In life and in business, there will always be times when you have to pivot. That can be hard, and it’s not unusual to struggle while you’re going through the thick of change. For Amelia Wilcox, a pivot in all of our lives led to a pivot in her business.
Amelia had grown her company, Incorporate Massage, to more than 4,000 corporate clients across the country, but when the pandemic hit and offices shut down, the decline in the need for massage therapists meant that Amelia’s entire revenue stream was coming to a screeching halt. But rather than fold, Amelia decided to pivot, and find a new need in this changing world that she could fulfill. Amelia identified the mental struggles that employees everywhere were dealing with and the fact that corporations didn’t know how to help those employees, so she created a new platform that corporations could offer to employees that included all manner of mental health resources. She rebranded her business in a matter of weeks, and has now grown her new business, Nivati, in a similar manner as her previous company. Amelia and I talked all about how that pivot happened, and what it takes for a founder or CEO to scale a company. Enjoy this episode!
Main Takeaways:
- You’re Only as Strong as Your Mentoring Network: People are generally happy to help when asked, so if you are venturing out into a new business venture or trying to acquire new skills, find an expert and ask questions. Soaking up knowledge, running ideas by people, and learning through observation will all get you ahead faster.
- There are Tools Available: There are preconceived notions and stigma attached to mental health, but if you are struggling, it’s important to know that there are tools available to you and there is no shame in using them. Take advantage of things like therapy, wellness activities, and medication when needed to improve yourself, and, in turn, improve every other aspect of your life.
- You Can’t Scale Alone: The skills that you have that may have helped you build your company from 0 to 1 million are not going to be the same ones you need to scale from 1 million to 10 million and beyond. You need to have the self-awareness to realize that at a certain point, you need to bring in more people, learn new skills, and elevate everything that you are doing in order to reach a higher level.
For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.
Key Quotes:
“We had the opportunity to position the business in such a way that we could help serve that need and help break down those stigmas and preconceived notions about what mental health is and what is normal or okay. And I was just like, ‘Yeah, I want to tackle this. I think I can do a lot of good for a lot of people and help them avoid those feelings of inadequacy and brokenness that come along with mental health challenges.’”
“The biggest themes were, one, employers didn’t know how their employees were doing. They were adjusting to work from home. They’ve never done that before and so they had lost those touch points with their employees and they were just like, ‘We don’t know how they’re doing. We don’t know what they’re struggling with.’ So they had very little insight into the wellbeing of their employee base. And then they just knew their employees were struggling. They were stressed. They were trying to balance all these things. It was just an insane amount of change in a very short period of time, which causes any normal human stress and it was just at mass.”
“All these mental health providers all over the US probably all over the world, just saw people rushing in essentially and this increased need for mental health support because people were struggling so much. There really was no option, even for a partnership to send people to someone else, which is what I originally looked at. I didn’t set out and say, “I’m going to solve this problem.” I was like, ‘Oh, we need to help these people.’ So that was kind of my light bulb moment where I was just like, ‘Okay, there’s a ton of demand and a ton of need. There’s very limited supply.’ So the next experiment is like, ‘Well, let’s go see if we can hire mental health therapists, because maybe there’s just a national shortage and nobody’s doing it.’”
“We’d sign a client and then I would just want to interview them and be like, ‘Okay, why did you buy from us? Why did you pick us over your Modern Health or your Lyra, Ginger?’ There’s a million mental health platforms that can provide therapy for your employees and the resounding information that came back, which… I feel like it actually took too long for it to click me. Like I wish I would’ve figured it out a little faster, but what’s different about what we do is you can actually work with multiple types of practitioners. So mental health makes up like 80% of our services that we’re providing for employees, but they can also work with a registered dietician, they can work with a personal trainer, they can work with a financial counselor on their financial wellbeing. So we just are providing a more holistic wellbeing solution for employees with mental health is the focus and mental health is like the lens that we look at everything through.”
“I feel like you’re only as strong as you’re mentoring network. Basically it’s like what industry expert can I talk to that can help me solve this problem? Who has the background and has done this before that can help me figure it out. And so I’m just very big on finding mentors and advisors and going and just asking for their help. People are generally happy to help with something if you just ask.”
“The skills that get you from zero to a million in revenue work against you in the next phase of growth. So everything that I’m really good at where I could just like dig in, do the work. I’m doing marketing, I’m closing all the deals and doing the sales myself, I’m building the product. Everything that made me super successful, super with the air quotes. Being able to just do the pivot, do the work, make sure we have product market fit, figure out how to go to market strategy, all of that, building it all myself is what got me to where we’re at right now, but if I continue to do that the company will fail. It will not be successful unless I can now transfer and delegate all of those responsibilities out to the rest of my team members. And that is really hard.”
Bio
Amelia Wilcox is the Founder & CEO of Nivati. She was recently awarded a 2021 Women in Business to Watch award from The Startup Weekly. As a massage therapist, she started Nivati (formerly Incorporate Massage) with a passion for helping people with their physical and mental wellbeing. Nivati now helps people all over the United States get the mental health support they need — from teletherapy to virtual yoga to life coaching.
