. It’s a personal story, so if you don’t mind me sharing a little bit about my background.
So, growing up, I was a very healthy kid, I was very active, I was involved with every sport imaginable. When I first started walking, my dad gave me a soccer ball, so soccer was always my favorite sport to play. Essentially I was so active, my mom would never be able to sit me down, even when I was sick, she couldn’t put me like in front of the TV, I just had to run around, I had to go do something.
And that was, that was my life, that was what I embraced, I embraced being active. But when I was 13, I was in 8th grade, things took a turn. So it was March of that year, I felt something was changing, so I wasn’t, I wasn’t feeling like myself. A couple weeks go on by, again, I am not, I’m not feeling well, I’m not the David I knew who I was, and so I lost 30 pounds in three weeks, so I was 6 feet tall, 105 pounds, and I was 13.
So if you can imagine, I was the skinniest little stick that you can think of, but I was in just this tremendous amount of pain every single day, 24 7. So from my lower half, there was this constant burning feeling, this sharp feeling that would just never go away. My calves, my ankles, my thighs, everything was just burning all the time.
And when I would try to explain this to someone, they wouldn’t understand that. There’s this 13, 14, 15 year old kid trying to tell you that he’s in so much pain, but how is that possible? You know, he could be exaggerating, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And so that was the cycle that I went through for a couple of years of never feeling heard.
I always felt pushed away. This specialist can help you, this specialist can help you. So it was just a constant mentally draining cycle of never being taken seriously. So all this started in March of that, when I was 13. Fast forward a couple months, I’m a freshman in high school. One month. into high school.
I had to drop out and enroll into online school. Because physically I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t get out of bed at that moment. So I had to enroll into online school, just the only way I was going to do school. So there was just these super simple elements of my life, such as going to school that I was really envious of my friends of.
Because they didn’t understand. How much my life had changed in just a matter of, a matter of months. I couldn’t go see my friends, I couldn’t go hang out. And so, I just continued going into this really mentally draining cycle of what had just become my life. And then, years and years and years go on.
There is no true solution to what I’m experiencing. I’m not getting any help. I continue getting passed on to a specific specialist. or this specialist. And there was just no help for what I was experiencing. When I was 17, so this is now a few more years later, I was, I was in a really serious car crash, so I live in Seattle, and so both my parents were driving I was sitting in the back right, and so we’re in the middle lane of a freeway called 520, we’re going about 70 75 miles an hour.
And a box truck hit me head on, so the right rear of the car, it hit us, we spun, the box truck hit another car. And so that car crash left me with a lot of nerve and cervical damage to my neck. And so after that, I couldn’t turn my neck to the left for three years, and I couldn’t use my right arm for a year and a half.
And so at that moment, I knew that I needed to just go out and find something for myself. And so I started doing so many different studies, so much different research on what can actually help me. And so that led me into a holistic and wellness approach to my health. And then that’s what brought us to Arctic Elevation.
So we provide the most advanced and effective wellness treatments for whole body ailments. Our mission is to enhance longevity. And promote your pursuit of pain-free life through IV drip therapy, NED plus wellness testing cryotherapy, red light therapy, invert SA and Compression Therapy. And then I wanna share a little bit about the branding of Arctic elevation.
So, as you know, this business is a very personal business for me. Winter is my favorite season of the year, and Snowboarding’s my most favorite hobby actually. And so, since this is so personal, I wanted my own self to be in our own branding. And so, cryotherapy, it’s a cold term. And winter, obviously it’s cold and it’s snowing.
And so I just started coming up with just these random cold words. And Arctic just, it really stuck with me for some reason. Out of the hundreds of names I came up with, Arctic stuck with me. And then I’m like, great, what can I connect Arctic with? Our goal is to elevate every client’s lives. We want to take them to the peak.
Another big hobby of mine is mountaineering. I love to climb, climb Mount St. Helens, Mount Adams, Baker, Rainier is next. And so, the symbolism behind our mountain peaks is us, you know, guiding our clients to their peak of their summit. Because when you’re climbing, it’s not just a straight shot to the summit, it’s long.
