Brad Wills is the former Chief Strategy Officer of MINDBODY, Inc. He is credited for being one of the architects for MINDBODY’s API Ecosystem and its Marketplace, as well as a critical player in the company’s successful IPO. Before MINDBODY, Brad led corporate development at Active Network, another publicly traded player in health technology. Brad’s recent decision to leave MINDBODY was, in part, to reconnect with his family. As such, the interview with Brad touches on the topics of life design, strategy, as well as digital health.
1) In your public epilogue about your decision to leave MINDBODY, you confessed, “I only operate at one speed … ” What have you learned since this admission about the personal tolls of unabated professional drive? What measures are you taking going forward to approach achieving high performance without forsaking other areas of your life?
I’ve now been out of the traditional workforce for the better part of six months. Recently, I came very close to taking a CEO offer at a Series B stage, VC-backed tech startup. While I was enthused about the business opportunity, I couldn’t get comfortable with the overall terms of the offer. These terms would have negatively affected my family, so I walked away. “Old Brad” wouldn’t have done this. I would have convinced myself and my family the decision was the right one despite everything in my body screaming “no!” I bring this up because I now have an invigorated sense of what success looks like and what I am/am not willing to assume in my next endeavor.
This time has also taught me how much I enjoy being around smart, humble people, building companies and solving problems. I am really excited for the next professional adventure. I believe the benefit of my time spent zooming out is I will have a much better navigational sense for managing and integrating the professional dynamic with the personal one.
2) You credit taking time for renewal (your sojourn) as the vehicle that bettered your family unit and gave you the space to enrichen your sense of professional purpose. One could infer that by making time for fun, play and personal experience, you were able to grow in ways that were otherwise elusive. What did this period teach you about prioritizing time for fun? Now that your sojourn is over, how has the success of your break influenced the way you prioritize the 168 hours you have in any given week (going forward)?
It’s funny; in a way, I am still finding I’m on a sojourn. The initial time on the road with my family was hugely rewarding in connecting with them and disconnecting from everything else. Since then, I’ve spent the past few months connecting across my network, attending industry events, consulting/advising several startups and evaluating businesses to jump in to run. Really everything is fun right now. I’ve always been someone that sees time as the most valuable resource we all have. For those who know me professionally, I often waste little time before diving into the heart of issues and ensuring meeting time is productive time on the calendar. I think the biggest difference as I look ahead is allowing more time into the calendar for experiences that don’t directly relate to driving business outcomes. It’s not about working less per se. It’s about recognizing that “you are a better you” if you’ve built in quality time with the family, workout time, etc. This time outside of work needs to be calendared in advance and prioritized accordingly. If life outside work is not an explicit commitment, the temptation to let work encroach into other areas of life is hard to resist.
3) What are two or three principles you consider uncommon tenets of good business strategy? Immutable truths that are often overlooked to the detriment of many organizations?
For me, great strategy is just as much about having the right people in the right spots as it is about great plans. At the end of the day, business strategy — whether it’s sound or not — must be implemented by people. It’s also not just about hiring the right people; it’s about the messaging behind the strategy. The “what,” the “how” and the “why” need to be clearly, consistently and frequently communicated across the organization.
4) I often warn fledgling digital health entrepreneurs looking to innovate in the U.S. health club market that if their pricing model is solely based on subscriptions, they need to understand that the total addressable market (TAM) is modest. I still believe this to be true (validated somewhat by published figures on recent exits), although previous interviewees have pushed back on my assertion. Given you had a hand in developing the MINDBODY Marketplace, what are a couple of key pieces of advice for innovators looking to maximize economic value creation through technology in the health club market?
In terms of TAM, if you are narrowing your assessment to simply delivering b2b technology to U.S. health clubs and looking at it as a function of IT spend, then I agree with you. However, organizations often spend 5-10x more on marketing to prospects and retaining customers. If technology solutions can make a direct and noticeable impact on the lifetime value of a gym membership, then those solutions are in a better position to command a premium above and beyond a percentage of IT spend.
My first piece of advice to those in the space is to really focus on nailing the consumer or member experience. It is my opinion that the successful technology providers of tomorrow will engage with end fitness consumers in fun, social and innovative ways that in turn keep consumers motivated. The best gym brands that create the best gym experiences for consumers will attract the most members and be able to command a premium.
Next, I would encourage innovators to brace themselves personally and financially because it will likely be much harder than they thought it would be when they were on the outside looking in. Make sure you have a backup plan (or three) in case the market opportunity wasn’t exactly where, or what, you thought it was when you embarked.
5) I had grown a bit bearish on “disruptive” fitness technology until Peloton’s success. Now with innovation such as BurnAlong and Mirror, in my opinion, consumers have more control over getting a quality fitness experience at a time and location that meets their needs (in many ways, Lymber will contribute to this as well). In your opinion, what innovations in health technology excite you? What companies and technology in this space do you believe will have the most impact on us over the next five years?
It’s an exciting time to be in the fitness industry. For me, innovations that make fitness easier to consistently and easily consume in a fun way are the eventual winners. In my opinion, the archetype of a well-balanced fitness or wellness routine needs to be very social and experiential in some ways and deeply personal and regimented in other ways.
I love how Peloton has helped blaze the way for an immersive in-home experience. They’ve recently introduced a treadmill to complement their bike product. I suspect we will see additional efforts to “Pelotonize” different fitness modalities. Are there brick-and-mortar brands, for example, that might want to increase distribution of their content to a larger audience? Done well, the in-home market can not only complement the “four walls” monthly membership, but it can also allow the brick-and-mortar brand to reach a whole new global audience. What better way to evaluate where to plant your next location than to already have a built-in audience of members familiar with your brand and the in-club or studio experience?
I think it’s also interesting to see companies such as Aaptiv that offer a lower fidelity training experience (audio only) witness explosive consumer growth. Video-based personal training has been around for years and really struggled to take shape. Aaptiv focused on delivering higher-quality training in an easily consumable manner at an affordable price. Take note of their emphasis on putting the trainer more front and center of the experience.
Also, the fitness industry is still so inefficient in matching supply and demand. While improvements being undertaken by the likes of MINDBODY are closing the gap, there is still a ton of room for industry improvement. Technologies that not only can improve demand for gyms but also do a better job of matching customer segments to the right-priced offering stand to benefit disproportionately from industry growth.
Finally, I think companies that can find a way to harness the social side of fitness in a scalable way are well-positioned to have a major impact on the industry. This is obviously easier said than done. Dick Costolo, the former CEO of Twitter, recently closed shop on his startup, Chorus. Chorus was attempting to harness the power of friends and peer pressure to help people stay on track with their fitness routines or motivate them to start new ones. A key reason for shutting down he cited was the “abstinence violation effect” whereby people hide from their support group when they fail to meet the group’s expectations, instead of turning to the group for help. Basically, Chorus couldn’t keep enough consumers engaged for long enough. Sound like a common problem?