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Transcript:
Stephanie:
Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Up Next in Commerce. I’m your host, Stephanie Postles, CEO at Mission. And today on the show we have Amelia Wilcox. Let me say your name again. Amelia Wilcox who’s a founder and CEO at Nivati. Amelia, welcome.
Amelia:
Thanks, Stephanie. I’m excited to be here.
Stephanie:
Yeah, me too. So I was looking through your company and was very excited because I wish I had had something like this when I worked at previous employers. And so I want to hear how you first got into the field of mental health before we even talk about building the company. How is this an interest of yours?
Amelia:
I’d say my interest in mental health probably started shortly after getting married because getting married is like a huge life adjustment and you realize you came from different backgrounds and have different communication styles and tools for accessing and working through problems. And so, yeah, I would say probably my first experience was just my husband and I were like, “We should try some marriage therapy, some marriage counseling and try to figure out how to communicate better.” So we did that. We’ve actually done probably like three rounds of therapy and it was just super helpful learning, even just things like how to use feelings words, like how to use eye statements and things like that. So basic communication skills, talking about emotional things. Then we started having kiddos. We’ve got three daughters and one of my daughters has been struggling with depression actually just since COVID, but required-
Stephanie:
Oh wow! How old is she?
Amelia:
She’s 16.
Stephanie:
Okay.
Amelia:
Yeah. And just started therapy and then also working with a psychiatrist and taking medication. And then my youngest who’s just turned 10, she got diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and severe ADHD. So there’s a scale and she’s the very, very top of the scale. And so since she was probably, I don’t know, six or seven, basically starting school, we’ve had her also doing therapy and she’s needed the assistance of medication as well to help manage those challenges. It was her decision, but yeah, she basically just felt like she couldn’t make friends because she couldn’t control her energy and her talking and she was like really negatively affecting her self-esteem. So being able to just kind of reign that in a little bit has been pretty life changing for her.
Amelia:
And then my other experience that I’ve had is I was actually in a car accident about five years ago and I suffered a traumatic brain injury. And with that, it has been like the super long road to recovery, but there was a time where I kind of just plateaued and I wasn’t really getting any better, so I had to like learn how to… I had to train my eyes on how to read again, because my eyes wouldn’t track smoothly, so I couldn’t read very well. Like they would skip lines and-
Stephanie:
Wow!
Amelia:
It broke the connection between my eyes and my brain and I had to go to like four months of vision therapy to repair it. And just the ability to process language was a challenge for me, so I would feel stupid in social situations where people would be having conversations and… You lose the ability to filter when you have a traumatic brain injury. And so all of the sound would come in and it was just so stimulating. It would just wear me out mentally and I just got to this point where I had done all of this treatment and I wasn’t really getting any better and had plateaued. And I was sitting in there with my neurologist and I said… I was holding back tears and I’m just like… I was like, “It’s just frustrating. I don’t feel like I’m ever going to get better.”
Amelia:
And she asked me a bunch of questions about how I was feeling and she said, “Amelia, you’re depressed.” I was like, “No, no, I’m not depressed. I’m the happiest person. I just have like a really positive, bubbly kind of personality.” And she’s like, “No, it’s okay and it’s normal and it’s okay to need help sometimes.” So she prescribed me an anti depressant and I was devastated. I was just like, “Oh my gosh, I must be so broken if I cannot even feel happiness without the assistance of a medication.” And that was the first time I guess I kind of realized that medication is a tool just like therapy is a tool, but research shows that they actually work best hand in hand instead of using one or the other.
Amelia:
So yeah, I mean, I would say I would have had a lot of experiences that have led me up to where I’m at today. So we had the opportunity to position the business in such a way that we could help serve that need and help break down those stigmas and preconceived notions about what mental health is and what is normal or okay. And I was just like, “Yeah, I want to tackle this. I think I can do a lot of good for a lot of people and help them avoid those feelings of inadequacy and brokenness that come along with mental health challenges.”
Stephanie:
Yeah. I mean, I would say you are the perfect person to tackle this. Wow. That’s a big background in that. I mean, at what point were… I mean, I know in the early days your company was called Incorporate Massage. Back up a bit and tell me, okay, when was it Incorporate Massage and then when all of this was happening and you’re going through therapy and trying to heal, when did you shift things over to Nivati?
Amelia:
Yeah. So Incorporate Massage, I founded in 2010 and we did onsite massage for businesses all over the US and Canada. So I grew the company to about 4,000 corporate clients and about 1,200 massage therapists across North America.
Stephanie:
Wow. That’s a big growth.
Amelia:
Yeah. Growing really well. We were on Inc. 5000 in 2019 and in 2020 just exceeding all of our goals. Had even raised funding for the company in 2018 and 2019 and were back to profitability and then COVID hit in March of 2020 and we basically went from 6 million to zero in 10 days where our revenue just completely stopped instantly.
