Brett Maloley
Entrepreneur, Teammate @ladderfit and Penelope’s Dad. I want to flip the commercial fitness industry upside down.
November 27th, 2025 — A letter from the future…
The turkey is in the oven and on this Thanksgiving Day we have a lot to be thankful for… the past 10 years have been an amazing journey, filled with many challenging times and even more incredibly rewarding experiences. To say that past decade has gone as we had expected it, would be drastically inaccurate, but its been an amazing ride and we are tremendously grateful for the time we have spent together, the people we have worked with and the customers whom we have served.
When we started Ladder, in June of 2015, we knew that we were entering a space that was rapidly evolving, but there would have been no way for us to really understand what the future would hold. Above all, what I am most proud of is the community that we were able to create; one that has staunchly guarded our core values and done our very best to epitomize the type of organization that my co-founders and I wanted to build, from the very beginning. Below is list of our initial core values and through we have since added a few, all of the below remain integral beacons towards our north star/guiding light.
November 22nd, 2015
1. A TEAM is always stronger than the sum of its parts
2. There are always winners and losers, COMPETE
3. Know that HARD WORK is just the bare minimum
4. Convey PASSION in everything you do
5. Stay LOYAL to the team, our customers and our partners
6. Give people the benefit of the doubt and always ASSUME POSITIVE INTENT
7. Maintain OPTIMISM, even during the most trying times
8. Take ACCOUNTABILITY for both the good and the bad
9. CONFIDENCE is a choice, prepare to have it
10. Maintain a sense of perspective and always act with INTEGRITY
11. Understand the importance of GRIT and always embrace it
At last count we have a total of 1,645 employees between Boston, Nashville, San Francisco, London and Vancouver and over 270,000 “producers” who use our platform on a daily basis to put our customers in the best possible position to succeed.
Our producers have evolved from individual health and wellness professionals offering a digital coaching service to a formidable ecosystem, of both individuals and companies, boasting over 1,190 specializations of physicians, therapists, coaches and practitioners creating a true team of preventive health experts who proudly serve our close to 4,000,000 active users, through a wide variety of both in-person and virtual services, fully integrated with our product marketplace and data repository.
Again, there would have been no way for us to really understand where the company would go, but any successes that we’ve had have been a true reflection of our firm commitment to epitomize our core values and work, unwavering, towards our sole mission of helping people find happiness through health and wellness. Hindsight is always 20/20 and its fun to look back at what we had initially envisioned and see how or original plan looks in comparison to the reality that has been the last 10 years! Below is a brief memo, from November of 2015, articulating Ladder’s NOW, NEXT and FUTURE:
November 20th, 2015
NOW- We’re going to own the digital coaching/behavior modification space, within the health and wellness vertical. Though we aren’t first to market, we offer a better service, to the consumer, at a far more affordable price… while driving significantly greater value to our producer group and tying in a gatekeeper group that enables us to access a significant acquisition channel that is not available to our competition.
NEXT- Once we establish a certain level of scale, relative to digital coaching (our initial core transaction) we’ll start to own more of the in-person transactions. Phasing consumers into H/W coaching, at an amazingly low barrier of entry, and phasing them out of digital H/W coaching, when they need more assistance than our digital platform can offer.
We’ll create a paradigm shift in the current commercial fitness landscape, driving utility to the consumer and moving the perpetually stagnate metrics of % of population who belongs to a gym and % of gym member who buy PT. No longer will 12.5% of the population belong to a gym, with 10% of those people buying PT… but much higher percentages accessing the aforementioned offerings, less frequently, offset by the education, process and accountability to process provided by digital coaching.
FUTURE- We will further expand the stakeholders, on the Ladder platform, to create a fully holistic action care team that truly derives preventive medicine. Ladder will eventually be a platform, monitored by the physician, that facilitates both digital and in-person interactions between the consumer/patient and all applicable service providers; who can holistically work with said consumer/patient to proactively treat/prevent future chronic and/or preventable health issues.
There is no telling what type of advances will take place relative to the specific assets that can help put people in the best possible position to succeed (relative to their health and wellness,) but there is no question that the most valuable cog in the puzzle will always be the delivery mechanism, the vehicle… and that is what we will create.
We’re starting with an MVP, in digital coaching, that will allow us to scale usage and that alone is a very powerful, much needed and tremendously economically viable transaction… but the real value is in creating the vehicle that can continuously connect people with the practitioners and product that will allow them to find happiness through health and wellness.