Rick Stollmeyer - Building a Wellness Business That Lasts

For all who are bravely facing the challenges of creating a thriving wellness business in a post-COVID world, this book is for you.

Or your wellness business may be stable but you're wondering, “What's next?” You successfully weathered the COVID-19 storm and surmounted numerous other challenges. You've received government funding and are back to taking home a comfortable income, your debt is manageable, your team is (mostly) reliable, and your clients are (mostly) happy. But the challenge of the shut down and the daily grind is taking its toll. Your days have begun to feel repetitive and you're secretly growing tired of it.

What began as your ultimate creative expression of self has turned into a really demanding job. You're working way too many hours and there is a tiny voice inside saying, “It's time to change it up or move on.” Maybe your creative spirit has been captured by a fresh new idea. Or maybe you just need an extended vacation.

For all who have built a thriving wellness business and are now standing at a crossroads, this book is for you.

Regardless of which of these descriptions best reflects your reality, please know that you are not alone. Thousands of brave souls have walked the path you are on now, and many principles they have learned are timeless and universal. And many new principles are coming into existence post COVID-19. You will learn these principles in a simple and clear way in the chapters ahead.

In the first half of 2020, COVID-19 hit the wellness industry like a bolt of lightning—sudden, unexpected, and devastating in its effect.

Simultaneously across more than ninety countries, the global wellness industry shut down. I know because the company I co-founded with Blake Beltram, Mindbody, handles the client bookings for much of the industry. More than 90 percent of the businesses on our platform were forced to shut their doors, either in response to government mandate or falling consumer demand, and more than 80 percent of total business activity disappeared—and it stayed that way for months.

In the midst of the dual public health and economic crisis presented by COVID-19, the seeds of our industry's future were being sown. Within days of the global collapse of our industry that began on March 11, thousands of wellness business owners were implementing virtual delivery of their services. Staying connected to their clientele and delivering wellness classes and appointments via Zoom, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other virtual techniques had become mission critical.

At Mindbody, our own software development team went into overdrive to accelerate the delivery of an integrated Virtual Wellness 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.

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.