In this episode, Jim Donnelly, Founder and CEO at Restore Hyper Wellness, talks about revolutionizing the health and wellness category, leading from the heart, and maintaining a strong company culture as his organization grows.
Welcome back to Elevating Brick and Mortar. The podcast about how operations and facilities drive brand performance.
On today’s episode, we talk with Jim Donnelly, Founder and CEO of Restore Hyper Wellness, an innovative care company that delivers expert guidance and an extensive array of cutting-edge health modalities, such as cryotherapy and IV drip therapy. Before Restore, Jim co-founded the Webby Award-winning premiere online travel community, IgoUgo.com. Earlier in his career, Jim worked in the luxury retail market, where he developed luxury condos for high-profile homeowners such as Michael Jordan, Cam Newton, and Chris Daughtry, as well as salons, spas, and high-end health clubs, including the Charlotte Athletic Club.
In this episode, Jim talks about revolutionizing the health and wellness category, leading from the heart, and maintaining a strong company culture as his organization grows.
Guest Bio:
Making wellness affordable and accessible to everyone has become Jim’s life mission and is the driving mindset behind everything his team does at Restore Hyper Wellness. In just five years, Restore has grown from one Austin location to over 100 locations spanning 28 states, and there are many more on the way.
Before Restore, Jim co-founded IgoUgo.com, winner of a Webby Award as the top travel website in the U.S. In under five years, IgoUgo became the leader in user-generated content for travel websites and was sold to Sabre Holdings / Travelocity.
With a focus on the luxury retail market, Jim has developed luxury condos (for homeowners including Michael Jordan, Cam Newton, and Chris Daughtry), as well as salons, spas, and high-end health clubs, including the Charlotte Athletic Club. The accumulation of these experiences informed the creation of Restore.
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Guest Quote
“We've gone through certain inflection points, and at each inflection point, you know, as we get bigger and bigger, we have to be very cognizant of how we are continuing to instill the culture, continuing to instill the deep mission and the important mission into people in a tangible way, where it used to be, I would tell them directly, they would see me get up in front of them.
But as you get more and more dispersed, you have to rely on other folks to be the messenger. So I will say that I still, for the important people, make sure that. I am personally communicating the mission and the vision to them, and they're now propagating that down.” - Jim Donnelly
Time Stamps
**(01:40) - What is Restore Hyper Wellness?
**(11:39) - Restore’s place in Medtail
**(19:36) - Maintaining customer experience amongst a growing franchise
**(27:09) - Jim’s favorite saying
**(33:52) - How to resonate with your CEO
**(39:58) - Sid’s final thoughts
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Sponsor:
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Links
Narrator: Welcome to Elevating Brick and Mortar, a podcast about how operations and facilities drive brand performance. On today's episode, we talk with Jim Donnelly, founder and CEO of Restore Hyper Wellness, an innovative care company that delivers expert guidance and an extensive array of cutting edge health modalities, such as cryotherapy and IV drip therapy.
Prior to Restore, Jim co-founded the Webby Award-winning premier online travel community, IgoUgo.com. Earlier in his career, Jim worked in the luxury retail market where he developed luxury condos for high profile homeowners such as Michael Jordan, Cam Newton and Chris Daughtry, as well as salons, spas, and high-end health clubs.
Including the Charlotte Athletic Club. In this episode, Jim talks about revolutionizing the health and wellness category, leading from the heart ,and how he maintains a strong company culture as his organization continues to grow. But first a word from our sponsor. Want to rest easy knowing your brick and mortar locations are offering the best possible guest experience? Partner with Service Channel for peak facilities performance. Check out service channel.com today to learn more. Now, here's your host, industry and FM technology thought leader and chief business development officer at ServiceChannel, Sid Shetty, along with our guest, Jim Donnelly.
Sid: Hello everyone.
Welcome to the show. I'm here today with Jim Don. CEO of Restore Hyper Wellness. Jim, welcome. Thank you for joining
Jim: me today. Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to this. I've been looking forward to it for weeks. Likewise,
Sid: Jim, can you tell us about Restore and what you offer your customers?
Jim: Sure. So Restore is a place for proactive health and wellness. Under one roof, we have what we call 10 modalities. That all help you deal with your health and wellness from a proactive preventative perspective. So we have IV therapy, we have cryotherapy, we have red light therapy, sauna therapy, compression therapy, intramuscular shots, just a variety of things that help you hack your body to be more healthy and allow you to do more of what you love.
