Episode #577: Driving Employee Wellness Participation-Rich Novelli's Platform for Small Business Success

0:01 This is Pete Moore on Halo Talks. I'm Bringing back guest 245, a good friend of mine for a short 25 years in the Halo sector, hailing and living in Reading, California, Rich Novelli. Welcome back to the show, buddy. Thanks, Pete. It's been a long time, man. You haven't changed a bit. Likewise. Good to see you looking strong and fit as always. So look, last time we chatted you were operating health clubs. You've been in the industry for a long time in a legend and a vet of doing good things and impacting a lot of people. So give us a little update now on what you're doing with Navita on the corporate wellness side and also on the, on the small group coaching, which I think is cool, as well as the individual coaching. Yeah, it's been a kind of a revelation, Pete, that I think technology and corporate acceptance has gotten to this convergence now where companies are realizing that they really can't see employee wellness as a nice to have. It's really a need to have. And the sector is exploding. Current market value somewhere around $19 billion and it's projected to grow to about 25 billion in the next five years. So this is it really kind of made me sit up and take notice and I wanted to continue to contribute outside of the health club sector because I've been in it for about 40 years. And while certainly we can

1:32 really impact a lot of people, what we're finding is that 10% of the people work out in health clubs. So how could I impact their health and wellness in a scalable fashion, in more of a participatory engagement type, type of platform? So I've partnered with a company called nuvita, they're out of New Mexico and they have about a 12 year history of working with over 200 very well known companies like Pfizer and GE and even governments like the city of New Mexico, our city of Albuquerque. Sorry. And so I partnered with them and developed my own platform called Alegria Wellness.

2:14 And essentially it's a comprehensive platform, it's app based that I'm really kind of marketing towards small businesses, anywhere from five to 300 employees that are really underserved. And as much as the corporate wellness sector is exploding, it continues to be really more acceptable by larger companies. So how can we get this out to small companies? How can I service individuals on a personalized coaching basis, but using an app that drives basically data input across exercise, nutrition, stress management, socialization and get these people involved where they are not necessarily in the health Club. If they're not health club people. We want to drive participation through one of these or all of these five sectors. And they use the app to input information about what they're doing.

3:16 And then I can personally coach them through the data that I collect on the coaching portal that I use. And that coaching can be anything from zoom call to text, email, you name it, we can do that. But again, the goal here for me, Pete, was how can I get more participation? How can I get more engagement than the traditional health club model and really drive this? So it makes sense for the employees, but it also makes sense for these companies that are saying 10% participation is not going to cut it for us. We want to see 30, 40% participation to justify, you know, sponsoring a program like this.

4:03 This is Pete Moore. I want to let you in on a little secret. There's this company called Promotion Vault. And what they do is they give out rewards from retailers that allow you to incentivize your members without having to do zero down and one month free or giving away shakes or giving away T shirts. What you want to do is build a rewards program that lasts, that people value, and that doesn't discount your own products and services. So here's the deal. There's something called Rewards Vault. The Rewards Vault is going to allow a member to set up their own profile. They are going to answer questions, you are going to get those answers. You're going to be able to target those members, and you're going to reward them inside your club, inside your spa, and outside of the club and outside of the spa to get them to become loyal, to get them to pay their monthly dues and to be rewarded properly for the actions. A lot of companies are cutting back on rewards.

4:59 You shouldn't be Promotion Vaults. Your answer, trust me, this is real. People have been talking about corporate wellness and employee wellness for a long time, and I feel like there's always been a slight disconnect between the amount of benefits and the potential impact and the actual usage of. I think that a lot of companies thought, oh, I'm just going to put this technology platform on the back end of your corporate intranet. And, you know, everyone's just going to gravitate towards it. I feel like the reality is that you need a coach, you need somebody championing that, whether that's internal or external. So I feel like, you know, given your background and your ability to motivate people and to hold people accountable, it's kind of an interesting play for you to. To go in there and Also from a standpoint of going into small, medium sized businesses, I mean that's where the, the most of the US economy is. From a standpoint of, you know, self employed professionals that are going in and they're, they're trying to better their lives and have a little more, you know, entrepreneurial opportunity and autonomy. Yep. But I think a lot of those people fall out of the health and fitness, you know, category because they're, you know, deconditioned and nobody's actually there to, to help them or, you know, create challenges or, you know, executive coaching for small to mid sized businesses is probably the lowest percentage participation or usage, I think, versus, you know, the financial

