Rick Stollmeyer - Building a Wellness Business That Lasts

As late as January 2020, Mindbody's research found that most early adopters of home-based virtual wellness—including those who favored the sophisticated connected offerings from Peloton ®and Mirror ®—were adopting those tools to supplement their workouts in the brick-and-mortar studios, not replace them. Meanwhile, the proliferating appointment-based wellness businesses, from therapeutic massage to boutique beauty and grooming, were well on their way to booking their best quarter ever, providing services that could not be delivered through a screen.

As we moved further into the decade of the 2020s these forces, combined with the emergence of leading-edge Gen-Zers, would have given the Third Wave of wellness a final push of growth before teeing up a graceful transition to an even more exciting Fourth Wave to follow.

But that story is transpiring in some parallel universe we don't live in.

In our reality, COVID-19 hit our industry in March 2020 like a thunderbolt, and the transition to the next wave will be sooner and more jarring. The pandemic instantly and prematurely ended the Third Wave of wellness before the Fourth Wave had a chance to fully develop and set up. This idled millions of wellness practitioners and caused tens of thousands of wellness businesses to fail during the long months of shelter at home and excruciatingly slow reopening. In the recovery that followed, only a portion of the wellness practitioners who had been fully employed prior to COVID-19 would return to work for the same businesses, and tens of thousands of brick-and-mortar wellness businesses would fail.

The unexpected shock of the COVID-19 pandemic also kicked off a rapid acceleration of industry innovation. Within days of the first shelter-at-home orders, thousands of wellness businesses were offering virtual experiences to their clients via off-the-shelf tools like Zoom, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Within a month, Mindbody had accelerated the release of our long-awaited integrated Virtual Wellness Platform, enabling wellness business owners to build scalable virtual businesses in conjunction with their brick-and-mortar offerings. In the months that followed, multiple other business management solutions followed suit. Necessity had indeed proven to be the mother of invention.

So, what does the future hold? First, we must acknowledge that you and I are engaging through a time machine. You are reading or listening to these words several months or even years after I have written them. Therefore, you already know things that I cannot possibly have known when I wrote this.

For example:

1 Who will take the oath of office in January 2021 as president of the United States?

2 When will COVID-19 prophylactic and therapeutic drugs be developed and widely distributed?

3 When will we have a safe and effective vaccine?

4 How deep will the COVID-19 recession be and how long will it last?

5 Which regions of the world will be more economically impacted?

Fortunately, these temporal factors are largely irrelevant to the long-term future of the wellness industry. Instead, certain longer-term truths are far more likely to determine the future of wellness, and armed with those truths we can make some observations.

Here are seven post-COVID societal truths that transcend political leaders, the economy, and the pandemic response and fifteen wellness industry predictions for the future.

Truth #1: COVID-19 has laid bare the true societal costs of obesity, sedentary lifestyles and poor nutrition.Prediction #1: People's desire to improve their physical well-being will be greatly amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, more employers, insurance companies, and governments will embrace the preventive benefits and increase their subsidies, incentives, and educational campaigns to activate millions of people into healthier and happier lifestyles. This will fuel massive wellness industry growth.

Truth #2: Sheltering at home and social distancing have amplified the need for services that support emotional and social well-being.Prediction #2: The demand for mind and body practices, massage therapy, and meditation will increase, especially for home delivery models.

Truth #3: Prolonged sheltering at home and the accelerated adoption of work from home and hybrid work options have amplified people's hunger to get out of the house.Prediction #3: As business, education, and government organizations reduce their reliance on commercial office space, the demand for wellness services in those commercial zones will go down. This will harm businesses in those neighborhoods.Prediction #4: At the same time, reduced demand for commercial office space will increase commercial office space vacancies and decrease commercial rent rates, creating opportunities for new residential developments and brick-and-mortar wellness businesses to emerge.Prediction #5: Increased adoption of work from home and virtual meetings will increase the value people place on offline interaction and group activities in their leisure time. This will fuel demand for wellness services in those neighborhoods. growth of outdoor wellness activities, as well as wellness businesses located in residential neighborhoods.

Truth #4: Sheltering at home has taught everyone to interact virtually.Prediction #6: The principal advantages of virtual wellness are convenience, cost, and physical safety. Less obvious and even more important is emotional safety; people will be able to avoid the body shame and embarrassment they may feel when they have their first face-to-face wellness experience. Millions of people will now be free to more easily sample and adopt compelling virtual experiences.Prediction #7: Most brick-and-mortar wellness businesses will become hybrid wellness businesses, leveraging their virtual extensions to reach larger audiences and draw more people into the offline face-to-face experience.Prediction #8: Brick-and-mortar wellness businesses without virtual extensions will find it difficult to survive.

Truth #5: The pandemic has made billions of people more concerned about sanitation, hygiene, and social distancing.Prediction #9: People will be choosier about the people they socialize with. This will be a challenge for large multi-purpose health clubs and low-cost/high-volume 24-hour gyms.Prediction #10: People will be willing to pay a higher premium for wellness experiences that involve fewer people. This will be a boon for personal trainers and high-end boutiques that serve a more affluent clientele.Prediction #11: Tribalism will increase. Aggregation platforms that fill classes with last-minute strangers will be less desired.

Truth #6: Connected devices are rapidly becoming more commonplace and affordable.Prediction #12: High-quality video feeds, heart rate monitoring, and workout machine tracking will make a high-quality connected wellness experience accessible to hundreds of millions of middle-income and lower-income people. This will help drive the resurgence of local practitioners who offer authenticity, community, and the option for hybrid online and offline experiences.Prediction #13: Peloton® and Mirror® will soon find their offerings commoditized by hundreds of thousands of connected independent practitioners, who can offer a more personal online and offline experience.

Truth #7: People are living longer and expecting a higher quality of life in their older years.Prediction #14: Rapid advancements in medical science and public health, combined with the increased adoption of wellness practices, will vastly increase average lifespans. Most of us alive today will reasonably expect to remain active well into our 90s. Millennials and Gen-Zers can expect to live well into their 100s.Prediction #15: Wellness practices for seniors will grow massively in the decades ahead.

What does all the above add up to? Wellness remains the largest and most important opportunity of our age; the industry will experience even more growth and innovation due to COVID-19. If you understand what is happening and have what it takes, you could not have picked a better time to launch a wellness business.