HALO Talks Fast Break: Revolutionizing Club Benefits-Amy Bach on Welld Health's Impact Across 10,000 Locations

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This is Pete Moore on Halo Talks NYC. I am

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bringing to a fast break a good friend of Integrity

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Square, Amy Bach, for many years from Weld Health,

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Chief Commercial Officer. Sounds like a big title. Tell us

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about what's going on at Weld and how you've been doing. Yeah,

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so I've been at Weld for about 18 months now, and it

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has been an absolutely wild ride in the best possible way.

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You know, Weld has grown dramatically over the past few

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months here. We're helping over 10,000 locations now,

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really with a focus on these check-in reimbursement programs.

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So you've heard of, you know, OnePass or Tivity SilverSneakers

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or Active and Fit and things like that. And Weld's really the

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technology solution that steps in and makes those programs so much easier

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to run. I mean, it used to be where you just rely on

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whatever checks you would get. from the aggregators or

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from some of these, uh, plans or funds. So just talk about,

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uh, the frustration that's been solved and like the percentage

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reimbursements that you're able to get on Weld. Yeah, so we

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actually came out of the ACAC gym chain for exactly that

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reason, right? They saw these, they had all these issues with it, the lack of

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transparency, the lack of understanding of how these insurance

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reimbursement programs were really working. And without that transparency, that

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reporting, all of that, it was also hard to optimize them. So Well

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jumped in and took something that used to have almost a 2-month delay in getting

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a real response of if you were going to get paid for a member or

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not and turned that into a real-time integration. So on one

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side, we integrate with the benefit providers like

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OnePass, ASH, and Tivity. And then on the other side, we're integrated with the

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member management systems. So we're integrated with over a dozen member management

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systems at this point in time, groups like ABC, all the Daxco

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family of brands, ClubReady, Mindbody, you name it, you know,

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we have those integrations. And because of that being integrated on both sides,

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we're really able to make this a real-time thing. So when somebody

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loses eligibility on the 5th of the month, you know, on the 5th of the

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month that you're no longer going to be compensated for those visits. So

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it really allows facilities to make sure

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that they're letting people in that are eligible because we do that real-time eligibility check

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at the beginning. But then also be notified when they're no longer going to be

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eligible so that you're really only letting people in that you're ultimately going to

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get paid for. Gotcha. With that, we are able to get our reject

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rates down below 1% the vast majority of times when

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customers implement Weld correctly. And what do you say to

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some of the people that maybe, you know, 5 to 10 years ago used

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to be on some of these systems but always said, you know,

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it's either, you know, denigrating my sale of memberships,

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or it's, you know, I'm not getting paid what I thought I was getting paid.

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What's kind of like the new normal? Or, you know, if you could reference any

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of the club chains that you guys work with just to say like,

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look, everybody's doing it now. Like, it's not something to, to be

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steadfast to against anymore. Yeah, I mean, it's just

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growing. This whole market and this member base out there,

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potential member base, just continues to grow. Fitness benefits remain

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still in the top 3 most popular benefits of

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Medicare Advantage plans, right? Vision, and hearing only above it.

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And then on top of that, we've seen this huge influx in the commercial side

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of things. So people used to always think about this as 65+, you know,

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really the silver sneakers, Medicare crowd. And in the

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past few years, we've just seen tremendous growth on the commercial side of things.

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So with that, you're also getting, you know, younger people in. And to the

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cannibalization question, I mean, people look at what their benefits are

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and they choose their facility that they're going to work out in based off of

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that. Right. So if you're not in that network, You're not going to get that

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member. But what we've also seen is clubs really learning how to

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optimize these programs outside of that. So yes, you get the base membership

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with your, you know, fitness benefit, but now we're going to take you on a

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tour as soon as we verify your eligibility, and we are going to show you

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how amazing our recovery space is. And hey, that's in the premium tier. So we're

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going to give you this little upsell, and you're going to pay us directly for

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that additional access and benefit. Or if it's a studio and you

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get 4 visits, Okay, great, but you could upgrade to unlimited for this

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amount. And watching our— yeah, watching customers

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really understand that and optimize that has really been

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great growth for them. So a lot of times people are actually seeing these members

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as paid leads, right? You're not paying for them, you're actually getting paid

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for them. And then you can add on on top of what the fitness benefit

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providers will give you. And what are some of, if any,

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of the hesitations with people getting on the wealth system? Because it seems to

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me like a win-win-win for everybody

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involved. Most definitely. Um, you know, I've

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absolutely had the— I've had the, the benefit of being in a

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position where sales are quite easy these days in a great way. Um, you know,

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people come in, we've been— we've gone live with 60% of

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all Planet Fitness locations over the past year. Um, we have

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Crunch, we have EOS, we're working with studio groups like Solid Core,

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F45, Exponential. And once people— once we get in front of

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people and really explain what we're able to do and also the

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pricing model behind it, it's usually a pretty easy sell

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for us. You know, hesitations or blockers we've had

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historically are if we don't have a member management system with strong

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enough APIs, right? If we can't integrate with it, we're not able to

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add as much value. So sometimes the member management system that someone is on

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really does limit us. But outside of that,

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it's usually just getting people to change a process that they've been doing for 20

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years. And that in itself can be a little difficult sometimes.

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But once we're in there, the first thing that we hear is how happy front

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desk staff is and how much we've made their lives so much easier. Great.

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All right. Well, you heard it here first. If you have not been on Weld

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yet or gotten a demo, get in touch with Amy and the team there

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and go Halo. And we love what you guys are doing. So congrats. Congrats on—

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I'll move it over to this side of the house. Thanks so much, Pete.