It’s not easy. You’re gonna, sometimes you’re gonna fall. And that’s, that’s what we’re here for. Recovery’s not easy. It’s not a straight shot to the summit. So at Arctic Elevation, we’re here to help them take them to their peak. Yeah, so inflammation, chronic pain, fatigue, nerve damage, anxiety, depression simply just not getting good sleep at night waking up tired.
There’s so many different things that we all deal with one or, one or another. As David did mention, he also struggles with arthritis and tendonitis and some autoimmune. So, I mention that because that is in addition to his story, but where that’s where Arctic has come into play and actually helped him personally.
So when you have seen success in your own life with this you can passionately and confidently speak about how it’s going to help others as well. And so I’m sure many of you know someone personally who has struggled with something like this, or maybe you even yourself are battling some chronic health condition.
Or just tired when we wake up, right, and tired of going to work, and we need more energy as we can never get enough of that. And so yeah, with Arctic Elevation, there are a variety of clients who walk through our door. There’s a never ending list of different common body ailments that, that we see.
And what’s amazing is that Arctic, with our vast amount of services that we offer and our customized approach, we’re able to help a variety of different people with different conditions and different experiences. We are not a one way track. This is why we offer all the services we do, and we look to expanding those services as well as technology and science grows and, and modernizes.
And so, what’s amazing about our model is with like I said, we have a custom and tailored approach to your health and wellness. And so our membership, we have packages, you know, and, and different ways that we can offer our treatments to people, but our memberships are very unique. Because they work off of a point system that allow you to spend them in our facility with all of our treatments however you need to.
And so that changes from month to month, right? You’re never locked into a certain treatment because we want our clients to explore. Maybe they come in for a certain treatment and they are, you know, we, we show them what else we have, we educate them, and something else is actually a better fit for them.
Or something in addition to what they came in for is accelerating their healing process. And so, like David said, we have red light therapy, infrared sauna, cryotherapy IV drip therapy, compression therapy. And you know, all those things are amazing. They all work in complement with one another.
But again, our goal is to help anyone who walks through our door find what’s going to work specifically for them. Not just trying to push everything that we offer. Because again, the goal is healing. Not just a, oh, fun little relaxing spa day because, you know, we offer hot tea and a nice warm neck pillow.
It’s about actual treatment. So you are, you’re going in to our services and you’re treating your body so when you leave you’re healing, you’re feeling better than before you came. And so going forward cryotherapy. Has anybody here tried cryotherapy? Awesome. I love it. This is great. How about a cold plunge?
Great. Great. Okay. So I love to, to compare and contrast cold plunges and cryotherapy. They are both amazing, right? But cold plunges, they take about 10 to 14 minutes in that freezing cold water to actually get the benefit from it, that anti inflammatory response. And so cryotherapy is, as most of you know, a short three minutes.
It, it may feel long when you’re in there, for me as I’m helping our clients it feels short. But three minutes is all it takes to elicit that anti inflammatory response in your body. What’s amazing, cold, cold plunges, water, cold therapy that freezes your muscle tissue. Cryotherapy freezes your nervous system.
And so what’s important about that is that you can actually. do cryotherapy before exercise and after. Whereas cold plunges, you have to be a little more methodical about how you’re timing that with your exercise. And so as a person, as an athlete myself, I ran track and field at Northern Arizona University.
And what I believe got me to that level was my recovery routine. Cryotherapy and compression therapy was a big part of that. I started when I was 11 years old. And so from personal experience I know this stuff works, it accelerates recovery. As well as healing, reducing chronic pain so much more.
But that’s, that’s not all. We have red light therapy. As you might have heard in the cosmetic industry red light therapy’s, you know, gained a lot of popularity. LED facials. But what people don’t know, it’s incredible for so much more. Your whole entire body. If you think back to high school biology, right, the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.
