Optimal Health Centre celebrates grand opening

Jon Johnson Photo/Gila Herald: Flanked by their Optimal Health Centre family, Hilary and Doug Grant, center, celebrate their grand opening with a ribbon cutting Saturday.

By Jon Johnson

jonjohnsonnews@gmail.com

PIMA – The beacon of public/private development in Pima showed off its luster Saturday, as the Optimal Health Centre celebrated its grand opening with two ribbon cuttings and open house tours of the facility.

Owners Doug and Hilary Grant were on hand to help guide the tours and perform the ribbon cuttings for the Optimal Health Systems and Gains In Bulk businesses. The facility will also hold a ribbon cutting for its Iron Man Magazine business in the future that is expected to attract some of the businesses’ famous athletic clientele. 

Jon Johnson Photo/Gila Herald: The new Optimal Health Centre is open for business.

“It is a big day for us,” Doug Grant said. “I get a little choked up because it’s a big day for us from the standpoint of being able to show people that there’s a place that they can come to help them reach optimal health. There’s tools out there – if they have their health, everything else in their lives are better; their finances are better, their family life is better, their social life is better and we just want to be that beacon here to help them with the tools to accomplish that.”

While having just one of the three businesses in Pima is a huge boost to the town’s industry, having all three under one roof was unheard of before Pima Town Manager Sean Lewis got together with Doug Grant and expressed a vision for the old Graco lot that was a rusting junkyard. 

The town voted to purchase the old Graco property at its Oct. 3, 2017 meeting, with the caveat that Optimal Health Systems sign a 10-year lease. OHS is a whole-food nutrition company that Doug Grant started in 1997 and has operated in Pima since 2003. It, along with its sister company, Gains In Bulk, serves a variety of people, including professional athletes, doctors, and people just wanting to improve their health. 

The new 12,000-square-foot Optimal Health Centre building increased the businesses’ employees from 12 in 2014 to about 42 and is a combination of warehouse, retail, manufacturing, publishing, and office space. The project utilized 100 percent local labor to construct the building, including Yentsch’s Concrete, Ward Brothers Enterprise LLC, Hughes Custom Performance, Hughes Plumbing, New Insulation Concepts, E.A. Glass, B&D Air Conditioning and more. 

Jon Johnson Photo/Gila Herald: Pima Town Manager Sean Lewis, right, chats with an employee at the open house.

“It’s great,” Lewis said. “Not only having the building and taking care of what was here before but adding this many jobs is beneficial. The company itself benefits the town just through taxes, but, more importantly, when you have 40 people with good, steady jobs that also helps immensely. Those 40 people buy gas and visit restaurants to eat and some of them buy houses, so anytime you can get an industry like this that impacts that many it’s a great thing.”

Jon Johnson Photo/Gila Herald: The Optimal Health Centre had two ribbon cuttings; one for Optimal Health Systems and one for Gains In Bulk.

To help with the project, the town was awarded a zero-interest $375,000 loan made possible through a rural economic development fund from the United States Department of Agriculture administered by the Graham County Electric Cooperative. The money was the cherry on top for the project and helped the business by allowing the town to do even more work on the building before turning over the keys to the Grants to finish up. As is, Doug and Hilary put in roughly $65,000 to finish the building. To read more about the facility and all that transpires there, read the Gila Herald’s previous report here.

Jon Johnson Photo/Gila Herald: Doug Grant works at his desk in the new Optimal Health Centre building in Pima.

“It’s great to do it in a place we love where I was raised her in the (Gila) Valley,” Doug Grant said. 

During the open house, employees took those interested on a tour of all aspects of the facility, including its production, shipping, retail, publishing, and offices. Also on hand was the inaugural copy of Iron Man Magazine created at the site. The magazine will be publicly available April 16.

Iron Man Magazine was first founded in 1936 and has been an innovator in its class throughout the years. The Grants have taken it a step forward by making sure all the athletes featured in the magazine are free of performance-enhancing drugs, a first for the industry.