Sid: What was your mission when you decided to start restore? Quite frankly,
Jim: we build a category called hyper wellness. Hyper wellness is something that we think is a higher level than wellness, and our mission became we wanted to make hyper wellness as affordable and accessible to as many people as possible so they can do more of what they love to do.
So that is our, essentially our mission statement, and we are well on the way to making hyper wellness affordable and accessible for people around the.
Sid: Yeah, I wanna double click on that very soon. But before I get there, we'd love to share your background and how you got here. Right. At one point you built luxury condos for, uh, some pretty big names, including Michael Jordan.
H. How did you end up doing that, and then what was your journey that led you to actually start
Jim: restore? Yeah, so a step back even farther, my father was a wacky entrepreneur and we drove around in a propane powered car. When I. A kid, how many people have a propane powered car? The thing about my dad was, he was actually an unsuccessful entrepreneur, but he always told me that it doesn't matter what you did, the next one's the one.
And so I, I kind of went into the world with that optimism. I, I got my mba. I started my first company during my mba. As a business school project, and it was getting golf balls out of golf ball, water hazards. So we got all the contract rights to golf courses around the southeast. Millions of balls came out of there.
We took it to a factory, we processed them, shipped them to Europe, and it was lost and found in America. And those were some grimy. Environments like you'd, I'd literally have to train my divers at Jekyll Island where you would walk in one side of the water and the other side of the water, 10 alligators would walk in at the same time.
The the other guys at the, on the team, they figured, well, if the owner will do it, then I'll do it. So I've been all in, entrepreneur, do whatever it takes. So I said, you know what? My dad's done this a lot and tried with all his mite and failed a lot. Let me go build a foundation. So I went and worked in a corporate career after the military at places like Coca-Cola, developing new brands internationally at Citibank, running a big marketing group for a new way to do financial services.
So Craft Foods is a brand manager on Jello pudding and cool Whip. So I got to the point where I had what I considered a real foundation and I had learned various. Aspects of how to do marketing better, how to do other parts of running a business better. That got me to about 2001, and so I went out and started an internet company with my best friend, who's still my best friend today.
It was a company called Igo Yugo, and Igo Yugo was an online travel community, and people would come and write travel journals and spend seven hours writing these. Put great pictures there, and then we had a matching algorithm that would match travelers of like minds. Long story short, we open that and start that and launch it about three months before nine 11.
Nine 11 happens. It's a horrible time to be in the travel business with the travel community, but the good thing ha, that happened was we then had no other option but to bootstrap it. So we essentially owned all of it. We bootstrap it. Four years later, we win a Webby award as the top travel site in the.
And so it was this wonderful journey. And then a little bit later, Travelocity and Saber Holdings by Igo Yugo from Tony and I, and I now have the financial freedom to be a full-time entrepreneur and do lots of things. And so since then I've looked at the phase of my life. And pick something that I was really passionate about.
So when I moved to Charlotte, it was to be married and have my first kids. But I got there after living in New York City for 10 years and I was like, ah, Charlotte's a beautiful, awesome city, but it lacks some cool stuff. And so I started this company Pursuit Group, whose only mission was to make Charlotte more cool.
And so we started this high-end men's grooming lounge that all the muckety mucks and, and Charlotte would come to all these bankers. We created such unique, interesting real estate that one building, one bank building that I bought. The top floor was Michael Jordan. The floor below him was Cam Newton. The floor below him was Daughtry.
The floor below him was Boris Dal. Wow. So it's seven floors of these super customized condos for the sort of who's who of Charlotte. And the idea was I had to do things that were incredibly unique because I had no pedigree in the real estate business. So I couldn't compete with the guys at the top end cuz they have professional organizations.
So I had to do the projects that they'd looked at and turned away cuz they weren't creative enough to make them happen. And so that's how I got. And then fast forward a couple years, my body's pretty broken down. I'm 46. I'm picking my wife up for lunch, and a woman walks by and says, Hey, Stacy. Hey Jim.
I'll see you later. I'm going to cryo. And I was like, whoa, what's cryo? And she tells me, and I'm like, holy crap. I was training for a triathlon yesterday. I'm beat up. Let's go to cryo instead of lunch. And so that's the genesis of how this all happened. I go in and do that cryo session. I fall in love with cryo.