Red Light Therapy strengthens the mitochondria, it stimulates it to produce more ATP, more cellular energy. The more energy our cells have, the faster they can do all of their functions, and so when you think about healing, right, we’re targeting the cell, the root of the cause there’s quite a few different benefits that it has for your body and it’s overall healing.
So, we use Prism Light Pod. Now, that’s important because Again, as we talked about earlier, right, marketing is everything, you can have a not so high quality product, but if you market it well, it’s going to do well, right? Well, Arctic Elevation, we invest in high quality technology, in high quality equipment.
Because we want to ensure that this is going to work, and we can confidently say that to our clients. And so, Prism Light Pod. They’re the most powerful red light therapy pod in the world, and that is because of how many wavelengths there are and how close it is to your body. It is a pod, a bed that you lay down in.
So a lot of our competitors, they’ll say, We have red light therapy! And it’s a, you know, you sit in a chair, and there’s, or you stand, and there’s a couple panels around you, right? Ours is a full body, 360 degree exposure to that red light. And, so our red light unlimited membership is actually a very popular one because people, when they come in consistently, they see the difference.
Quick testimony about a young girl, nine years old, who came into Arctic Elevation. Her mom called, I actually answered the phone, and she said, you know, my daughter has been in and out of the hospital. Lots of seizures, a lot of undiagnosed things. I don’t know what to do. I’ve researched that red light therapy can help.
And so I told her everything about it. You know, different plans, what we can do. She brought her in. This young girl was experiencing about 50 seizures a day. That is a lot. And it is just uncontrollable. After two weeks of consistent red light therapy, about five times, five, six times a week, no seizures.
She hadn’t had a seizure. Her mom was in awe. And so, you know, from a young girl again, you can’t make that stuff up. She just is sharing her experience and, and how she feels. And so, that was incredible. And on top of countless other, you know, examples within our, our clientele of You know, how Red Light Therapy has helped them.
So really, Red Light is, that is the future right there. It is a one stop shop to all healing. So when someone comes in with some sort of, really anything, I go Red Light Therapy first. And then all the other things, of course, are a great addition. But Red Light Therapy is incredible. Can’t talk, you know, can’t praise it enough.
We have our IV drip therapy. How many of you have done IV drip therapy? Awesome! I love it. So you know, right? When you get your, all of your nutrients through an IV, your body is absorbing 99 percent of those nutrients. It’s, it’s right into your bloodstream, readily available for your cells to use.
Right? When we take a supplement orally we can only absorb about 15 percent of it because we have to digest it, break it down. Sometimes our bodies don’t do that as efficiently, depends on where the source is coming from, all those different factors. And it takes time. IV drip therapy is the future for quickly and efficiently supplementing your body, right?
Making sure we have all of our nutrients. And healing, and not just getting to baseline, but to maximizing our health, right? Because everything we do at Arctic Elevation, it’s not just recovery, it’s not just, okay, let’s get back to normal, we’re trying to elevate, right? So it’s for everyone, it is preventative care, it is aftercare.
So, on top of all those three things, we also have our infrared saunas, right? We use specifically sunlight and infrared saunas that use near, far, and mid infrared wavelengths. Those work differently to achieve different results. A big part of Arctic elevation, why, why Arctic elevation, right? What are, how are we different from our competitors?
It’s our custom and tailored approach. Even our red prism red light therapy pod, we have six different settings we can put that on that changes the length of the wavelength to actually focus on a certain area, right? We have to have a certain length of that wavelength to actually regrow nerves. And so those are certain settings.
We have settings for skin, for weight loss, for all those different things. Our saunas, right, we have six different settings that we can put those saunas on to again, further customize the experience for, for our clients. And so, how we operate, it’s not a, hey, come in, okay, use your service learn about it on your own time.
Any staff at Arctic Elevation, they are educated on everything. Enough to recommend and suggest different protocols for clients. And so, a big part of that is our customer service. That is something that we have control over, no matter who else is in the market, right? And that starts at the top.
So, David and I, we take customer service extremely seriously. From the second someone walks in our door, it is all about the atmosphere, right? It is the scent, it is the sound, it is the sight. The lighting, how comfortable it is. We are trying to create a spa like atmosphere with actual Treatments and healing.
