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MD postpones residency for supplemental income

He name is Aaron Tabor -- Dr. Tabor, to some -- but you can call him "Soy Boy." The doctors who call for information about his soy supplement do. He thinks it's funny.

Tabor, 29, ditched plans for a residency after medical school to peddle a soy drink powder he developed to ease his mom's menopausal symptoms. Now, two years later, his Winston-Salem-based Physicians Marketing Group Inc., which does business as Physicians Laboratories, has already turned a profit and is expected to pull in revenues of $5 million in the fiscal year that ends in April 2000, largely on the strength of its Revival drink-mix powder.

Revival was born of research Tabor did after hearing his mom complain about hot flashes, night sweats, mood swings and fatigue. He found that Japanese women, who eat as many as five servings of the soybean curd a day, report few of the emotional and physiological symptoms reported by American women. He went to work on a soy supplement for his mom. "Literally, within one week of taking the finished product, she really had a turnaround in her menopausal symptoms," Tabor says. "She has more energy than I do now."

Tabor decided there was a market for his mix, but selling soy in the United States isn't easy. "First, soy tastes terrible," Tabor says. "Second, you have to eat a lot of it to get the full benefits." He solved the quantity problem by using only the center of the soybean, which is five times more potent than outer portions. Solving the taste problem took a little more time.

After some experimentation, Tabor came up with flavors that satisfied a panel of picky judges. "We'd feed it to my brother's kids. If they smiled and liked it, we knew it was good."

With about 15 employees -- including his father, mother and two brothers -- the company recently expanded into a 50,000-square-foot warehouse to accommodate shipping operations. While some might cringe at the prospect of so much family participation, Tabor says it all seems to work fine. His father, Bryan, handles company logistics and inventory. Older brother, Byron, handles shipping and fulfillment, and younger brother, Nathan, attends to physician relations. His mother, Suzanne, helps develop new products and patient-outreach programs. Manufacturing is outsourced to two other companies.

Tabor, who graduated from Johns Hopkins University's medical school in 1997, says he plans to do a residency someday, but developing Revival and...