Platform, enabling wellness business owners of any size to upload both prerecorded classes and streaming video, restricting access of that content to paying clients only, and selling hybrid face-to-face and virtual memberships. And the people came.
In the weeks following the official declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw exponential growth of virtual wellness delivery as people sheltering at home logged into classes and appointments from their laptops, phones, and tablets. In the months that followed, as communities around the world gradually reopened and brick-and-mortar studios were once again allowed to welcome paying customers into their places of business, we saw that virtual delivery had become an important and enduring component of wellness—in addition to the brick-and-mortar offline experiences.
In short, the sudden bolt of COVID-19 lightning that so dramatically disrupted our industry in 2020 has become a spark that ignited yet another wave of wellness industry growth and innovation. This wave promises to be even larger and more exciting than the last.
My Journey to the Wellness Industry
This book is not about Mindbody or me, but in case you are wondering where the knowledge and opinions in the pages that follow come from, here's the short story:
I was raised in a small-business family. My grandfather, parents, and three of my four brothers were all small-business owners. I began working at Stollmeyer Lighting—our family's retail lighting store—when I was 10 years old. My dad and older brothers taught me to assemble and display light fixtures, sweep floors, and clean. Within a few years I was on the showroom floor selling light fixtures and in the back office learning how to keep the books and understand financial statements.
My family was proud of my entrepreneurial parents. My mom and dad were different from other people. They were independent in their thinking and daring in their pursuit of the American Dream. People in the community respected and looked up to them. My parents didn't have jobs; they created them.
But there was another side to this story.
What others outside the family rarely saw were the hard realities of making a living with a small business. Decorative lighting sales rode the crests and troughs of the economy. Stollmeyer Lighting flourished when homes were being built or remodeled. But when the inevitable recessions came—and there were several in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s—sales would plummet and the store would morph from a nicely profitable family business into a cash-burning machine, quickly eating into my parents' nest egg.
One of those recessions hit as I was entering high school in the early 1980s. Our comfortable upper-middle-class household was soon pushed into financial crisis. I was a strong student and could see the seriousness in my parents' eyes as they urged me to excel in school, go to college, and “get credentials” so that I might have a more financially secure future than they did. They vowed to pay for any university I could get into and encouraged me to dream big. I internalized their message and knew deep down that I would never ask them for a penny.
Instead, I threw myself into school and aimed for straight A's so that I might earn a scholarship to a top university. Near the end of my junior year, a classmate told me about the Service Academies—the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland; the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York; the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado; and the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut. These are all top-rated universities and they pay their students to attend, including free room and board. Successful graduates not only receive a bachelor's degree but are guaranteed a job as commissioned officers in their respective service branches. I liked the sound of that.
Three weeks after throwing my high school graduation cap into the air, I reported to the U.S. Naval Academy. I knew very little about the Navy except that they had cool-looking ships, awesome jets, and the best-looking uniforms. I figured my experience at Annapolis would be like Harvard with some Navy training thrown in. Boy was I wrong.
By accepting an appointment to Annapolis, I had committed myself to one of the most physically, emotionally, and academically challenging programs in the world. After the first week, we were given a brief break and allowed to call our parents. When I heard my mom's voice, I burst into tears. I could scarcely get any words out. She and my dad must have thought they were torturing me, but I was just exhausted and homesick. We weren't tortured, but we were hazed. The truth is I really hated the place and the place didn't think much of me. But I was seriously stubborn. I wanted the free education and I wanted to be a naval officer. They could kick me out, but I sure as hell wasn't going to quit.
Although several upperclassmen tried to drive me out, they didn't succeed. In the end, with the emotional support of my parents, the help of my classmates, and a few blessed doses of good luck, I graduated, received my commission as an ensign in the Navy, and was selected for the nuclear submarine program.
I served aboard the USS Chicago (SSN-721), a fast attack submarine doing important missions in the Western Pacific. This was in the final years of the Cold War with the Soviet Union and our ship participated in multiple missions designed to prevent a hot war from breaking out. Most of these I can never talk about, but I can say that we were fortunate to never go into battle, damage the ship, or lose a shipmate. But the real specter of those possibilities hung over us constantly. It was dangerous work and unbelievably intense. A nuclear submarine is one of the most complex machines ever created, and keeping it running safely is a constant battle against the elements. A submarine crew works 24/7 and sleep quickly becomes the most precious commodity.
When I left the Navy at age 28, I was a profoundly stronger person than the scared kid who had broken down in tears at the sound of his mother's voice a decade earlier. Those were hard years, but they were purpose-driven and they introduced me to some of the best people I have ever known. Most important, the Navy showed me about the hidden strength inside each of us, taught me humility, and gave me a global perspective. Staring into the face of war for ten years, I became deeply committed to peace.
In my first six years after the Navy I held six different engineering management jobs in four different companies. None of those roles inspired me and I began to feel that I must not be cut out for business. What I was really feeling were my family's entrepreneurial roots tugging at me. In 2000, I left corporate America behind to co-found Mindbody with my high school buddy Blake Beltram and ran that business as president or CEO for nearly twenty years.
Blake was also raised in a small-business family, and we shared a deep empathy for the scrappy grass-roots entrepreneurs who were opening neighborhood boutique studios in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. These people were leading a boutique fitness movement that we would later identify as the Second Wave of Wellness (see Chapter 3, “The Generational Lens”), and they included two amazingly powerful women who would play pivotal roles in our future. The first was Mari Winsor, the “Pilates Teacher to the Stars” who had engaged Blake to build a PC software solution that could manage and link her hugely successful Beverly Hills and West Hollywood studios. The second was Blake's future wife, Cynthia Graham, a Black entrepreneur and wellness innovator who together with her sister Karyn opened RPM Studios in 1998, one of the first Spinning® studios in the San Fernando Valley.
Mindbody's first products were PC software solutions designed to help wellness business owners simplify their operations, boost their revenues, and stay connected to their clients. But we had much bigger dreams. We envisioned a platform that could help drive millions more people to those studios and thereby connect the world to wellness. That intention would later be captured in Mindbody's Purpose Statement:
To Help People Lead Healthier, Happier Lives by Connecting the World to Wellness
Achieving our vision would prove to be much harder than we ever imagined.