It makes me feel great, but I hate everything else about the experience. It's a horrible retail environment. It's overpriced. I did not like the owner. They talked about making money more than they talked about helping me feel better. And so I said, you know what? I can do this better. And so I. Called a friend.
It took me a few months to convince him. He said, all right, let's do this. He put some money in and I did all the work, and we launched five studios. It was just cryotherapy at the time, and it just went great. And so we then woke up and said, this is great. We've got good traction, but this is a small business.
This is a cryo only business. Anyone can do it. It's a guy in sweat paint kind of business. We've gotta make this a bigger business with defensive barriers, with moats that that sort of make it hard to do with big opportunities. Big opportunities. So we started adding additional modalities. We added the medical side of the business.
We created a telemedicine infrastructure to support it and just on and on these different pieces that have made Restore what it is today. Now we're 200 locations around the country. We're opening a store every five days or so. We'll open a good number of stores this year and for the foreseeable future.
And the goal is to have 1500 locations in the US at some point, and then obviously look at international.
Sid: That's fantastic. Firstly, I want to just say I love what you shared about what your father said as an entrepreneur. Like you gotta believe that the next one's the one I will add.
Jim: The second thing he told me, by the way, he would then go on to say, and the good thing in the US is there's no debtors prison , so you can't go to jail for being a failed entrepreneur.
And he would say, as long as you work your butt off, do exactly what you tell your investors and everyone. Put some of your own money in and risk it first and in your ethical in every way. It's okay. That's the American system. Go out and take a chance and do it till you hit it.
Sid: That's great. That's great.
And by the way, congratulations on, you know what? It appears like you've had multiple successes in different verticals in this entire journey, and it's really great to see the point where you are today, where you're actually building a brand around a new business. With the Restore, you're seeing some great success with the Restore Your, your growth has been pretty phenomenal and you're in 200 locations today.
How many states and how fast have you grown? Like how many years has this taken to get to 200? Yeah,
Jim: I think the official number that we've announced is 180 9, but we've got five grand openings this weekend, so 200 is the round number this month. We started literally around a little under eight years ago.
We opened that very first location, sort of seven and a half years ago. We opened the next four and learn the business, and then we started franchising about four years ago, and so franchising was the fuel that really made this thing take. And we're not franchise guys. We didn't know anything about franchising, but we did know that franchising was a very capital efficient way to expand rapidly.
I also love the inherent nature of franchising in that every franchisee is his own business owner. And so they're super passionate. So you've got someone on the ground at every location that is waking up every day thinking about it, and these people become your friends. They become people that you're intellectually and emotionally tied to.
And so it's a really lovely way to do a business.
Sid: One location a week that's pretty phenomenal. Like your growth is fueled by a combination of like corporate owned stores and franchise locations. Is there like a certain mix that you're looking to have, like when you reach so some sort. Stable state or, or sky's the limit.
Jim: Yeah. So I didn't answer one part of your question earlier. We're in 41 states now, and so when you're spread that far across the country, and I think we'll be in 44, 45 states by the end of this year, you do have to start being strategic about how you do your corporate footprint. And so I think before we were a little more opportunistic about we really like this market.
Let's go get a cluster. We really like this market. Now where we've gotten is that at the end of the day, the f. Piece of our business is the main driver of growth and store openings, so let's be a little more strategic about our corporate footprint. So let's make sure we've got a corporate footprint in central Texas, which is where we are and where our headquarters is.
Let's make sure that if there is an area of the country that, that we might want to have a cluster because of training purposes or something like that, that we lean into. So we've honed where we're gonna have corporate locations and we're sort of optimizing that as we speak. Got
Sid: it. Do, do you consider what you do in the services you offer to be under the umbrella of
Jim: Medtel?
So, so we fundamentally believe there's a place for traditional medicine, but we think the sick care model is completely broken. So fixing people after they're sick as the construct for your health system, we believe that to be broken. And so, We wanted to be on the front end before you get sick. The preventative piece of that.
And so in order to do that, you've got to be very accessible to people. And so some of these thoughts lead to your strategy ultimately. Like you have to be at retail, you have to have a bunch of locations and all that. But before you get to that stepping back, it's, we wanted to create an environ. That was easy to access where information was understandable and once again accessible so that you could know the issues associated with your wellness.
You could have the options available that you needed. They needed to be affordable, and you needed to have a person that was a restore employee that could then give you what is right for you, give you the right protocol for you, and the idea that's broken in traditional medicine. The, you're being treated as the average person.
