About Sam

Meet Samael Tejada:
A Catalyst for Change in Modern Wellness

My story, like the stories of so many others, began with the dreams of my parents. While their heritage and culture were deeply rooted in their native Dominican Republic, they made the decision to migrate to America when I was seven months old. Committed to a better future for their four children, they sacrificed comfort and familiarity to move to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and later, South Florida, to live the American Dream.

I was trained and certified as a lifeguard at age 14, and hired through the Milwaukee public school system as a lifeguard by the time I was fifteen years old. In my senior year of high school, my family relocated to South Florida. One year later, I started my first business, Rescue-101, providing the American Red Cross Lifeguard Training course to teach others to become certified lifeguards, training them about health, safety and crisis prevention so they could effectively react to situations.

It was a satisfying career, but my ultimate goal was to become a firefighter/paramedic, which I did at age 19. And a lot of my brothers and sisters in the fire department ended up working for me at Rescue 101 during their off days. It really excited me to be serving the City of Oakland Park as a firefighter/paramedic, but I was also stoked about providing job opportunities for both trainers and students in my business. It felt good to be helping people on multiple levels. I guess that entrepreneurial spirit has always been a part of me.

Other people working in my side business presented an opportunity for me to explore other avenues for added revenue, and to help more people. On my off days from the fire department, I took a side job performing blood draws for Cenegenics Health Institute, a pioneer in the preventative functional medicine space. There I met the man who would become my biggest mentor, Dr. Robert D. Willix, Jr., a cardiac surgeon and founding partner of the company as the chief medical officer. Dr. Willix was a pioneer in Age Management Medicine, focusing primarily on maintaining health rather than just treating disease. Here was a cardiac surgeon whose objective was to keep people off his operating table.

I was inspired on a whole other level by this man and this approach to health and wellness and began attending seminars and learning everything there is to know about anti-aging and the world of functional medicine. The patients who were benefiting were all high-end CEOs and affluent individuals and I began to feel my entrepreneurial spirit stirring. Health is undeniably wealth, and only those with the financial means seemed to have access to the transformative benefits of preventative healthcare.

I was still passionate about wanting to save as many lives as possible, but in the firefighter/paramedic role, I would often be helping the same person with the same problem they had called about the week before. We’d tell them what to do to take better care of themselves and we’d be right back there the next week. I wanted to do more than that. I wanted to provide lasting solutions for these individuals to take care of their health and well-being. From my perspective, this glaring disparity in healthcare equality presented an opportunity to save far more lives than I could as a firefighter/paramedic. I’ve always had a knack for finding a need and then developing a plan to meet that need.

Driven by this mission, I founded Liquivida, fueled by the knowledge I gained from my mentor and a deep-rooted conviction that I could bring transformative wellness solutions to the masses. I attended seminars and conferences and read everything I could to learn more about preventative medicine and keep up with the science. As a student, I never really appreciated the textbook approach to learning, but I just naturally absorbed all of this clinical information; it resonated with me.

Fast forward nine years, and with no outside investment of capital, Liquivida has become a multi-million-dollar company, and a rising leader in the modern wellness industry. During this journey, I had to retire from the career that I thought was my passion and purpose. And at one point in my life, it was. But it led me to my next purpose. That’s called growth.
This growth journey has led me to places that years ago, I could not have imagined. Feature articles in countless publications, appearances on health-related television segments and entrepreneurial podcasts, a respected leader in the modern wellness industry, an advisor to high-end CEOs, speaking engagements at high profile industry events, a published author, a sought-out resource for other entrepreneurs who want to explore their own path of passion and purpose, and the President & Founder of a franchise company that has created jobs and opportunities nationwide and is making a powerful impact on the wellness industry.

My impact will not end there. I was recently named Chairman of the American IV Association’s Leadership Advisory Board. The Board will play a pivotal role in unifying, shaping and driving the IV Hydration Therapy industry forward safely, with a commitment to oversight, growth, clinical excellence and quality improvement. My future ambition is to get involved in local politics, enhance local businesses and my community, before moving to state level politics and affecting legislation impacting business and the wellness industry. That is the ultimate goal, at least right now.

I’m looking forward to the places that I will be ten years from now that I could not have possibly envisioned today.