to the good faith of hundreds of early adopter customers, the help of multiple mentors and investors, and the talented efforts of thousands of team members, our vision has been realized.
Mindbody now helps tens of millions of consumers engage with tens of thousands of wellness businesses worldwide. Our platform manages both retail brick-and-mortar and virtual wellness businesses, including many hybrid businesses that have sprung up since COVID-19. Our company employs more than 1,400 team members in offices on four continents, and millions of wellness experiences are managed on our platform each day.
There was much we didn't know twenty years ago about building a software business. We didn't even know how much we didn't know. But we did know the most important thing for any entrepreneur: our customers. By keeping those customers as our North Star and striving constantly to know them better, we were able to figure out the rest.
In this book you will gain a deeper understanding of the wellness industry and learn how to define your ideal customers. Armed with that insight, you will learn how to prepare yourself for success, conceive a wellness business that lasts, and launch that business successfully.
My life's journey has included many hard lessons, most learned with the help of friends, customers, and mentors and several with accompanying doses of pain along the way. My ultimate purpose in writing this book is to pay that forward, passing along as many hard-earned lessons as possible.
Whether your dream is to be an independent wellness practitioner, small business owner, or creator of the next global brand, I hope this book inspires you, helps you to better target and serve your customers profitably, and saves you from learning some lessons the hard way.
1 Making a Living in Wellness
Building a successful and sustainable wellness business is far from easy. This industry, which began in earnest in the late 1970s, has been subject to changing consumer tastes, rapidly evolving technologies, and unpredictable disruptions ever since. The fitness class or wellness service that is hot today could be old news in a few years, and every once in a while an unexpected disaster like 9/11, a sharp economic downturn, or COVID-19 can upend your carefully laid plans.
Many prospective wellness entrepreneurs don't want to hear that, particularly yoga and Pilates teachers, and practitioners of ancient arts such as Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine. Yes, these practices are centuries old and proven to work. But, as a business owner, your principal challenge is not whether your modality works. Your principal challenge is how to deliver experiences around that modality that tomorrow's consumers will pay for so that you can earn a sustainable profit. This is the essential ingredient of a successful wellness business.
As we will lay out in the next chapter, the modern wellness movement has occurred in three distinct waves, each driven by the arrival of a new generation of adults coupled with key advancements of technology. Now in the 2020s, we are surely on the cusp of yet another wave, the onset of which has been accelerated by COVID-19. In the decade to come, we can be certain that hundreds of millions more people will make wellness a top priority in their lives. What we cannot be certain of is which wellness practices and forms of delivery those people will favor. But we can make educated guesses both by understanding the societal forces that have shaped the modern wellness movement and by being astute observers of the trends happening around us.
Most important, we can commit ourselves to business plans that are agile and hedged against future disruptions and that are capable of absorbing economic shocks and rapidly adapting to match changing technologies and consumer tastes.
Therefore, to successfully create wellness businesses that last, we must embrace a paradox. We must be disciplined enough to prepare ourselves and create well-thought-out plans, committed enough to see our plans to fruition, and nimble enough to change course when our concepts don't work or the tide turns against us. This means staying grounded in the timeless principles of the wellness experience—movement, nutrition, mindfulness, and social connection—while staying flexible in how best to deliver these outcomes to our clients.
The best way to do that is to closely watch and experience other wellness businesses around you. As you do this you will observe what they are doing well and what they are not. You will take careful note of why the most effective wellness businesses are successful and why the least effective are not. Both examples are necessary and important. In fact, the bad examples may teach you even more than the good ones.
If you are a veteran business owner whose numbers have stagnated or started to fall, you may identify with this statement:
That new flavor of the month wellness business that just popped up and is stealing all my clients. Meanwhile, my business steeped in time-honored tradition is suffering..
If this describes how you are feeling, I first want to acknowledge your pain. You worked so hard to learn your craft and build your business. You have served so many people and enhanced so many lives. And now it feels like the upstart is taking them from you. That hurts.
Okay, now I want you to set that baggage down and consider what Khalil Gibran said more than 100 years ago in his poem On Children:
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
As entrepreneurs, the businesses we create feel like our children. And as with actual children, their growth is marked by repeated opportunities to choose between bravely moving toward their future or staying stuck in the past. In business as in life, one is either growing or dying.
And what is true for the parent is also true for the entrepreneur. Choosing to raise a child or start and run a business is a Hero's Journey.
The Hero's Journey
In his landmark book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell defined an archetypal human journey found in every culture, mythology, and faith tradition. This “Hero's Journey” is captured today in the movies we love, from the Wizard of Oz and Casablanca, to The Graduate and Star Wars, to Forrest Gump, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Apollo 13.
Joseph Campbell summarized this Journey as follows:
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder:
fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won:
the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man
Let's break this down.
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day …
The United States is the most entrepreneurial nation on earth and the birthplace of the modern wellness movement, yet even in the United States less than 6 percent of U.S. adults earn a living owning any business and less than 0.5 percent are employed in the wellness industry.
In short, wellness professionals and entrepreneurs are a rare breed. They are heroes who have made a conscious decision to leave the comfort of the world most people consider normal. They have