6:32 industry and hedge funds and you know, you like watch their show Billions and they got like an HR woman that, you know, kind of, you know, like coaches people up and you know, would that be great if you know, like the average distribution company has 50 people could have somebody like that like you to basically say, hey, look, I could actually coach up this team. And you could have the same benefits that some of these bigger institutions that are spending a lot of dollars on their productivity and on their people. Because obviously even with AI, AI is like a tool and a weapon. It's not a, you know, a place for executives to be replaced. You know. Exactly. I was just gonna, I was just gonna say that too, that AI can do a lot. But you know, the whole point of accountability, coaching, keeping people accountable for what they want to do in their wellness lifestyle, has to be a personalized touch. And a lot of times that's just listening. Right. So, you know, from an employee perspective, this really kind of hits a lot of my sweet spots because it's about exercise, it's about nutrition, it's about stress management, it's about socialization.

7:46 But I can meet them where they're at if they're not going to a gym. That's great. We have on demand workouts. I can walk them through walking platforms, I can walk them through weightlifting platforms, whatever it is that kind of sparks their motivation and then I can hold them accountable. And on the nutrition side, we talk a lot about being consistently good instead of occasionally perfect on your nutrition. But there's a lot of tools that I can provide through this platform that shows them how much to eat, when to eat, portion size, even suggestions for protein sources, carbohydrate sources, and again, I can coach them on that stuff while not necessarily having to be face to face face with them. Now what's cool is on the corporate side, of course, a lot of the small companies now are seeing employees health as a strategic business asset. They need a competitive advantage, they need improvements in recruitability and retention. And the technology that's now kind of caught up in this sector, such as AI and wearable trackers have made this a lot more approachable but also a lot more affordable. So the average cost for something like this for a small company could be anywhere from a small to medium sized health club membership. It's really very affordable and the more participants that we have, the more that that cost can come down. So from a company's perspective they can justify it from all the ROI that they see. But the employees that are participating

9:18 in being engaged in this now at larger numbers are really what's going to also justify this for these, these small companies. Awesome. Well, you know, from a standpoint of companies that you want to target, you know, obviously you can do everything remotely and through ZM Zoom and so on and so forth. But are there certain areas of the country where you know, you say hey, I'm going to, I'm going to be there hands on and in person or how do you kind of view this business? Yeah, that's a great question and I thought a lot about that. Obviously I'm west coast based and a lot of what I've approached small companies with in this regard is look, I can come out and do workshops, I can come out and do employee meetings, we can do lunches and those kind of things. So you know, for companies that are cross country obviously that becomes a little bit more problematic and people that, but if they have the appetite for that, I can certainly do that. I really don't want to limit too much of my geographic participation because so much of this can be done remotely. I can really customize this to what the companies are looking for. But I am targeting these smaller scale companies because that's where I feel the underserved market is at this point. It's getting with these small companies and really making a difference in an impact. And not to put too fine a point on it Pete, but these small companies also you get this team building type of attribute to this

10:51 when you've got a smaller group of people. I can break this program up into teams where you know, one team is competing against another team. We do six week challenges. So you're talking about a minimal commitment for people that aren't really fired up about exercise. Well, it's six weeks and we're going to make this. So I'm with you every step of the way. And after that first six weeks. The participation rate historically has gone from 30% to 45%. And these companies do three or four of these six week challenges a year and now it becomes the ROI just jumps after that. So that's kind of where I'm at. I don't know if I answered your question that much, but. Yeah, you did. You did. I think, you know, look as people kind of turn into their 2026 budget and turn into, you know, understanding that a coach in every sport makes the team better. You're more likely to win when you've got player personnel that are actually out there, you know, managing your employees. And you know, there's a lot of things going on with mental health right now. There's a lot of things going on with, you know, people taking GLP drugs and you know, some of these things are, you know, like quick fixes. But at the end of the day, like having a coach that's predictable, that's sustainable, that, you know, is looking out for your team and looking out for each one of your players. Because I view every employee is just an athlete that just happens to be in the business world. There should probably be called business ball. And then people would actually take this a little more seriously from like an athletics athletic

12:22 standpoint and like being fit to work. Yeah. Actually benefits everybody. You know, when they roll out of bed and they come into the office and they feel strong and confident, it pervades into everything you do. But at the bottom line is when, when I talk to companies and I ask them, have you tried in employee wellness? Yeah, we have. Well, what did you do? Well, we did a health club membership. Okay, why did that work? Well, we got some people that saw that as a positive and they participated. What percentage? About 7 to 10, 12%. Okay. What about the other 90%? Yeah. Well, it wasn't for them. So the barriers have been affordability, participation and personalization. Right. So if I can be, I'm going to be that accountability coach for every one of those people that signs up and those, those workouts and those nutrition program and that stress management program can be different for every person. And the platform allows me to personalize that and then coach them up to that point. So if we've removed those barriers, then we can see greater amounts of participation and that's what's going to get catch the attention of these smokers. One important point I think that you kind of just touched on is people that have not had success with corporate wellness. They have to really go back and diagnose like what they really had like you didn't really have a coach, you didn't really have a, you know, person that was, that was accountable. There was account exec. You basically had a website that might have been private labeled on the back of your corporate intranet, that had no