Stephanie:
And were you kind of quite seeing that coming down the pike and you’re like, “I see the writing on the wall.” Or was it really abrupt where it was like a big surprise?
Amelia:
Not me. I’m just such an optimist. My board had to be like, “No.” I remember specifically, they said put together a forecast of a six week revenue halt, a 12 week revenue halt in like six months. And I remember I put together the six week and the 12 week, but I didn’t put the six months together for them and they came back and they were like, “Well, where’s the six month?” And I was just like, “You guys, it’s not going to last that long. We’ll be fine. We’ll be back.” I did not want to have to furlough my team. These people were depending on us, but we had a finite amount of cash in the bank and they were like, “Nope, you need to put together the six month forecast if we need to see what it’ll look like, if you have no revenue for six months.” I put that together and then that was the writing was on the wall. Once you saw the numbers, you were like, “Oh, we’ll be out of business if COVID continues to hold up our company.”
Amelia:
So my board literally had to sit down with me and they were like, Amelia, pretend like Massage never comes back. What do you do? And when they said it that way, it was like made sense.” And I was like, “Oh, okay. So we need to find some new way to generate revenue and grow the company and serve our clients.” Because we really had no idea, but I was so sad that this was like a four to six week challenge and it was like, “You guys are just going to be basically on unpaid vacation for four to six weeks and I’m really sorry, but…” And my team was… They took it like champs and they were like, “All right.” But yeah, it ended up obviously, I mean, still today… We had probably 250 to 300 clients on contract so we were coming into their office like every Monday and we’ve got maybe 20 companies back in office doing massage and they all have lower head count and their teams are spread out.
Amelia:
So I’m really grateful that I had a board that could shake me into reality because if I just didn’t have that force… I’ve never seen anything like this. I mean, nobody has seen anything like COVID really. So I just was like, “No, it can’t last that long.” So that’s when we decided… I talked to our clients, I talked to our massage therapist. I found out what other licensing our massage team had that we could serve our clients in a new way. And then I talked to all of the companies that we worked with that I could get on the phone, anybody that would talk to me and just started asking all the questions I could think of, what they were struggling with and just looking for patterns and opportunities where we could serve using the team and the technology that we’d already built for Massage.
Stephanie:
So were there themes that were popping out or were the needs all over the place? Cause I can imagine, you know, right when everything’s kind of starting and you don’t really know the outcome, I could see the needs of your clients being like one person wants this. Another person wants something very, very different and you trying to consolidate what everyone’s thinking. Seems like it could be difficult, especially in the early days of the pandemic where people don’t really know what they need. So what did that process look like when you were doing those surveys? Yeah.
Amelia:
Yeah. The clients that I sat down and talked with, I feel like they didn’t necessarily know what they needed. It was just chaos. They were like, “We’re sending all of our employees home and now we got to figure out how to set them up with computers at home. Do we let them take the office chairs or not?”
Stephanie:
All those are important questions.
Amelia:
Yeah. I know. I was like, “Well, these are $300 chairs. I don’t know. Do they take them home?” So it was, it was pure chaos for HR and I feel like that hasn’t even really relented that much. I think the dust is settling a little bit, but then now they have issues around vaccination mandates and office politics around vaccinated versus unvaccinated and are we going to get sued if somebody gets COVID at work? All these things are happening over this course of time and a lot of them haven’t gone away. They’re still dealing with a lot of stress and a lot of uncharted territory. But there were themes. I’d say the biggest themes were, one, employers didn’t know how their employees were doing. They were adjusting to work from home. They’ve never done that before and so they had lost those touch points with their employees and they were just like, “We don’t know how they’re doing. We don’t know what they’re struggling with.” So they had very little insight into the wellbeing of their employee base.
Amelia:
And then they just knew their employees were struggling. They were stressed. They were trying to balance all these things. It was just an insane amount of change in a very short period of time, which causes any normal human stress and it was just at mass. So we thought we could eliminate some of that stress with our team. I mean, originally we were just looking at like, “Okay, we can do meditation and yoga, maybe some fitness classes over Zoom. We can do some life coaching.” And we did that for a few months just serving our existing clients, trying to help their employees.
Amelia:
And a few things kind of stuck out. Number one, all of these classes we were doing over Zoom companies were asking us if we could record them and they could keep the recording and put it like in their company intranet, so employees can go back and do this meditation over and over again. And the other thing that happened is our life coaches started reporting to me and saying, “Hey, all employees have real challenges. They have anxiety and depression and we are just life coaches. We are not equipped to help them manage and tackle these actual emotional and mental health challenges that they’re dealing with.” So they just said, we need someone to refer these people to. And so I started two different things. I said, “Well, let’s start work recording content. Let’s see if we can sell basically a content package to a company.”
