Meet The Disruptors: Dr Mike Wasilisin of MoveU On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Being disruptive is currently considered a noble cause to start a business and a great way to attract others to work for that mission. Personally, I feel that anyone with passion and pursuit should give it a shot if the cause to be disruptive at least does no harm. If a company or industry is meant to withstand the test of time, then it shall remain standing.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing, Dr. Mike Wasilisin.
Founder and CEO of MoveU, Dr. Mike Wasilisin, is best recognized as the crazy doctor who is here to help “Fix. Yo Shit.” Before becoming a viral sensation and head of MoveU, he spent most of his early career attempting to understand the gap in information people seemed to miss when focusing on bettering their health via fitness. After working for countless years as a Chiropractor, Mike soon realized the gap lay within typical jargon used within the fitness world, which hindered the way mobility training was presented. He soon ditched his practice and took the leap to launch his own fitness content platform, MoveU, with the intent to properly educate and explain exercises in precise detail to those from all walks of life seeking enhanced mobility. Now, Dr. Mike Wasilisin is on a mission to empower every human being to take care of their own body and fix their own pain through proper body movement and a champion mindset.
The program’s rapid success has quickly garnered the attention of thousands including the likes of Trever Noah and Gwenith Paltrow to name a few. Most recently, MoveU & Dr. Mike were voted as one of the Top Innovators in Fitness for Men’s Health. Check out this recent Men’s Health interview (also appears in print) here.
Wasilisin’s approach is the next wave of mobility training, something he calls mindful movement, since it focuses on the intricacies of basic stretches. And he’s already garnered 15,000 paying subscribers, and growing, on the MoveU site. They provide fun, simple exercises and education videos so that everyone can feel empowered, motivated and not get discouraged by programs that do not cater to the root cause of their issues.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
In the year 2000, I delivered pizzas as a part-time job, and every Friday night, I would deliver pizza to a local chiropractor. He had a really nice house, truck and always had beautiful women over his house. One day I got fired from my pizza job and walked into his office, and he hired me. He took me under his wing for six years and taught me the chiropractic profession. At the same time, I completed my bachelor’s degree in psychology from Kent State University while earning my prerequisites to be a sports psychologist, which I later changed to prerequisites to become a chiropractor. 2006 I got accepted into Palmer chiropractic College, went all in, and moved and committed to earning my doctorate degree in chiropractic. In 2009 I graduated and took an opportunity to work at any sports chiropractic clinic that was associated with the Titleist Performance Institute in Oceanside, California. I was the captain of my golf team in chiropractic school and fell in love with the biomechanics of the golf swing and Rotary sports and enjoyed working with athletes’ injuries.
I started building my practice in San Diego, and in 2012 I had a great opportunity to become an instructor of kinesiology at California State University to instruct pre-physical therapy students on manual therapy techniques. This was one of the most memorable days of my life because I discovered one of my deepest loves in life, educating. I taught for a couple of years while continuing to build my chiropractic practice.
Eventually, I lost motivation to build my private practice as the lifestyle of being a chiropractor didn’t suit me. I sought more freedom in my life, and to make a bigger impact as I’ve always known I would. During the timeframe, I started other businesses that never took off, including massage devices, an online dating company, and even a beef jerky company where we ate all of the profits.
I was frustrated with my profession and the healthcare industry as a whole, as I believe both industries were so focused on symptom relief that nobody was helping people address the root cause of their issues. I thought the solution was to leave the industry, but I was wrong.
In 2015 I started creating consistent social media videos on Instagram, and the videos took off. A few months later, there was a viral hit of one of my favorite stretches. It was a stretch that I’ve actually never seen anybody else teach. After that, I was certain that the path to impacting the masses was through social media and online education. I committed to going all in and being fully digital in one year. Surprisingly, everything happened nearly perfectly, and I was able to sell my chiropractic practice and incorporate a company called moveU, empowering people to take control of their bodies and fix their pain through mental and physical exercises.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
It’s difficult for me to say that my work is disruptive because I didn’t set out to be disruptive. I set out to create freedom in my own life and teach the world what I believe was the truth about their bodies and the possibility of overcoming pain and limitations without the need for experts in surgeries and drugs.
I think what made my initial success was a video dynamic that had not been previously seen on social media. In a fun, entertaining, and simple way, I taught people how to properly move their bodies and had one of my prior students demonstrate the movements.
I think what makes it hard for us “professionals” to stick their necks out is the fear that they’ll be excised from their community. We’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in education and tend to get protective over the degree and the licensure because it took so long to achieve it that one doesn’t necessarily want to take risks to lose it, or two not be respecting the community. I feel like I became institutionalized to act a certain way in being a professional, and that didn’t represent who I am as a person. Fortunately, the feedback I received from our growing audience motivated me to continue being more myself and put myself out there in wild and entertaining ways that may not be acceptable to the profession.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you started? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
What comes to mind was my launch plans for MoveU. The initial business plan was to create a single online program to be a start to finish guide to help people overcome back pain. At the time, we had maybe a hundred thousand followers on Instagram and an email list of a couple of thousand people. The goal was to create an email campaign to enroll people in this online program. I have my sights set high. I told the team that I expected we would generate about $100,000 in revenue from this campaign. The emails all went out, and we proceeded to generate 800 bucks.
I learned that the brand wasn’t established or credible enough to enroll people in the program just from an email or a website. I had to get in front of the people who needed me and share my story, and share their possibilities with them, along with the plan to their success.
The first webinar proceeded to enroll zero people. I was terrified and remembered drinking tequila before the webinar started to calm down for the seven people who were attending. The second webinar enrolled exactly one person, and by my reaction, you would have thought that I had just won the lottery for $100 million. I ran two webinars per week for a year and a half, and after hundreds if not thousands of people enrolled in the program, we switched the business model to being purely driven from website enrollments and took a break from live webinars.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
I have 3 mentors; a Business Mentor, an Entrepreneur mentor, and a Lifestyle mentor.
