many cases taking dramatic cuts in pay and benefits and in other cases leaving behind regular pay and benefits altogether. If you choose to strike out on your own as an independent contractor or small business owner, you also leave behind paid vacations, 40-hour workweeks, and most government labor law protections.
When you launch your own wellness business, in the early stages, you will likely find yourself working 60–80 hours per week and drawing little or no cash from your business. And unless you have a wealthy partner or benefactor, you will most likely find yourself drawing from personal savings, running up credit cards, and borrowing from friends and family to ensure that your own employees and landlord get paid.
And you will be doing all of this to help other people live healthier, happier lives. That makes you a hero in my book. In every sense of the word.
… into a region of supernatural wonder …
To start a wellness business is to enter into the world of the marketplace, a mysterious land where unseen forces and unpredictable outcomes rule the day. When you open your doors, you will learn things about your community you never knew. You will become one of a small band of people in your community who have each taken similarly daring leaps. And you will find yourself searching online or looking at your neighborhood with new eyes, asking the ultimate question:
Thousands of people search for what I do every day. Why aren't more of them coming to me?
… fabulous forces are there encountered …
The moment you begin offering wellness experiences, your services will not just be competing with other classes and appointments offered in your neighborhood. They will also be pitted against the nearly infinite array of choices we all have to fill our time. The fact is, fewer than one in five people are actively engaged in any form of organized wellness. For multiple reasons, many industry experts and I believe this level of engagement and the overall wellness industry will grow rapidly in the decade ahead, but as a wellness entrepreneur your biggest competition isn't the studio, gym, or spa down the street. It's not even Peloton® or the various on-demand or streaming classes now readily available online. Your greatest competition as a wellness entrepreneur is the couch and the latest video game or series on Amazon Prime.
So what fabulous forces could compel someone to set down the easy distractions of modern life and replace those with a challenging new wellness habit? These forces will seem supernatural at first, but there is a formula you can follow that will take most of the mystery away. The key elements are found in Chapter 12, “Lay Your Foundation with Your Competitive Advantage,” Chapter 17 – “Build Your Website and Start Guerilla Marketing”, and Chapter 19 “Grow Your Clientele with Paid Marketing That Works.”
… and a decisive victory is won …
In short, creating a successful wellness business that lasts is profoundly difficult. It will stretch and grow you in ways you never imagined. But when you decode the supernatural wonder and prevail against the fabulous forces, there are few victories in life so sweet. It's like summitting a high mountain, experiencing the most fabulous sex, or bringing a child into the world. Creating a wellness business that lasts is thrilling, humbling, ecstatic, and heartrending—all at the same time.
A few months after we started Mindbody, a close friend who owned her own spa treated me to a massage. I was seriously stressed and needed it badly. In the middle of the treatment, she asked me in a soft voice, “So, how does it feel to have your own business?”
I was in a deeply meditative place and took my time responding:
“… I feel …”
“Truly alive,” she finished knowingly.
“Exactly.”
… the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
Regardless of the ultimate outcome, the mysterious adventure of creating your own wellness business will give you the power to bestow boons. Even if your first business venture is not “successful,” the journey will teach you valuable lessons that will inform your next venture. Even if you decide to simply go to work for someone else, your insights from that venture will make you uniquely valuable to your next employer. At Mindbody, we love to hire entrepreneurs. These are the people who get how hard business really is and who reflexively look for ways to add more value to the organization. That is a huge boon to anyone they choose to work for.
And if your business succeeds, you will help hundreds or even thousands of people live healthier, happier lives. You will help transform your community and inspire untold numbers of others to take similar leaps. Those are powerful boons!
The Hero's Journey was never meant to be easy. But if you have what it takes, it is the best thing you can do in your professional life. Regardless of the outcome, the journey is utterly worth it. Perhaps that's the whole point.
In the months ahead, as you embark on your own Hero's Journey, you will most likely have moments of discouragement, exasperation, and doubt. In those times, refer back to the Hero's Journey to remind yourself that this is all part of the process. You will get through this!
2 The Seven Dimensions of Wellness and Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
The Global Wellness Institute defines wellness as “the active pursuit of activities, choices, and lifestyles that lead to a state of holistic health.” The operative words are active pursuit, and the fundamental truth is that most people need a highly trained practitioner—a teacher, trainer, therapist, or coach—to materially improve their wellness. Wellness is personal. It is about people helping people, and that truth is why the wellness industry exists.
The Mindbody team has been serving the wellness industry for more than two decades and we have witnessed unprecedented growth in that time. Growing at more than twice the rate of the rest of the global economy, the combined value of the wellness industry pre-COVID-19 surpassed $4.5 trillion in 2019 (Global Wellness Institute Report, October 2019). To put that unfathomable number into perspective, humanity spent more on wellness products and services in 2019 than they did on eating out, and 2019 was a record year for restaurants as well.
But all of that was before COVID-19 disrupted our lives, introducing the entire world to a new fear of an unseen enemy few had ever imagined, and upending the economies of the world. That unprecedented global crisis permanently changed the world view and priorities of billions of people, accelerating many societal and technological trends already in motion before the virus hit, introducing a several new trends and interrupting multiple others. The most important question to those of us in the wellness industry is what will happen to our cause and our businesses now as the world recovers from the pandemic and adjusts to a new normal.
Will the wellness industry as we know it still exist in five years? Absolutely! In fact, we are about to experience a massive new wave of growth.
All the research the Mindbody team has done, all the data we have looked at, all of our conversations with industry thought leaders, and all of the rapid technological
