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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 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.

… 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!