Not, again, not just a day spa. You feel nice and then you don’t come back, right? We’re trying to actually heal and elevate our clients life with luxury. And so by taking that step forward, we value our clients investment. Their, their financial investment in their health and also their time, right?
When you do these services, if you want to see maximum results, it’s going to take frequent visits. Same as going to the gym, right? I’d love to say you can go to the gym, do an hour workout, and have the dream results you want. Everyone knows it takes consistency, right? Sometimes I think it works that way, but, you have to have consistency, you have to have a plan, right?
You can’t just go in there and do whatever and then be like, why, why isn’t it working? And so that’s what we explain to our clients. With holistic wellness, it does take time because we’re working on things naturally with the body. And so, but once you, once you take that time the results are incredible.
And so we value that in our clients and we create a space. That they want to be at. We create a relationship that brings them back. And that’s exactly what we share with all our other locations. That’s the fundamental way we operate. And so again, when you, you know, it starts at the top and it follows its way down.
If we don’t take that seriously that, that value is going to get diluted everywhere you go. So that is, that’s something we take a lot of pride in and what separates us from others. Yes, like John has noted, the core fundamental aspect of Arctic Elevation is our customer service. Because I never felt heard, I always felt pushed off.
I was that 13, 14, 15, 16 year old kid that was never taken seriously for all the pains I was going through, for all my illnesses. I always felt pushed off to this person, to this person, to this person. So with Arctic Elevation, we make sure that everyone is taken care of no matter what they’re going through.
For, I know what it feels like to be in any kind of pain you cannot be your best if you don’t feel your best. And that’s our motto at Arctic Elevations, feel your best, be your best, so you cannot be yourself if you don’t feel like yourself. So anyone that walks through our doors, whether they’re going through any physical, mental, or emotional distress, we take care of them.
We’re here for them. We listen to them. We build this one on one connection with all of our clients to know that we’re here for them. We’re going to take them to their peak no matter what they’re going through. Absolutely. And again you know, well, what David loves to remind me is, remind me of is don’t worry about whatever anyone else is doing.
We are picking our own way. Right? And so we’re doing things our own way. We’re not trying to copy what someone else is doing and just replicate it. Right? We are increasing the value of what we offer. And we’re doing it in a unique way. And again, our culture is what separates us from all, from Anywhere else you go.
We have taken clients from our competitors, just from the second they walk in, they comment on the difference. I won’t mention the competitor that I’m thinking of, but there’s one. But we, again, it’s that big of a difference and, and it makes an impact on people. And the joy that we get aside from the business side of things, the personal gratification and the joy we have hearing our client’s testimony.
That’s a big why for what we do it. Like David said, he’s been there, he’s seen that, he’s gone through it. And so when you hear somebody else come to you say, Oh my gosh, I’ve lost this, you know, this much weight doing this service. I have, you know my husband says I look great in these jeans now.
And my pain is gone. I can get back to what I was doing. All those different things, they, they really, they remind us of our why, right? Why we’re here right now, why we’re trying to bring Arctic and our specific culture of Arctic elevation to as many people as we can. Yeah, and then through our chief medical officer, we have created signature Arctic IVs that target specific needs.
So if a customer comes in we don’t want to just sell them, you know, just this highest IV that does not actually treat what they, what they need. Cause we all have different. goals, needs so when they come in, we want to actually treat what they’re dealing with. So, for instance, one of our signature Arctic IVs is called our Gut Health IV.
So we’re, through using glutamine, proline, and taurine, we’re able to target gut health. We have anti aging infusions such as NADD, NADD new wellness tests, and that’s going to target and test cholesterol, hormonal panels, lipid, testosterone vitamins, allergies. So we’re taking a whole overall look at what the client.
It’s experience. Yeah, absolutely. And then, as Arctic grows, our mission stays the same. So currently, we have stores opening in Lake Washington, Rocklin, and Eldorado Hills. So Eldorado Hills and Rocklin are going to be in Northern California. We have stores opening soon in Kirkland, Washington, Roseville, California, and Fair Oaks, California.