My business mentor’s name is Jim Mcloughlin. I sublet an office from him in 2013, and he began helping me understand business. He’s helped me better my skills in operations, taxes, HR, legal, payroll, budgeting, hiring, firing, and whatever else has come up over the years.
My entrepreneur mentor is Shayne, and his wife was a patient of mine, and then he became a patient as well. He sensed I had big goals, took me under his wing, and helped me formulate my plan to create an exit MoveU. He set the bar for big business growth in the tech industry and has given me a vision of the size and impact MoveU can be and has connected me with key growth resources.
My lifestyle mentor is Dave George. He’s obsessed with hunting ruffed grouse (an upland bird) in the Wisconsin forest in the fall. When October hits, you better believe you’ll find him walking trails near his cabin nearly every day of the week for months. He hunts birds through December or January and then back to work. Now that he sold the company he co-founded 15 years ago, I’m going to incriminate him to his past employees and team… Dave was not working in October, November, or December! Whatever he did or said to you was all smoke-in-mirrors! That’s why I love Davey, his passions and hobbies are prioritized in his calendar annually, and there ain’t no exceptions!
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
Being disruptive is currently considered a noble cause to start a business and a great way to attract others to work for that mission. Personally, I feel that anyone with passion and pursuit should give it a shot if the cause to be disruptive at least does no harm. If a company or industry is meant to withstand the test of time, then it shall remain standing.
I’ve always had a great admiration for the disruptors and the entrepreneurs and inventors that have stood out over the last couple hundred years. They seem to be the ones that push so hard against the grain that a noticeable societal change occurs. I personally don’t see any downside to attempting to disrupt. However, that could be the inner rebel in me that doesn’t like the rules.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
Products, technology, and more entertainment!
Physical Products: Until now, MoveU has taught people how to fix their bodies and take control of their pain mostly through bodyweight or gym exercises. We have within us already everything we need to live a strong and pain-free life. However, physical products can speed up progress, create buzz, and simplify complexity. So, you’ll be seeing at least one product launched in 2022
Technology: Aside from social media videos, we offer online programs; Total body, lower back, core, hip, pelvic floor, shoulder, and neck. I plan to integrate these videos into the technology we created to deliver results faster than online programs. I believe there will be a day where your phone will scan your posture and take into account your age, sex, demographics, symptoms, etc, and precisely drop you into video trainings exactly for you, in the perfect order for you — ultimately helping you recover at lightning speed. And I’m not talking about symptom relief. Usually, symptom relief is lightning speed. I’m talking about permanently making changes to your body in the fastest amount of time possible.
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
I do. In 2015 I was on a liveaboard spearfishing trip in the Sea of Cortez, hunting for tuna and grouper. Spearfishing consists of the equivalent of an underwater bow and arrow and the ability for the spearo to hold his breath and kick deep down into the ocean on a breath of air, with no oxygen tanks. Many people ask how long I can hold my breath, and my best time is 5minutes and 30 seconds.
So I was on the spearfishing trip diving and struggled with my career. You see, when I left my chiropractic practice for trips, not only would I have to pay for the trip, but I would lose money from patients that I would not see because I was gone and still had to pay my rent and overhead costs. Then, you come back from the trip, and things are slow because people lose their routines when you’re gone. It was like a triple-sided sword.
My best friend claims he gave me the book, yet I cannot fully give him credit because I don’t recall where I got it from, yet in my hands, on the trip, I had a book called Endurance — Shackleton’s incredible voyage. The book is a true story of an explorer in 1912 to set out to be the first to traverse the entire continent of Antarctica on foot. His mission went incredibly wrong before they even hit land, and he, plus his crew of 29 people, survived for 2 1/2 years in Antarctica living on the ice, sailing in dinghies through some of the most treacherous seas in the world, and scaling over mountains never been done before to return back to their departure point 2 1/2 years later. The story is incredibly well-documented and my favorite adventure book I’ve ever read.
After the trip, things changed. I gained confidence in my own ability to lead my team and myself to new levels in my career. From that book, MoveU was born.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
From the book Mastery by Robert Greene, “You want to learn as many skills as possible, following the direction that circumstances lead you, but only if they are related to your deepest interests. You value the process of self-discovery and enjoy making things of the highest quality. You avoid the trap of following one set career path. You are not sure where all of this will lead, but you were taking full advantage of the openness of information. You see what type of work suits you and avoid what doesn’t at all costs. You move by trial and error. This is your 20s.”
I would’ve paid $1 million to be able to read and embrace this quote in my early 20s or late teens. I was trained to think that what I’m supposed to do after high school is go to college and get a degree and then pick the job I’m going to stay in for the next 40 years of my life. So there was a lot of unnecessary stress early on and poor decisions resulting from me jumping the gun on career decisions. This quote would’ve slowed things down. It would’ve made my 20s more of a game of accumulating different skills rather than sticking with one set career path.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
Over the past 20 years, I’ve worked with over 15,000 patients one-on-one. I have worked with tens of thousands of people online and entertained and educated millions. Along this path, there’s one thing that I’m certain of enough. If every person on this planet understood the mechanics of their body, the number of surgeries, disabilities, opioid addictions, and people living their life limited in pain would be reduced to a fraction of a percent of what it is now. And I believe that I have the charisma and personality to spread this idea and how to do it.
How can our readers follow you online?
You can find me @moveu on Instagram and www.moveu.com. We’re also MoveU on Facebook.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Thank you so much for the personal opportunity to dive to depths that I have never been. I hope my story can fire others’ career paths and maybe help some people believe in themselves once again.