The pharmaceuticals that are being developed, they're developed for the average person. Unfortunately, none of us are the average person. We're our own unique person. So you come into a restore, we figure out what's right for you. We walk you through that. We find a way to make it affordable, and then we get you on a journey and the journey.
Is to try to get you to the virtuous cycle of the more you do, the better you feel. The better you feel, the more you do right. Once we have you there you are in a better place, and then you can go be a better human being. When you don't hurt, right? When you feel good, you are a better husband, you're a better father, you're a better spouse, you're a better partner.
all of these things. My favorite stat to tell people is that we have a net promoter score of 86. And so, wow. Most people on this podcast may not really understand the power of that number for perspective. An Apple store, they're in like the sixties, an Orange Theory, which is a seminal brand in the fitness space at this point.
They're in the sixties. We're higher than virtually anything in the retail space, and if you compare us to a primary care physician's office, a typical primary care physician's, Has a net promoter score of zero . And so people really love our approach to things. And we also say our approach to things has led to a different dynamic.
We see our customers on average almost five times a month. So if you play that out, we see our average customer 60 times a year. A primary cares office sees their average patient one time. That's not a relationship, that's not something that allows you the ability to really make a difference, to know somebody, take things to the next level.
So we have a completely different dynamic than other places.
Sid: That's right. So thanks for sharing that. When we look at what's happening in the space right now, there's a lot of new service offerings like you, like we just talked about, that are basically saying we need to change the way customers and patients can access healthcare and wellness.
Yeah. And so they're opening up. These new spaces that are more welcoming have a certain experience now, like you mentioned, is way better and different compared to a traditional doctor's office. Do you have a certain experience that is your North star When you think about what a customer or a patient feels when they walk into a restore,
Jim: and the easy answer is, we wanna be the Apple store.
Of the wellness space, like they're beautiful environments. They're open, they're welcoming, and so we incorporate a lot of that into our environment. We, we want it to be a beautiful space. We want it to be very open. By the way, that's the antithesis of the doctor's office, which is built around lots of small, little patient treatment rooms.
We want you to walk in and see the vast majority of things that we offer happen. The second you cross through the doors. And so what happens is then you say, what is that and right? And what is that and what is that? And it makes it easier for us to give you an introduction. More importantly, when you then go sit in an IV chair, you're sitting right next to someone who is a passionate.
Advocate of what we're doing. And so you'll have all these conversations about why are you here and what are you doing? And so it's one thing to hear it from our staff. It's another thing to hear it from an actual person that looks like you and that is there for real reasons. And so all of those things are very conscious.
Whether you get a treatment or not, you walk out of a restore feeling better than when you walked in.
Sid: You're kind of changing things a lot, right? Like you, you are, you're turning things on its head, like how the directly person thinks. Going to a doctor's office when something's wrong. And essentially you are not only saying, Hey, preventive healthcare is good, you, you are using the word hyper wellness and you're offering services that may not necessarily be in the vocabulary of most people.
So it's a very interesting concept and clearly it's working. But what I also hear is, You're mission driven, you trust your team and your employees to carry forward that mission. Cuz it really, in, in a space like this where it's not really known in a ubiquitous fashion, all the services and the benefits and so on, you cannot need that.
Right? You need the person that walks in with some inhibitions to feel welcome and then be open to the ideas of what you consider hyper wellness.
Jim: Right? That's right. And you know, we are building a category. We are offering services that in some ways are complicated. When someone comes in and says, what does red light therapy do?
So photobiomodulation, you have to talk about how this red light is at a certain frequency and it's helping your mitochondria. And it's like those are complicated conversations if you don't find an easy way to talk about it and then multiply that by 10 because we've got 10 of those kind of services in the space.
Our job is to make that information accessible and digestible and not overwhelm you with everything at once. It's what's your entry point? And I always talk about a budget and I talk about a budget in two pieces. There's a budget in terms of dollars you have to spend, and there's more importantly a budget you have in terms of time.
And what I find is, You gotta be very cognizant of people's walk in the door budget. Figure out the right entry point, get them the right protocol, and then understand over time that as you make them feel better, those budgets increase and you wake up six months later and now what people thought their time budget.
