by Mike Tinney
Wellness is a funny industry. It’s full of big game hunters and connected veterans. People often make decisions based on prior relationships, and they go after the biggest sales and contracts. As total outsiders to this industry, FIX spent it’s first couple of years watching these “adults” from the proverbial kids table.
“As it turns out, the head of HR for the local Trader Joes cares just as much about the dollars they spend on their staff of 45 as Coca-Cola or Delta does, sometimes more.”
The thing is, though, when we entered the market we got a BUNCH of inquiries for challenges from small businesses (i.e. companies with less than 100 employees). We still do. It was difficult to accommodate those challenge requests, though, as there’s a certain market value associated with the budget for health, usually $12 – $30 per year per employee (which is shamefully low, but more on that in another post). If you have a company of 100 people or less with a budget of $1200, it’s hard to make that work from an ROI perspective. But as it turns out, the head of HR for the local Trader Joes cares just as much about the dollars they spend on their staff of 45 as Coca-Cola or Delta does, sometimes more.
These sales take just as long to close, and the service expected is very similar to what a mid, large or jumbo employer expects. As a result, most of our peers/competitors in the wellness space ignore these small employers. They can’t find a profit in them…
You can spend X amount of time and energy servicing a 45 employee company and making $900… or you can spend that same amount of time and energy on an 800 person company and make $10K-$15K… or you can spend 3x the time and energy on a jumbo and make a six figure sale. It’s a very real, and very frustrating reality of the math.
We tried to accommodate walking challenges for small companies for years in the form of shared challenges, where we’d run multi-employer challenges once per quarter. These challenges would allow a small employer to “group up” with other small companies. They could combine their buying power, and in doing so, get a challenge at the same cost as a mid sized company. There were trade offs, though. You had to start on a predetermined challenge start date, whereas bigger companies could choose their own date. You had to share the challenge and chat room with strangers from other companies, where bigger companies had their own private instance. The data mixed together with participants from multiple groups, whereas larger private groups could get detailed reporting with data just for their group. It was OK, but not great.
“The wellness industry, to date, has been leaving 48% of the market ON THE TABLE because it hasn’t collectively figured out how to deliver services to them in a cost effective manner.”
Here’s the thing, though. The U.S. Small Business Association shows that Small Businesses make up 99.7% of all U.S. companies, and those companies comprise 48% of the U.S. workforce. WOW. The wellness industry, to date, has been leaving 48% of the market ON THE TABLE because it hasn’t collectively figured out how to deliver services to them in a cost effective manner. And while the industry chases the jumbo employers with their RFP’s and specialty contracts, it leaves approximately half of America’s workforce unsupported. Holy cow, that’s a lot of unsupported lives.
So we rattled around that a lot at FIX, and last fall our tech and ops teams said “!@#$ it, let’s just automate this whole process for them so that any group, of any size, can create challenges on their own.” So they did.
Now, any small employer, from an office of 1 up to a group of 300, can go onto our website and choose from any of our walking challenges and their respective difficulty levels. The HR person or company owner simply picks out all the settings they want for their private (only for their employees) challenge, including start date. They can copy and paste employee email addresses in (just like with Mailchimp) and swipe a credit card. Then our servers go to work with the automation: they email challenge invitations to the staff of the company and spin up the challenge automatically. Lastly, it’s our accounting department who rings the sales bell, because we’ve sold services to the secret part of the market no one else seems to care about.
And then, in as little as 1 week, the zombies attack Andy’s Goodyear Tire Center, and the employees are on the move! The beauty is, it happens automatically, at one of the lowest prices on the market. Want to try if for yourself? Head over to our Self Service Challenge Portal and enter the code APR_BLOG5 for 5 free challenge seats. Treat Yo’ Self!
Until next time,
Mike
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