13:53 connectivity or stickiness or challenges or communication tools or, you know, calls to action or motivation. You just basically had a rebranded, you know, skin of a website that had some cool shit on it that somebody could go and they could take, oh, wow, I can get like this discounted health club membership. Okay, that's like not really a call to action. That's just like an employee benefit that happened to be on the back of your corporate Internet that has a thousand other links on it. So I think people as they go into 20, 26 here, you know, reframe how you think about corporate wellness, maybe erase what you thought it was and say, hey, if I could actually bring in an executive coach and I could actually bring someone in to help me optimize my team and then he's, he or she and you are bringing in these weapons of how can I actually get people off the couch, make the right decisions and become more productive and more of a team player. Like that's really the objective that we're going with. It's not a website or just an app. This is like a, you know, hands on approach to corporate optimization. It really is. And what's really cool on the back end of this, Pete, is that, you know, we'll do all the heavy lifting. So if you've got a small HR department or maybe no HR department to get something like this kicked off, we provide all the marketing.

15:15 So we provide the marketing materials. We give this to you to review and approve. You push it out through your normal employee communications, but you don't have to create any of this marketing material that's going to go out to your employees to get them excited. And then we also provide weekly bimonthly analytics tools. So how is it being received? What is the feedback that we're getting from your employees so that your employees and the company can see kind of how this is going for you? So we remove a lot of the heavy lifting that a company would have to do because everybody's busy. I get that. And you may not have a wellness expert as you alluded to early in the conversation. The larger companies can afford to do that, small companies can't do that. So how can we provide a soup to nuts kind of solution for them? That really makes sense. And like I said, that's very Affordable for them on an employee scalable basis.

16:19 This is Pete Moore. Here's the last tip for you of the podcast. We are partnered up with a company called higher dose higherdose.com they are the leader in workout recovery products. Infrared technology, LED light masks, neck enhancers, and other products such as PEMF mats and sauna blankets. If you have not gotten on the workout recovery train yet, your time and your stop is now. You got to get these products in there before these workout recovery and spas end up saturating your market. Having your members walk out of the club and going into one of their locations for 200 bucks per month where they're paying 39 to you. Let's become an expert in workout recovery. If we are already an authority in workouts, Higher dose, check it out. There's a wholesale code and we look forward to helping you augment your products and services to meet the demands of your members. And hey, let's get people happy, healthy and sweating. And the recovery should be just as good as the workout.

17:29 Well, I will say in closing here that if you said to me, give me a top five list of people who actually care. C A R E Rich Novelli makes a top five list over the last 25 years. So if you're looking for a coach that actually takes things not just from a business standpoint, but it takes things personally. It says like, I am coming in here and I'm going to do this, that I am going to help you optimize your team. Team. It's not just him as a business person, it's him as like a human and wanted to make an impact and contribute. So, Rich, I, I think I'm excited about where you're going with this. I hope more companies get involved and hopefully this podcast leads us from good groups that say, hey, I want to jump in here and I want, I want Rich to help me optimize my team. So look forward to, to 2026 and let's, let's get people more healthy, motivated and productive and that leads to a society, you and I want to live it well. Pete, thank you as always for your support and for you leading the way in this sector. Halo sector has never had a better champion and you do so much for all of us in this, this area. So thank you for that and thanks for having me on, brother. I mean, it's great to see you. It's good to see you, man. Awesome.

18:45 This is Pete Moore on Halo Talks, your captain speaking. I am the founder and managing partner at Integrity Square We've been around now for 15 and 1/2 years. We have been helping people like yourselves get capital, do mergers and acquisitions, consulting strategic advice in the health, active lifestyle and outdoor halo sector. Trying to help as many entrepreneurs as possible will get to the next level, take that inflection point and be the force behind your growth. We are helping companies that have at least $3 million of EBITDA, around $10 million of revenue, and we are positioned to help you get institutional growth capital or to negotiate deals with strategic partners.

19:29 If you go to integritysq.com isq you can see our capabilities. Deck Happy to set up a consultation at any time that is free of charge and we look forward to you helping solve obesity, loneliness and diabetes. Go halo. Sam.