Amelia:
Obviously people are asking us for this over and over again, so if we put together a set of videos, can we sell that? And so we kind of had like a group of people on our team just going out and trying. Turns out we could sell it. Companies liked it and we sold our first contract for, I think, 17,000 to a 700 person organization in California. And then I just started getting on the phone with all these mental health clinics and just saying like, “Hey, people are struggling. We have all these people we need to give more support to. Can your clinic…” And this is just here in Utah. “Can your clinic help? Can we send people to you essentially?” And everybody said the same thing. It was really interesting to me because everyone was just like, “No, we can’t help you? We’re booked up for months. We don’t have the bandwidth. We don’t have enough people.”
Amelia:
While this is happening, all these mental health providers all over the US probably all over the world, just saw people rushing in essentially and this increased need for mental health support because people were struggling so much. There really was no option, even for a partnership to send people to someone else, which is what I originally looked at. I didn’t set out and say, “I’m going to solve this problem.” I was like, “Oh, we need to help these people.” So that was kind of my light bulb moment where I was just like, “Okay, there’s a ton of demand and a ton of need. There’s very limited supply.” So the next experiment is like, “Well, let’s go see if we can hire mental health therapists, because maybe there’s just a national shortage and nobody’s doing it. They all already have jobs.”
Amelia:
And so I brought our recruiting team back. They are experts at hiring massage therapists at scale pretty quickly. We could basically staff anything anywhere with two weeks notice on the massage side.
Stephanie:
Wow. That’s impressive.
Amelia:
Yeah. So I brought them back from furlough and I said, “Okay guys, let’s just basically take our exact systems and processes that we built for hiring massage therapists and staffing. Let’s do the exact same thing and just see if we can find a new type of practitioner.” And so I brought them back, we put together the job ad went through our whole process, built out new questions and things to ask them to vet up their skillset. We hired our first therapist. She turned into our lead clinician, so she actually helped with the hiring and the vetting on the clinical side. But turned out, we were able to hire a few people. And so then I was like, “Okay, now we have a mental health team. Let’s go see if we can sell this to employers.” That was the genesis of the pivot.
Stephanie:
Wow. Okay. I want to dig in a bit on your hiring process because I’m sure a lot of companies and people listening right now are like, okay, what does your playbook look like to hire someone, find a great person. And you don’t even know maybe what the skillset should be, but apparently you’ve had something working when hiring massage therapists. So what did it look like when you kind of took that playbook and shifted a bit to find new talent and even scale up quickly?
Amelia:
I’d say a lot of it stayed the same. The new layer that we had to add to it was just kind of that clinical vetting process, which… So for us, it was like we put together our job description. We post it out to all the job hiring sites. And then our recruiting team does an initial call and then for massage, they would do a video interview and then they would have them submit a video of them doing a five minute massage on a model, somebody in their household. We had a team of massage therapists that had specific criteria they were looking for and they would look at that video and based on what the massage therapist was doing and their body positioning, the equipment they were using, the technique that they were employing, we could give them a score in these five different categories. And then we would take everyone above a certain score and reject everyone below a certain score.
Amelia:
And we actually rejected 88% of applicants. So when you ran the numbers, I was like, “Oh man, we’re only taking the top 12%.” So I think it worked really well for us on the massage side. So obviously a licensed mental health counselor can’t really send us a video of them doing like their practical skills in the same way. So that was the new piece we had to develop, which was figuring out what questions we’re going to ask them in the interview process that the administrative team can do from a hiring perspective, but then bringing in our clinical expert on the mental health side that could ask them very specific questions about their methods and technique and clinical applications.
Stephanie:
Cool. That’s interesting. Okay. So now you basically have your company idea. You’ve been asking questions formulating this idea, but you’re still doing mostly everything in person trying to figure out how to pivot online. What does it look like afterwards? Because now of course you have… Everything looks like perfect. You get your website, you have this great digital presence. It seems like that’s how it’s always been. But I want to hear, what did that transition look like?
Amelia:
Oh my gosh! It was so messy, I would say. So we figured out like, “Okay, there’s a huge opportunity in mental health.” I started diving into becoming an expert in mental health and the statistics and the research and methods and techniques and how it applies to businesses. So I dove into the employee assistance program information. So like 80% of companies in the US have an employee assistance program. And how did that start? And what does it typically cost and how big is the market? And just anything I can get my hands on. I just went into learning mode basically.
Amelia:
And then we had to obviously update our website and rebrand. So we rebranded very quickly. Actually insane. It was like three weeks. We had a new brand launched because we couldn’t really launch with Incorporate Massage and do all these other things outside of massage, so we needed a new name right away. So we did that. And with that came like new logo, new website. The website, I think I’ve redone like three times in the last year just trying to dial in the messaging because we signed our first mental health client and they started in October of 2020. So we’re like 16 and a half months into our pivot right now. But as we grow and we figure out what our niche is and why people are buying from us versus our competitors, and it’s a highly competitive space and we keep dialing in our unique value proposition and what we’re really offering that’s different than anyone else.