It was, it's totally different, right? Because you're having such a big impact on
Sid: them. That's great. I wanna pivot slightly, right? Because as you know, our show, our North Star, is to really help articulate and connect the dots between the importance of physical spaces and how they relate directly to customer experiences, brand experiences, and elevating the conversation around all the teams that are involved.
In not only building those physical spaces, but maintaining those physical spaces and how you bring those up in the right conversation and how it should be as important as any other function, um, in any organization. When someone talks about building a brand, I wanna talk a little bit about that because clearly when you talk.
About restore and the kind of experience you want your customers to have. You talked about how you're using the physical space to achieve a certain part of your goals. I wanna just have you double click on how you went about thinking about the physical space when you were coming up with the concept of restore and how.
Continue to make sure that you have that same experience as you've grown now to 200 locations. I will
Jim: say that it's number one, it's an ever-evolving thing the way we did it six years ago, seven years ago, four years ago. We continue to evolve and get better, and I think that's in our dna that we want to constantly make the space better.
But we did start with some fun. Concepts, you mentioned them. I mentioned them, that we want this to be as open and transparent, a physical space as we possibly can create. We wanted to make sure that the things we included fit within a very obvious construct. So, so going back to hyper wellness. Number one, you have to walk out feeling better than when you walked in.
Number two, everything we do has to be supported by science and medical studies. Number three, and this is where it gets into fitting into the retail space. It has to be something this scalable and replicable every time. And so for us, that means that we do things like a crown machine. Like every time you get into a crown machine, it's gonna feel the same, whether you're in Omaha, whether you're in Santa Monica, whether.
In South Beach, everything feels the same. You can expect a consistent experience no matter where you go. And then third, we wanted massive throughput in our space. So how do you get massive throughput? You do things. Everything that's offered at Restore has to either be machine driven that's super quick and efficient, like a cryo chamber that can do four people at a time, or it's a one to many service like an IV where a nurse can do six people at a time.
Or it's chamber driven, where you can put someone in a hyperbaric chamber or a sauna, walk away and do other things. And so open and transparent, beautiful space drive massive throughput because of the choices you make with your retail offering. Use the physical environment to convey information. So if you, you can see our hyper wellness construct, it's nine.
Components and you can educate yourself when you're there, you'll actually see the hyper wellness reps take you to that wall and talk you through everything that's included in hyper wellness. So just lots of things like that. And then enable the customers that are there to be part of the message and to be part of the community.
And so there, there's never a day that goes by where someone doesn't go in and someone tell them what a wonderful experience they have or why they're there or what they're doing. And so you have to make conscious decisions to bring that to life. And then the other thing I'll say is that during Covid in particular this, the whole notion of telemedicine blew up.
Telemedicine was advanced by a decade because of Covid. And so what everyone thought was that telemedicine was gonna be the answer. But as soon as Covid ended, guess what happened? People went back to their primary care office. People like to have the ability to go into a physical space, touch it, feel it, talk to a person.
Now on top of. It's also nice to have the telemedicine option, so we believe omnichannel is absolutely the way of the future in the medical slash wellness space.
Sid: Hey, I'm your host Cichetti and I hope you're enjoying this conversation so far to make sure you're up to date and have access to all our episodes. Make sure you're subscribed to the podcast. Also, if you have thoughts, comments, or questions. Be sure to follow a service channel on LinkedIn so you can be part of our community of like-minded folks as well as have access to a lot of other great content.
Feel free to also connect and follow me on LinkedIn. I'm your host, Sid Shetti, and now back to the show, Jim, as to see you and. Right. You have a certain vision on what that physical space is, and you just mentioned about having that consistent compelling experience for your customers. As you've grown, there's teams that, I'm sure you have that deal with construction, new store openings, facilities.
How are you ensuring that? They are on the same page with your mission. As you grow and as you scale, and honestly as you start opening franchise locations, how are you ensuring that message and that consistency and that compelling experience is what you expect?
Jim: You're a hundred percent right, by the way.
We are, we've gone through certain inflection points and at each inflection point, you know, as we get bigger and bigger, we have to be very cognizant of how we are continuing to instill the culture, continuing to instill the, the deep mission and the important mission into people in a tangible way where it used to be, I would tell them.
They would see me get up in front of them. But as you get more and more dispersed, you have to rely on other folks to be the messenger. So I will say that I still, for the important people, make sure that I am personally communicating the mission and the vision to them, and that they're now propagating that down.