So again, Fair Oaks and Roseville are also going to be in Northern California, essentially in the suburbs of Sacramento. And we also have a area representative franchise model that we offer. And so, one of our franchise area representatives is actually here with us today he is Ara. And then we have area representatives in Sacramento, San Francisco, L.
A., Orange County, Las Vegas, the entirety of Ohio, Jacksonville, and Orlando.
And then, while we still have some time, I’d love to invite my father, my main business mentor Victor Koshy. Welcome, Victor! Well, David, she did better than you, for sure. From the day I remember, there was a time when when David was about 13, probably under 13. Go ahead, take your seats, guys.
I’m gonna take a little bit of time. And, anyway, so Jason, his older brother, was going to play a soccer game. So David tried to support his brother, he said, hey, remember, you’re that great, you guys are going to do great, you’re going to win. So as he inspired him, I was thinking, wow, such a great brotherhood.
The game is finished, they lost, soon as Jason sits in the car, he says, you suck. So, that’s a brotherhood. Anyway we, we said so many things about longevity, and I remember I read this story about Jay Leno. One day he goes through the men’s journal, and he sees this man in their fifties and sixties in such a great shape.
And he says to himself, well, to, to look that great, To be that great, to have a body like that, I would be willing to do anything except exercise and diet. And it is normal for us to avoid the pain. That’s what we all humans would prefer, to avoid the pain. And and for David, as he shared the story, and me as his father, he was actually It’s completely opposite.
He would embrace the pain. Because it was hard for the parents to see your child struggling the way he explained. And that was like nothing the way he explained. To see every day what he’s going through. The pain, the struggle. And I was thinking to myself, Why don’t you follow your brother? Just sit and play the video games instead.
He would just go through that pain and still pursue his dream, whether this is sports, hiking, anything, just to, just to raise the pain because he had that goal, he has that dream. So as a father, and we were just, me and my wife, we were just like, why God, why this happened to our son? And today I know why, because of the arctic elevation was born.
And when David came to me one day with this vision of this business, you know, I’m the one who has to actually be the first investment, I was thinking to myself, is there is a demand for it? Yes, I see that you were struggling and now like you have zero symptoms that help you, but is there is like a lot of people like that, is there is a demand for it?
So that was like, five years five years ago, four years ago that he brought that, that vision, that was the first time. And today, I actually, I see this is like on another level, just like the Mr. Schultz, when they were discussing about the Starbucks. You know, today it’s thirty, thirty eight thousand stores all over the world.
But the way it was before, when he shared that dream, he shared that vision. His other other partner said, no, that’s not going to work, you know, for people to walk out and not stay in the coffee shop, but buying to go. And today we see the results. So the same thing as, as like, I am in my business we celebrated 30 years.
We sell event merchandise on site at the sporting events. Which, like, for example, United States Figure Skating Championships were the company who created the design and then would sell right there at the event, would sell the merchandise for the official logo. So we do about 150 events per weekend all over the United States, Europe, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
But never in my life that I heard the customer would say, you know what, I will be paying for your business. I will be praying for success of your business. Never in my life. All you hear are people just complaining about the prices and stuff like that. But here they actually say we’re going to be praying for success of this business.
So, if you guys have the same passion to help other people. If any of you just want to hear about the investment and whether this is worth for you to be part of this. Part of this this journey of the of the franchise because the minute we just mentioned, because this hasn’t been public, this is the very first time we actually come and publicly announce that.
We were just sharing this information between our few friends. And, like, we tested grounds with Sacramento, for example. The minute we start selling Sacramento, it was sold out. All of those potential spots were sold out within a few months. So, we see the tremendous demand, we see the tremendous potential, so we would like to partner with people who are like, have the same passion, and if you have that, we would like to talk to you, we have different booklets that we will also pass out, and then of course you can connect with us later, through the email, phone numbers, wherever, and those two wonderful people can help you.
Thank you guys. Woo!