Amelia:
And I would even say like two months ago we figured it out even more and I imagine a year from now, the messaging will look different again and you should always be iterating anyway. It’s just this is really, really fast iteration.
Stephanie:
Yeah. I’d say so.
Amelia:
We’d sign a client and then I would just want to interview them and be like, “Okay, why did you buy from us? Why did you pick us over your Modern Health or your Lyra, Ginger?” There’s a million mental health platforms that can provide therapy for your employees and the resounding information that came back, which… I feel like it actually took too long for it to click me. Like I wish I would’ve figured it out a little faster, but what’s different about what we do is you can actually work with multiple types of practitioners. So mental health makes up like 80% of our services that we’re providing for employees, but they can also work with a registered dietician, they can work with a personal trainer, they can work with a financial counselor on their financial wellbeing. So we just are providing a more holistic wellbeing solution for employees with mental health is the focus and mental health is like the lens that we look at everything through.
Amelia:
But I think the key to our success and why we have traction and we’re moving so quickly is because we are basically providing something for everyone, wherever they’re at on their mental health journey, because not everybody needs therapy and even if they need it, not everybody’s open to therapy. So how can we meet employees at their level, I would say. And even than that messaging and that positioning, I only realized after talking to our clients just a couple months ago, that that was really what was unique about us. Seems like in retrospect it should have been obvious, but when you’re just in it and you’re your face is just grinding, it’s hard to zoom out a little bit and see. When you’re doing the work and trying to drive the direction of the company, it can be challenging.
Stephanie:
Yeah. I hear that. So I know you all are a Salesforce customer and I want to hear what that looked like when you were going from being completely in person to then having this beautiful digital first experience. What did it look like? What technology did you use? How did it help working with them?
Amelia:
Yeah, so I would say we were very lucky because we had made the business decision to migrate our custom platform that we had built from the ground up. We were migrating all of that functionality and rebuilding it inside of Salesforce because Salesforce was going to allow us to just scale much faster when we were doing onsite massage. Because we were a technology enabled services company and basically there was enough out of the box functionality that Salesforce already had that would’ve cost us. I mean, we had a team of seven full-time engineers managing our existing platform. And then moving to sales force was going to allow us to cut that down to like two. So we’d made the business decision based on cost and speed to move the company’s technology inside of the Salesforce platform. And we had started that October of 2019 and so we were, I guess, six months into that rebuild and just like maybe a month away from launching and then COVID hit. So we had this essentially like 75% built.
Stephanie:
Ah, got it. So you’re already on your way.
Amelia:
Yeah. We were on our way. It wasn’t done. It was like 75% of the way there. Nothing was done enough that we could launch with it. And all of a sudden all of our revenue had dried up. There was not the ability for us to go out and raise new funds because we were just a company that had been… What investors are going to give you money? You just got murdered.
Stephanie:
Yeah. “Don’t look over here. Let’s think about the future now.”
Amelia:
So yeah, we had to figure out how to just use the super limited resources and what we had in the bank to basically pivot the build. So just leave all of the massage specific pieces, 75% built, because we have no idea what’s going to happen there and then focus our build on, okay, if this is a new problem we’re going to solve, then we need this tool, this tool, this tool to provide that virtually for employees. And so yeah, we just pivoted the whole design. It was actually really hard to just walk away from what we had. We had mapped out, we’d been working on it for like six months.
Amelia:
We’d already invested like hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars into this rebuild and to say like, okay, we’re just going to walk away from all of that. We have no idea what’s going to happen and we’re putting all of our bets and all of our chips on building this virtual solution. It was all we had. It was all the money we had left. So we did that and-
Stephanie:
Takes a lot of guts by the way to give up. Yeah, that’s sunk cost. I’m not going to look at that anymore. I’m going to move on. Yeah. I think-
Amelia:
In retrospect, it’s not really sunk cost because like I said, we have a handful of companies that are back in office, so we’re actually doing both and we’re starting to sell blended contracts now where companies that are in office are saying, we want you to do our massage and our mental health and our wellness program and we’re kind of combining those budgets and it’s a single app they can use for everything for employee wellbeing. But we didn’t know that at the time.
Stephanie:
At the time it probably felt like you’re throwing it all away.
Amelia:
Yep. It definitely did. So yeah. We just focused on the new pieces that we needed to just allow people to schedule with a live practitioner and then to build out a content library of prerecorded classes people could take. So that’s how it happened.
Stephanie:
And was that functionality already there? Is that kind of why you went with them because you had the classes, you knew what you wanted on there and it was already basically built into the platform? Was that the driving force behind it?
Amelia:
Yeah. They have a content management platform there. There’s CMS that we just used it out of the box functionality and we were like, “All right, throw it all in there. Let’s see. See if we can serve it up in a way that looks attractive.” I did like all the design basically for our first version of the platform and we just used Salesforce Communities, which are now called Experiences. I built that out. They’re very easy to launch. You could launch a community in 10 minutes.
