How Options Medical Weight Loss Was Created — By the Co-Founder Who Built It

My father weighed more than 400 pounds.

He tried everything the system offered him, in the order it offered it. He had the gastric sleeve. When that failed, he had bariatric surgery — and it worked, for a while. He lost 200 pounds. Then, like so many patients, he put it all back on. That’s not a personal failing; it’s the statistical norm. A 2023 systematic review found that nearly half of all bariatric surgery patients experience significant weight regain.

I watched the rest of it happen in slow motion. I hired him one of the best personal trainers in the area — he never once stepped onto the workout floor. His doctor, who by his own admission had almost no training in nutrition, referred him to a nutritionist. The nutritionist handed him a plan that required cooking five meals a day. For a man who had never meal-prepped in his life, that plan was dead on arrival. So he went back to his doctor, who did the only thing left in his toolkit: he prescribed antidepressants for how the whole cycle made him feel.

Surgery. Trainer. Nutritionist. Prescription. Four providers, four buildings, four philosophies — and not one of them talking to the others.

He passed away in 2012.

Two years later, I co-founded Options Medical Weight Loss. I’ll always believe that if a place like it had existed sooner, I might have had more time with him.

Year One (2014): The Place That Would Have Worked for My Dad

If you weren’t in the weight loss world back then, it’s hard to remember how fragmented it was. One company sold a diet. Another sold pills. There were coaching outfits. There were food programs like Weight Watchers. Every one of them was a silo, and every one of them believed their silo was the whole answer.

Nobody had put it all under one roof and systemized it.

So in 2014, I left the corporate world and co-founded Options Medical Weight Loss — a medical weight loss clinic designed from the ground up to be the place that would have worked for my dad. I was the architect on the business side of the house: I created the branding, built the operational and sales systems, and oversaw the marketing and growth plan. If it touched how the company ran, sold, or grew, it came through my desk.

Why we called it “Options”

The name was the philosophy. We gave every patient options — real ones.

If a patient didn’t want medication, we had a program for that. If they didn’t want our diet, we had a program for that too. Medication was a tool, not the product. The food we offered was a tool, not the product. The product was healthy living — taught patiently, at the patient’s pace, so that by the time someone hit their goal weight, they actually understood how to keep the weight off.

I designed the Options Diet System around the exact failure I’d watched my father live through. No one goes from zero to cooking five meals a day. So the ODS taught meal prep the way you’d actually learn it: one meal first. Then two. Then more, as the habit took hold. Progress a person could sustain, instead of a program a person would abandon.

Everything was customized to the individual, and the individual was in charge. We had a phrase for what we were really selling: empowerment equals confidence.

The numbers came first

By 2014 I had already spent a decade building businesses and the systems that run them, and I’d learned the formula the hard way: people plus processes equals profit.

So Options didn’t grow into its metrics. It launched with them. From day one I knew every number that mattered: leads, consult bookings, show rates, closing percentage, retention. When you can see every link in the revenue chain, you can fix the exact link that’s leaking before it costs you the month.

Years 2–4 (2015–2017): Building the Machine — and Replacing Myself

Once the clinic worked, I went to work on the more important thing: making it work without me.

I built an org chart where every position — every single one — had three documents behind it: a workflow, a training, and an audit. How the job is done, how a new person learns it, and how we verify it’s being done right. (Years later this became the backbone of what I now call the Barton Method: Measure, Systemize, Train, Audit.)

That structure changed everything about how we could grow. We expanded quickly from two small offices into a 2,000-square-foot clinic. The second person I ever hired became the manager of our second location — Glenview. The person working directly under me became our next manager and took over the clinic after that. Promotion from within wasn’t an accident twice; it became the design. Eventually there was a documented pathway to promotion for every position in the company — the front desk knew exactly what it took to become a coach, a coach knew what it took to become a manager, a manager knew what it took to run a market.

Then we expanded out of state, and opened more locations across Illinois. And here’s the part I want every clinic owner reading this to sit with: the system was easily replicatable because it was a system. Not a founder’s instincts. Not tribal knowledge in one manager’s head. Documents, numbers, and training that produced the same patient experience in every location.

By 2017, the machine was documented enough to sell — literally. I converted Options Medical Weight Loss into a franchise. I wrote the operational core of the Franchise Disclosure Document myself — the systems, the training, the way the business actually runs — with attorneys handling the legal framework. When your operations are already documented down to the position level, that part of an FDD isn’t an invention; it’s a compilation.

Years 5–8 (2018–2021): The Franchise Era

Under that system, Options expanded across four states — first Illinois, then Arizona, then Ohio, then Florida — and grew into one of the largest privately held medical weight loss companies in the United States. The playbook never changed as we scaled — measure everything, systemize everything, train everyone, audit relentlessly. Each new location opened with the full operating system on day one instead of learning it live.

By 2020, the growth curve demanded its own infrastructure. In 2020 and 2021 I built out a home office to support massive growth — centralizing the functions no individual clinic should carry alone, so every location could focus on the only thing that happens at a location: taking care of patients. That’s the unglamorous truth about scaling a clinic business. The locations are the visible part; the home office is the machine that makes location twelve run as well as location one.

And then came the test no playbook saw coming. In early 2020, as COVID emerged, I had a feeling something was about to go terribly wrong — so before the world shut down, I built out our telemedicine infrastructure. When the lockdowns hit, we didn’t scramble. We turned it on. The first time our patients ever used telemedicine was the moment the world needed it most, and our care never stopped. That’s what a systems business looks like under stress: you don’t predict every storm, but you build fast enough to beat the ones you see coming.

2022: The Exit

In 2022, I made a full exit from Options Medical Weight Loss. Today the company runs dozens of clinics under private equity ownership and professional management — and to me, that’s the final proof of the thesis. A business built on one person’s talent dies or shrinks when that person leaves. A business built on systems outlives its founders. Mine did.

The Bet That Aged Well

Here’s the part that means more in 2026 than it did in 2014.

We built Options years before GLP-1s turned medical weight loss into a national conversation. Back then, our founding premise sounded almost contrarian: medication is a tool, not the product. The product is a person learning to live differently — with medical support, coaching, and nutrition education working together under one roof, at a pace they can actually sustain.

Then the GLP-1 era arrived, and the entire industry ran headfirst into the question we’d designed for a decade earlier: what happens when the medication stops and no one taught the patient anything? The model the field has converged on — medication paired with real lifestyle change, coaching, and nutrition support — is the model Options was built on from day one. We didn’t predict the drugs. We just refused to believe any single tool was the answer, because I’d watched every single tool fail my father one at a time.

What I Do Now

Options didn’t teach me the system — Options proved what systems can do. I’d spent the decade before opening and operating businesses across the country, and in the years since, I’ve taken everything those businesses taught me and built something new: a unique operating system designed to work across every kind of wellness company — weight loss, med spas, concierge medicine, longevity. Every revenue-driving number visible at the click of a button, and a workflow, a training, and an audit behind every position. Through Will Barton Ventures, I’m now bringing that system to the masses. I’m also the Founder and CEO of MyGevity, building in the longevity space.

Whether you own a clinic and can’t pull your numbers on demand, you’re ready to scale from one market to many, or you need an operator in the room guiding your board — that’s the work I do now. Start with a conversation.

I built the first one for my father. I build the rest of them for yours.

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