How to Pivot Your Business During Unprecedented Times with Lauren Trenkle and Dr. Geoffrey Trenkle: An EOFire Classic from 2022

The emergency that became an accelerator

When the world narrowed to a single daily worry—how to stay safe while still keeping a paycheck—some businesses folded and others reinvented themselves. For Lauren and Dr. Jeffrey Trankel, founders of Total Testing Solutions and Total Health, the pandemic was less an interruption than a clarifying moment. They had built a modest ENT practice from the ground up, then watched that practice mutate into something more urgent: a response team, a logistics operation, and eventually a technology company that could reach people where they were.

From clinic to community: an urgent outreach

Their story begins in a familiar place: a small medical practice in Los Angeles serving an underserved community. As patient visits dwindled, staff fell ill, and supply chains jammed, the couple began making calls—Quest, LabCorp, colleagues in New York—trying to source swabs and tests. What started as ad hoc outreach to keep staff employed turned into full-scale testing operations, with the founders personally buying tests and setting up in an empty office parking lot to serve people who couldn’t wait for overwhelmed hospitals.

There is a gritty, human image that repeats throughout this account: two clinicians in PPE, changing outside the building, paying out of pocket for tests, and learning to move at pandemic speed. That early pain—operational uncertainty, financial risk, and physical discomfort—became the raw material for innovation.

Architecture of a pivot: logistics meets empathy

The Trankels didn’t invent demand. They found gaps left by larger providers and moved into them. They learned to balance Lauren’s operational rigor with Jeffrey’s appetite for saying yes. When a construction company asked for weekly testing of a thousand workers in San Francisco, the couple accepted first and figured out the logistics later—calling in favors, building supply chains, and assembling boots-on-the-ground operations.

The lesson was practical: when complex problems deter competitors, the opportunity to serve and scale often widens. They turned a testing service into a multifaceted organization—public and private testing, vaccination efforts in partnership with LA Metro and public health, e-commerce for at-home antigen tests, and a software product to manage scheduling, reporting, and now virtual proctoring.

Virtual proctoring: a small idea with systemic reach

One of the clearest examples of their ability to reframe a problem is virtual proctoring. As regulators and employers searched for ways to verify off-the-shelf antigen tests, Total Testing Solutions put a human surveillance layer over at-home testing. Through scheduled sessions and a 24/7 proctoring team, the company could confirm proper test administration, authenticate results, and deliver verified reports—features that made the service appealing for travel, schools, and employers navigating compliance.

Building the software to bind scheduling, results delivery, and proctoring was a different kind of challenge. It required marrying clinical workflows with user-friendly interfaces and scalable backend systems—work that pushed the founders, neither of whom started as software developers, into product and platform thinking.

Disruption with humility

That product thinking opens a larger ambition: occupational health. The Trankels see an industry still clogged by fax machines, fragmented records, and cumbersome protocols. Their experiences exposed an opportunity to modernize how companies manage employee health—by combining telehealth, verification tools, and a clearer user experience. Their approach is not about upending care for drama’s sake, but about making routine health services faster, fairer, and more accessible.

People before perfection

Underpinning the business moves is an interpersonal dynamic that matters as much as any spreadsheet. The pair describe a classic entrepreneurial duet: one partner relentlessly visionary, the other insistently operational. That friction is productive. Lauren’s insistence on doing things right occasionally slows rollout, but it preserves quality; Jeffrey’s willingness to say yes accelerates growth. Their balancing act offers a practical template for founders who run businesses with partners, spouses, or siblings.

There is another softer strand to their philosophy: grace. After months of triage and exhaustion, the Trankels articulate a simple social plea—more kindness. The pandemic exposed brittle nerves and frayed patience, and their work became a daily reminder that service, even when transactional, carries a human dimension.

Learning to seize asymmetric opportunities

Their operating maxim—say yes and figure it out—distills into a repeatable strategic posture. Look for problems with high barriers to entry and underserved populations; that combination signals an opportunity to build defensible services. Where others hesitated, the Trankels invested time, money, and reputation. The risk paid off: a local practice became a national testing and software provider that serves businesses, transit hubs, and individual consumers.

• Act on asymmetric opportunities: high-complexity problems often have fewer competitors.
• Match roles to temperament: pair visionary thinking with operational discipline.
• Invest in software as glue: tech ties logistics, reporting, and user experience together.

Their work is a reminder that crises refine priorities. What starts as community triage can mature into systems and products that persist long after headlines fade. For the Trankels, the pandemic was not only a test of endurance but an engine for transformation—one that combined bedside empathy with supply-chain grit and a willingness to design new systems. That combination points to a quieter kind of resilience: the capacity to reimagine service delivery so that care is not just an act, but a continuously improving system that meets people where they are.

Insights

Adaptation rooted in service, not opportunism, yields sustainable enterprises; the future of occupational health may depend less on scale than on better workflows, verification, and ease of access. As medicine sheds outdated practices, there is a chance to rebuild systems that are both faster and more humane.