Stephanie:
What’s a community look like? I don’t really know what to think about with that.
Amelia:
I mean, it’s essentially just a website that you can… They have templates you can use, drag and drop functionality. So we started building custom inside of Salesforce where we built like custom components, but in the Communities, it’s kind of like a templated webpage and you can throw specific components that you’ve custom built into their pre-built platform. And so that’s the direction we started going. We built out a bunch of custom components, put them into the Salesforce Community and then using Mobile Publisher, we were able to just publish it to an app because we were looking at, even on the massage business, like if we wanted to build our own mobile app for massage, it was going to cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars and take us probably six months. And with Salesforce, it was like, “Ah, we can just use Communities, use Mobile Publisher, push a button and have a mobile app.” You would think it’d be a little more instant, but it’s actually like waiting on Android and Apple to do it. The one that takes the longest.
Stephanie:
Yeah. I know that world, every time we promised someone like your new podcast will be out, the podcast is coming out soon. We’re like, “Oh, but we have to wait for Apple.” So TVD and it’s a black box. So I don’t really know.
Amelia:
Yeah. It’s a mystery. Sometimes they would be totally fine and our changes would be released. And then other times they’d push back and they’d be like, “No, we’re not going to release this because this, this, this and this.” And you’re like, “Well, it wasn’t a problem last time. What changed?” I feel like it’s just whoever randomly gets assigned to-
Stephanie:
[Crosstalk].Amelia:
… days. So yeah, that’s kind of how we move forward and got the mobile app right away, allowed us to be competitive in the space because we had technology we could release really quickly.
Stephanie:
Yeah. So where’s the majority of your usage? Like your customer usage, is it within the app now?
Amelia:
It’s like 50, 50 mobile and desktop, but it is all on our platform. It’s just people can access it through the web or through a downloaded mobile app.
Stephanie:
Got it. Yeah. Just having that all in one place. I mean, I think back to… I mean, when I was working at Google, which you would think… They have everything there, but having it all in one place, I would say at least when I was there really a thing, like if you wanted a massage, you had to go to one area, if you wanted mental health assistance to be here, it was all in different areas. So just thinking about one portal that you can log into and be like, I want to check out meditation. I want a workout class. I want to book a massage. I mean, that seems like the dream as an employee to just have it all in one spot.
Amelia:
Yeah, definitely. And for HR too, I think they’re dealing with this app fatigue where things have been so niche and so specific for so long and they’re paying a per employee per month fee for access to meditation app and their employee assistance program and their wellness platform and… The big one for 2022 they’re saying is going to be financial wellbeing and we’re already ahead of that curve. We’re going to be the first mental health platform that has financial health as well. But yeah, they’re paying a PEPM fee for all of these platforms, but they’re only capturing a tiny niche of their employee base because it’s so specific. So it gets HR really exciting because they’re like, “Oh, we could just pay one per employee per monthly and we can get high utilization.” And it’s easier for them. It’s easier for their employees, definitely.
Stephanie:
Yeah. I mean, that’s kind of the trend that you see happening in a lot of big companies who had many apps out there. We had Walmart on the show and they’re saying how they have had quite a few apps and now they’re basically just bundling them all into one super app. And now after I heard that I’m looking around, I’m like, “Oh, and that company’s doing that and that one’s doing that.” And it makes sense, like you said, app fatigue. No one wants 10 apps when you can just have one and get the same results without having to open a million things.
Amelia:
Definitely.
Stephanie:
So when it came to skillsets, I mean, it sounds like you learned so much in a very short time period and what you were doing to what you’re doing now, how did you learn those new skills and kind of shift your mindset to a digital first mindset?
Amelia:
Well, I feel like you’re only as strong as you’re mentoring network. Basically it’s like what industry expert can I talk to that can help me solve this problem? Who has the background and has done this before that can help me figure it out. And so I’m just very big on finding mentors and advisors and going and just asking for their help. People are generally happy to help with something if you just ask, so yeah, I just started seeking out people with the background in product. I probably interviewed, oh, a lot of like UX designers and product managers and reading everything I can get my hands on at night when I’m hanging out with my family and we’re reading our separate books. I’m reading about product design and what it means to build a product team. I’ve never had one before and then running everything.
Amelia:
I’m lucky because I have a very supportive and experienced board of directors and so then running my ideas by them and they’re able to teach me quite a bit. So that’s kind of my process, is just finding people and talking to as many of them as I can and absorbing all the information I can get.
Stephanie:
Yep. Is there any piece of advice that resonate with you still today where you’re like, “Oh, I remember that one. My one board member said this or they gave me something to read.”? Anything that still sticks with you today?
Amelia:
Yeah. I mean, if I look at my whiteboard-
Stephanie:
Ooh. I see you looking up, I’m like, “I want to see this whiteboard.”