We do things like, we have a headquarters standup every Monday. Every single person in the headquarters is at the. And I lead the stand up and I talk about what's happening. Each of the leaders get up and they talk about what's happening in their group, and then at the end we do things like, tell me something good.
And so the idea of, tell me something good is tell me something good in your life that is happening that we would all like to share and celebrate. That's not exactly tied to restore, but what it's tied to is this whole mission of hyper wellness, of do the. within hyper wellness so that you can do more of what you love to do.
And so we want to hear what you love to do and that you're doing more of that as a way to instill the mission into people. So we do things that that kind of embody the mission without constantly saying the exact words around the mission. And so as a culture, we do probably a hundred things in our corporate environment to make sure everyone at the HQ gets it without any ambiguity.
and then those people become the foot soldiers to go out and propagate it across the system. We do a ton of things to make sure the franchisees come here and they a hundred percent understand what the mission is. They get trained on it. They see positive reinforcement in every kind of way. For instance, we lead with number of services performed rather than number of dollars collected.
Got it. That's a subtle thing, but it sends the message, we care more about how many people we're helping, right. Than how much money we're making. So like I said, I could give lots of examples like that. This little board on the back here that, you know, you can't read it, but. It says you can build an empire and be an unbelievable business person and still be kind like that's, I love, that's the kind of messaging that is throughout, and there will come a day when I'm not necessarily the right person for this role.
Like I lead from the heart, I lead with emotion. I am people first. Always. At some point you. Get more sophisticated processes, you have to, it becomes more spreadsheets and all that. And so some people are better than that than me. The challenge is making sure that person who might be better at me at the scaling and the process doesn't lose their heart and doesn't lose all of the beauty of the things that made this so special.
And that's the real challenge. I love that.
Sid: Everyone, I think within our audience and all of us, we all play different roles and we own different functions. That's what we do. I think why we do something is so mission-driven, and I love how you articulated about how you constantly remind not only your entire team, but all your partners and franchisors as well as to franchisees is to.
Why you're doing something and what's important that the customer's important and how you take care of them is important. And everything else around that can be operationalized, but don't lose focus on
Jim: the mission. Yeah, that's right. You know, I think everyone in the system's probably heard me say my favorite saying many times, and my favorite saying, and I mean it in, in as genuine as way as you can possibly mean something.
I say a day that I don't cry is a day that I don't feel a day that I don't feel is a wasted. And I always say to people, take that thought and incorporate that into the way you approach restore. Now, you might not cry like me, like I actually cry. You could cry metaphorically, but if you are not working on things that you can connect to deeply, if you are not passionate about the impact you're making, then you're not thinking about it the right way.
And by the way, I tell my employees also, and you better prioritize your life the right way. Work. Tremendously secondary to the rest of your life. Prioritize your family. Prioritize your faith. By the way, whatever your family looks like, whatever your faith may be like, we don't dictate any of that, but those things are way more important than work.
That's fantastic.
Sid: Jame, I wanna, I wanna pivot slightly and ask you a couple of questions. Come up. When you talk about businesses that have a reliance on some very special equipment, they're, they're key to not only your business and the experience, but they actually are key to your service offering. In, in your case, you rely on specialty equipment.
And this ties very much into some of the questions our audience might have. How do you ensure that you are keeping your assets aligned with the kind of experience you wanna offer for your customers? That all your assets are actually functioning, what kind of maintenance programs that you have? To ensure that those are not going down, because ultimately someone walks in with some sort of inhibition on, Hey, this is new for me, and then something doesn't work.
It's probably not the experience you want them to have. So I'm curious, do you think about this? Does it keep you awake at night? Do you, how do you delegate that?
Jim: One. I think as a leader you have to be self-aware of your strengths. So I do have a business partner and co-founder Steve Welch. He's an engineer.
I'm a marketing guy. He is unemotional, I'm emotional, all of these different things. So I, I give you that construct because it does lead into when you have a problem you need to solve, you gotta make sure you. All kinds of perspectives and capabilities to do it. So in the wellness space, it is very fragmented.
There are no big sort of Medtronic kind of companies that are producing high level medical devices. It's a lot of mom and pops. It's a lot of, there's a little bit of voodoo and big promises and, and there aren't a lot of manufacturers that stand behind their equipment that have warranty programs and all that.
