Rick Stollmeyer - Building a Wellness Business That Lasts

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.

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.

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 chosen to leave the comfort and safety of a conventional job, in 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.

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?

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.”

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.”

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.