Amelia:
My big quote that’s right at the top that I have to remind myself of literally every day is basically the skills that get you from zero to a million in revenue work against you in the next phase of growth.
Stephanie:
Wow.
Amelia:
So everything that I’m really good at where I could just like dig in, do the work. I’m doing marketing, I’m closing all the deals and doing the sales myself, I’m building the product. Everything that made me super successful, super with the air quotes. But yeah.
Stephanie:
Take those air quotes away. You are.
Amelia:
Being able to just do the pivot, do the work, make sure we have product market fit, figure out how to go to market strategy, all of that, building it all myself is what got me to where we’re at right now, but if I continue to do that the company will fail. It will not be successful unless I can now transfer and delegate all of those responsibilities out to the rest of my team members. And that is really hard. So I went through that when we grew, say on the massage side is probably when we hit about the 2 million in revenue, that that mindset was introduced to me by one of my board of directors. But then, things crashed. We had to pivot and I was in my like MO where it was just like, “Oh, all right, I can do everything. I can do it all.” I feel like that comes more naturally for me than delegating.
Amelia:
So I have to be very intentional. I’m very thoughtful about asking myself that question, the sub-questions under it, who can you delegate that to? Where it’s like, my natural inclination is like, “Oh, we need to build out the hiring plan for the sales team. Cool. I’ll build it out and then I’ll hand it to my sales leader as like”-
Stephanie:
It resonates with me.
Amelia:
Have them build it and then you review it. And so it’s a new motion. And it will become second nature to me once I’ve done it long enough, but it’s definitely something to keep in mind that like the startup skills that get you from point A to point B are critical, but you have to develop new muscles to get from point B to point C.
Stephanie:
Yeah. I mean, I’ve heard that many times on this podcast from different leaders saying it’s all about like who, not how when it comes to… Like it’s not a to-do list, it’s a who list. So that’s been a theme that I’ve heard a lot, but when it gets down to actually doing that, like how have you found success when it comes to delegating and trusting your sales lead to put that plan together for you? What did that look like to create that trust and willingness to delegate? Because I’m trying to think about like, if someone is in this moment right now and they’re like, “I’m in it. That’s me. Everything that Amelia just said is what I’m doing.” How do they get past that to break through to the next level?
Amelia:
Yeah. I would say I did it wrong more times than I did it right in the beginning where I think I was just like, “Oh, I need to delegate this. Okay. You go do this.” And then they fail and they drown. So I think it’s more like you have to determine number one, do they know how to do it? If not, it’s okay. And you can teach them and you should really only have to teach them once. So if I’m saying, “Okay, this is our marketing goal for the year and we need to figure out how that’s going to break down by channel.” Maybe my marketing leader’s never done that and I have to say, “Okay, let’s do this together and then I’ll show you.” And then after that you should be able to do it. So for me, there’s an element of like diving in deep, but then coming back up to high level. And it’s okay to dive in deep I think if you’re teaching somebody how to do something for the first time.
Amelia:
And that’s not always me because, like I said, a lot of the things we’re doing, I’ve never done before. So it’s that industry expert. Maybe the diving in is saying, “Oh, you’ve never built out a plan to… a hiring plan. We’ve never had a sales recruiter, for example.” So I don’t know a lot about sales recruiting. I’ve never actually built an outbound sales team. We grew Incorporate Massage all inbound. So those are new muscles I’m trying to develop. So then the next question is what industry expert can you bring in to solve that? So I have to go find that person, and LinkedIn has been a great resource for me. I’ll just say like, I need help with this and it’s like a resounding like, “Oh, I know how to do it. Oh, I can introduce you to so and so. Oh, I’ll spend an hour with you.”
Amelia:
Most recently we’ve been focused on sales recruiting and so I brought in all these people, sales recruiters from big companies and CROs from tech companies that are more than willing to just donate their time. And then it’s me, it’s my sales leader and we’re just writing down everything they say and trying to learn from their experience. So yeah, that’s how-
Stephanie:
I know you mentioned earlier trying to showcase what that person might be interested in. So not everyone maybe is open to therapy right now, maybe showing them meditation or maybe just showing them how to book a massage or something. How do you think about making a custom experience and a good customer for every person who comes onto the platform?
Amelia:
So for me it’s really like looking at the individual user data. So it started as like, “Okay, we’re doing therapy.” That’s what we started off with and then we had content and I was like, “Well, I don’t really know which one is the winner. I don’t know if everyone’s just going to use content and we’re going to say like, “We’re a content platform or a product company only, and we’re going to drop life services or I don’t know if we’re just going to end up doubling down therapy and nobody’s going to use the product and we’re just going to drop that.”” So there’s just a lot of looking at behavior in the platform and all the data around it and so one of the things we know pretty early on is that we actually exported our user list and looked at the users that did therapy with a live practitioner over zoom, and then the users who watched a mental health video were actually very different populations. So there’s very little-
Stephanie:
Interesting.