So we essentially have to inherit all. And so the first step for us is we have something called Restore Labs. Restore Labs is really, it's not a white trench coat test tube lab. It's a commercialization lab. Okay? So we run all of our modalities through that commercialization process. We make sure it's gonna fit, it's gonna work, it's gonna provide efficacy, it's gonna stack the equipment is the right cost, it fits in the space.
We have an ability to service it. And so we do go through a pretty deliberate process. Sometimes you will come to a piece of equipment or a modality and. What's out there is not good enough. So for instance, in the cryotherapy chamber space, we felt like most of the suppliers out there were one bad month away from being bankrupt, and they did not provide the level of support that we needed given how fast we were scaling.
So what did we do? We went out and we found the right engineers and the right experts, and Steve led a process of creating our own cryotherapy chamber. We now produce our own cryotherapy chambers in a factory that we, that's sort of a contract labor manufacturing thing. It's our factory, it's our staff.
It's our team. Sure. And we have our own proprietary cryotherapy equipment. Now we did that to make sure we'd have a reliable source of equipment, but more importantly, we did it. There's an asymmetry of information with us. We know more about the cryotherapy space than anybody. We know more about the customer experience that needs to happen to anybody, so therefore, we were in the best position to go out and create the best possible customer experience in our own proprietary cryo chambers.
They're the best in the world, number one. They're beautiful. I do believe there's an aesthetic involved. As you mentioned, when someone walks in and sees a piece of equipment that they're gonna get inside of that's negative 250 degrees, it needs to. Beautiful. It needs to look sturdy and it, and then you gotta have all the different features built into it.
Whether that's safety features, whether that's features that provide better comfort, better, better speakers for the music, better microphones to talk to the person outside. I mean, on and on. And I think we've done that, navigated that really well. And I would put our cryotherapy chambers up against anything out there in the world.
And it's, they're the envy of other manufacturers of equipment. Now, are we going to do that for all of our equipment? No. Sometimes it doesn't make. But once again, when we have an asymmetry of information, when we have a unique capability and we can create a better differentiated product, that's when we'll look at do we need to produce it ourselves?
And I think we've demonstrated we have the capability to do that. So you're
Sid: not just offering a service, you're innovating, you're coming up with your own products too, whatever. It makes sense.
Jim: Experience. Right? And we wanna make sure that we have the equipment and processes and employee. in place to bring that experience to life and that experience has some really important things associated with it.
There's nothing more, more important than your health, than the amount of energy you have and the way you recover and your immune system and all that. So provide the experience that affects these very seminal important things in the best possible.
Sid: Jim, a lot of the folks in our audience, like I mentioned, are, you know, in different functions of the physical space or in asset management.
Clearly, like you are very passionate about not only the physical space, but the what's in those spaces in terms of the specialty equipment that you are. Putting in front of your customer and you're asking your customers to get into any advice that you would, that you could give our audience on whatever vertical they're in, whatever business they're in, how do they actually articulate a message on what they do and why they do it?
To the CEO of the company because a lot of times, like folks just think about what they do and say, yeah, I just maintained this, or I just build this, and they focus on that very specific function in a silo. However, the right answer really is that everything you do is tied to the customer experience, the brand and our audience and everyone in our space needs to be able to articulate that.
That resonates with the ceo. So any advice on that,
Jim: whether it's the O K R process or some other sort of management system like that. At the end of the day, it all boils down to this, have a mission that is clearly articulated and that everyone in the company knows then have big objectives that you're trying to accomplish.
Beneath those objectives have key. And all of that sort of has different views all the way down to the lowest ranked person in your company. They need to understand how the activity that they do day to day is a, is attached to a key result, which affects the key objective, which helps drive the mission.
If you haven't done that, you're gonna have a lot of people ad. Thinking, all I do is process inventory or process invoices for the medical sales system. Yeah. You're at the foundation of making sure this very important process happens so the medicine can get out to the stores and help more people. Like you gotta tie it.
All the way from the bottom, all the way to the top and all the way from top to the bottom. And if you haven't done that in a clear way, then you're, you are gonna have a lot of people say, well, I'm just in purchasing, I'm, I just work on the doc here and they're not gonna be motivated and they're not gonna be loyal, and that sort of thing.
So you have indicators as to whether you not, you've done that. How, what's your turnover at your company? What's your retention rate? When you go randomly talk to someone that's in a function like finance and say, what's our mission? Can they articul. How does your work tie to a key objective? And they can articulate it.
So there's little tests. It's not complicated. When I go into the store, I'll grab whichever employee's there and I'll say, what's our mission? Then I'll say, what are your goals and how many members do you have? And I'll say, what's your main personal individual goal? And once again, if they can't answer those questions, Then you haven't done enough and you haven't made sure that store was doing enough and you haven't made sure the manager within the store was doing enough for that person.
And so I would just say sometimes it simplify it and tie everything together from the top to the bottom and the bottom to the top.
Sid: That's great. Jim, what's the, when you look at the next five years, you, you're only building a category or leading the way in that category. What does the next five years look like?
What's the future of Restore and what do you want your brand to be known for? What kind of legacy do you wanna put in place? Yeah,
Jim: and I don't think in terms of me, by the way, I think in terms of Restore, because I'm just one piece of the puzzle and sure, you know, CEOs can come and go, but you know what?
What I think about is, what is Restore going to do as a legacy? And what I want that legacy to be, whether it's today on some level five years, is that we changed the health and wellness of society. We made it. Obvious that what we do is a better way to make people healthy, to help people do more of what they love to do.
And that we did it in a way wasn't just for the rich people in our society, wasn't just for pro athletes, it was for everybody. And I think that's one of the biggest issues in health and wellness and healthcare, is that if you have resources, if you have money, if you're. You never have a problem. You have such beautiful opportunities, but if you are not rich, you can get screwed.
So when I talk about restore, helping with the health and wellness of society, every part of society, all types of communities, I mean everybody, no matter which part of the socioeconomic scale they reside at. So that's what I want the legacy to be, and I want it to be big, meaningful impact like that. We literally have increased the health span of.
I e the number of years that people live and can continue to do the things they love to do, not just moving their lifespan higher, because if your lifespan goes up, but your last years are miserable, who cares? I hope that answered your question.
Sid: I love that. Thank you. Any advice for members in our audience that have an entrepreneurial spirit or are daring to dream to do something of their.
Jim: Yeah. You know, entrepreneurship is hard, and I do tell people, don't underestimate that. It's hard. You gotta have this sort of perseverance gene. My advice to people is always become an entrepreneur. If you can marry three things, if you can marry your passion and interest to something that you're really good at that a lot of people want.
And so I hear entrepreneurs all the time say, well, I'm passionate about it. I'm gonna go build a business around it. All right. Are you good? Do people actually want the thing that you're passionate about? So when you can marry those three things together, You're starting off on the right foot, then don't be afraid to get help.
I think I'm a relatively talented person in a lot of ways, but I have lots of inadequacies. I always try to find partners and people that have skills that I don't have, and I think the key to that is being self-aware. If you could have one super skill or one superhero attribute as an entrepreneur, it's self-awareness.
If you're self-aware, you can bring in the right people. You can know when you have a problem, you can fix things a lot better. And so that's my overall overarching thought on advice to entrepreneurs. That's amazing.
Sid: Self-awareness, right? Like such a unique concept, but such a meaningful one that I think makes us all better people, but.
Shows us exactly who we are and how we can compliment ourselves with people that we surround ourself with. So thank you for sharing that, Jim. I absolutely enjoyed this conversation. I really appreciate it. Thank you for taking the
Jim: time. It was my pleasure. People thank me for these things, but I promise you I get more from this than you do.
I love spreading the gospel of Restore and talking about these things, so thank you very much for having me.
Sid: I love that. Thank you so much. Any last words you'd like to leave our audience
Jim: with? Get to a restore. And try the services and if you have a hesitation, people will walk you through it and I promise you, you're gonna feel better and restore.
Do.
Sid: Well, that was Jim Donnelly with Restore Hyper Wellness, a leader in a new category of health and wellness. Jim and Restore are seeing tremendous success and growth, but one thing that seems clear is that they're mission driven or the focus on their customers, their health and the experience they offer.
What is also clear is that the physical space and the locations are clearly a big part of their. And the experience they wanna deliver to their customers. And as they scale and expand, they, like many other businesses, will rely on their team comprised of experts like you, functional leaders in construction, facilities, operations, and the many other functions that it takes to run a successful business.
A key takeaway for all of. Is that what we do in our functional areas has a huge impact and ties directly to what a sea level exec cares about. What matters is how you articulate that message and tie what you do to the mission and the North star of that business. And with that, I'm Cichetti and I'll see you on our next episode of Elevating Brick.
And.
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