Amelia:
… overlap, which was mind blowing to me and I was just like, “What?” I would’ve thought, if I’m working with a therapist, I’m also watching all the mental health videos or vice versa. If you’re watching mental health videos, then you’re probably pretty open to therapy, but that was not the case at all.
Stephanie:
Wow.
Amelia:
Yeah. So what I gained from that was just this realization of, interesting. Some people are ready to talk to someone, but some people are not, and maybe they don’t want to, maybe they’re not open to it, maybe they’re just not ready yet, or maybe they’ll watch a video on helping their teenager who’s struggling with depression or maybe they’ll download one of our PDFs where we basically take our video content on mental health and we put it into written forms so people can choose, do I want to watch a video or do I want to read? Because it’s different populations that like to consume information in different ways. So that was kind of another light bulb moment for me, where I was just like, “Oh, people need this custom experience.” There’s not a one side fits all solution for mental health. If there was, then we wouldn’t be in the situation that we’re in.
Amelia:
So then I start looking around at the market and there’s all these different mental health tools, which are really interesting. So one of the ones that we’ll be actually be launching next month is we’re going to have our first version of our mental health chatbot in our platform because there’s a ton of research that’s been done that shows that people feel more… It’s like 60% of people feel more comfortable talking about their mental health challenges with a robot than they do with a human because they don’t feel judged, which was mind blowing to me.
Stephanie:
I can see that. Because I know they have text version of that. With a human also I know did really well for a while too. You don’t have to look at them, you don’t really know who’s behind that text message. So I can see why a robot feels nice too.
Amelia:
Yeah. And I mean, it’s the generation that’s up and coming, the millennials are a lot more comfortable with technology and text and email therapy and things like that. So once I started going down that path with that first initial realization, I just started to see all these other trends and patterns, other types of mental health technology that were being built that could help people, whether it’s… There’s a positive text messaging… a positive psychology text messaging app that we’re going to be integrating with and piloting. There’s a vocal analysis tool that can tell how you’re doing emotionally based on your vocal tones and give you an analysis and make recommendations just based on hearing your voice, that we’re going to be piloting. There’s just a lot.
Amelia:
So if you look at now the mental health space is super fragmented as well and there’s all these different tools you can use and all these different ways. Some are focused on sleep. Some are focused on behavior change. Some are focused on overcoming addiction and it’s just like, we are so different as humans and any employer, like their employee base is so varied and diverse that it seems so narrow minded to think there’s just one simple solution for helping solve that mental health challenge.
Stephanie:
Yep. Yeah. I agree. So when thinking about the next couple years, what are you most excited about or what are you going to be launching that you’re… I’m not sure maybe if it’s going to be a huge success or it’s feeling a little bit uncertain right now.
Amelia:
I mean, I’m really excited about launching our financial wellness element and we have a partner that we are bringing in and they’re providing all the financial wellness content and they’re providing the financial network of financial counselors who will teach you how to get out of debt and how to invest and build wealth. Because there’s a lot of research also backing up the financial stressors cause and are linked to mental health problems. So I want to make sure, we’re always thinking about mental health holistically and how we can really equip employees with what it is that they need to succeed. So I’m really excited for the financial piece.
Amelia:
There’s a chance it won’t go the way we expected or we’re going to learn something new from that and change the way we want to offer it, but we’ve got that coming. Like I said, we’ve got our first version of our chatbot, the next version of it once we gain information from the data, kind of our V1, then we will start building in AI and just making it smarter and smarter. But the idea being like, “Oh man, I’m feeling really sad today.” And system will be able to say, “Okay, based on your past behavior, what you’ve interacted with and what we have available as a platform, you would really benefit from this five minute meditation for helping with depression or maybe watch this video on mental health.” Or whatever it is that the system’s just going to get smarter.
Amelia:
So it’s going to become more and more effortless for people to get the help that they need because people don’t really know what they need. It’s like you go on to Netflix and you want Netflix to tell you what you want to watch today. You don’t want to have to go find it. Especially if they’re struggling with their mental health, that’s why-
Stephanie:
They need one more thing to think about to figure out what they need.
Amelia:
That’s why they’re there because they need help and they don’t know exactly what they need. So I’m really excited to start watching our system just get smarter and smarter, making it more effortless for people to get the help they need. I mean, there’s a lot of things on the roadmap. So it’s just a lot of piloting over the next six months where we’re going to be implementing all sorts of different tools and then measuring the utilization and how people interact with them and deciding which pieces are going to be permanent in the platform and which pieces we’re going to pass on.
Stephanie:
I love that.
Stephanie:
All right. Cool. Well Amelia, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Joining me. It’s really cool hearing what you guys are up to. Where can people find out more about Nivati?
Amelia:
Yeah. So you can just go to nivati.com, N-I-V-A-T-I .com or I’m very active on LinkedIn, so you can find me Amelia Wilcox, DM me and happy to chat.
Stephanie:
Amazing. All right. See you next time.
Amelia:
Thanks Stephanie.
