Wellness Reimagined: Vishal Amin On 5 Things That Should Be Done To Improve and Reform The Health & Wellness Industry
An Interview With Maria Angelova
I want to see better integration across the sector. Healthcare and wellness are fragmented both as separate markets, and also within themselves.
In our world of constant change, and with life moving faster than ever, topics such as mental health, self-care, and prevention have become popular buzzwords. People are looking to live healthier lives, and there is superb care out there that is being offered. At the same time, there are misconceptions about the meaning of self-care and exercise. Many opt for quick solutions — surgery, pills — to dull the problem without adequately addressing the underlying cause. Meanwhile, many parts of the industry are unregulated and oversaturated. People with years of training are competing with people with weekend training. Many providers are overworked, overwhelmed, and underpaid. The general public is not educated about asking the right questions when selecting a wellness provider. In the face of all this, what can be done to correct the status quo? In this interview series, we are seeking to hear from a variety of leaders in the health and wellness industries who agree that the wellness industry is in need of an overhaul and offer suggestions about what can be done moving forward. As a part of this series, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Vishal Amin.
Vishal Amin’s career began in healthcare. His decades of experience in this space, and years advising numerous businesses at management consultants McKinsey and ?What If!, led him to found industry disruptor Until. The business helps wellness professionals reimagine the way they work in a model that puts community at its heart.
Thank you so much for doing this interview. It is an honor. Our readers would love to learn more about you and your personal background. Can you please share your personal backstory? What has brought you to this point in your life?
I like to say that I have always been a Londoner, but having grown up in Surrey, I do not think everyone will agree with me! I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I cut my business teeth working behind the counter of my parents’ corner shop and selling sweets to the other kids in school. I was the kid with the playground side-hustle until the teachers caught on!
After leaving school I studied Management Science at the London School of Economics — a degree which set me up nicely for a job in corporate, but not the healthcare start-up I ended up working in.
As I progressed in the company I relocated to New York for several years (with a short stint in India), before eventually leading the finance function before a strategic exit. When I came back to the UK, I moved into a management consulting role at McKinsey & Company.
In 2012 I met Alex Pellew at ?What If! Innovation, designing new business ideas and products for FTSE 100 companies, where we instantly became friends. We nurtured the idea of a health and wellness business which would build on my knowledge of the healthcare sector and Alex’s talent for sports marketing.
Looking back, it was these formative years of my career that sowed the seeds for Until, the wellness optimisation facilities business we set up in 2021. I had seen first hand how other countries operated their health and wellness sectors from both a practitioner and client perspective, recognizing the benefits of a preventative model of healthcare — encouraging people to work on their health before they reached a point where they required treatment.
What is your “why” behind the work that you do? What fuels you?
I founded Until, a health and wellness optimisation business, alongside fellow entrepreneur Alex. We started the business after learning, through hundreds of hours of conversations with practitioners in the sector, that due to the limiting cost of accessing space for their client sessions, many were struggling to earn a living. It was shameful.
Unable to run their businesses independently, many practitioners instead found themselves having to work from established gyms, which meant giving up high percentages of their earnings. Alex and I set out to right the balance with Until. By disrupting the industry’s established ways of working, we have created a brand-new concept in the marketplace, a destination where wellness professionals can work for themselves, but not by themselves, among like-minded peers.
As for what fuels me, our business expansion ambitions are integral to a sector which champions goal achievement. Even the name Until stems from the word found at the crux of all health, wellness and performance goals; you keep working until you beat your personal best, or you seek help for an injury until you are pain-free. Until is there to underwrite those promises and enable practitioners and their clients to reach their goals.
What are some of the most interesting or exciting new projects you are working on now?
I am really looking forward to opening our third wellness optimisation facility in Marylebone, London, which is due to open its doors in September 2023. We start internal building work this week and is our first step into the world of dentistry and medicine! As for the long term, we have ambitions to expand with a further 40 facilities in over five cities within four years, which is extremely exciting!
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I definitely get on board with learning from your mistakes! Understanding the feedback you receive is essential if you are seeking to grow your business.
The Until journey has been a real learning process throughout. We are building an industry disruptor model and working to build an industry-defining global opportunity and a key challenge with such a unique business is that there is no manual or previous examples you can build a base on — there has been a lot of learning on the job and managing expectations!
At first we set out to build a business with a strong work life balance at its core — we’re a wellness business so this felt important! But, that being said, we are all passionate about what we do and the Until brand we are crafting, so there have been a lot of 3am nights and working on weekends has at times become the norm, for us as founders and for our core staff team. We needed to learn to pivot and accept that things might not always be as we planned.
It’s about angling for that purpose, ensuring we set the tone of the business right, and going out to make sure to deliver it. You need a driven team who share your obsession in your mission and what you are trying to achieve. Sacrifices need to be made, work needs to take the forefront position and your personal life has to be on the backburner — but do not ice it out completely! You will be better for it in the long run if you make some time for your close ones.
Another story — as an entrepreneur patience is often a weakness — launching our first club we couldn’t wait to show people what we were building — and truth is we didn’t. We ended up showing prospective members around a building site. Whilst we thought it was cool to don hard hats and high vis jackets and walk through building materials in low light it probably didn’t show our product off in the best light. One prospective member even got stuck to the floor! We learnt — first impressions count and far better to be patient and give our members a proper experience.
OK, thank you for all of that. Let’s now shift to the core focus of our interview. From where you stand, why are you passionate about the topic of Reimagining The Health and Wellness industries? Can you explain what you mean with a story or an example?
This issue is my bread and butter — it is what I have built my career and my business on (as well as being an avid health and wellness enthusiast myself). To tell a story on why I am so passionate about the topic of Reimagining The Health and Wellness industries, I would look back to my time starting a consulting firm.
It was around then where I felt comfortable enough financially to invest in a personal trainer and ready to commit to a program. The training sessions lead to massages on a weekly basis, physiotherapist appointments and nutrition plans. At a later stage I also began to engage in therapy.
It was here where I think it all clicked, this holistic health experience, feeling the effectiveness of each specialism and understanding how interrelated they all are. I did not see why they were not all available under the same roof and it became my obsession to plug this gap in the market.
When I talk about Reimagining the Wellness industry, I am talking about reimagining it from the perspective of the providers as well as from the perspective of the recipients and patients. Can you share a few reasons why the status quo is not working for both providers and patients?
Until is reimagining the established ways of working with health and wellness professionals. Unlike many competitors, Until champions practitioners’ independent businesses and allows them to work on their own terms instead of taxing them on their talents. Our team saw injustice in the industry, and set out to right the balance, creating an environment where independent health and wellness professionals are free to work together on their own terms.
Shaped by professionals, for professionals, we are proud to have built a business dedicated to supporting practitioners, where we never take a percentage of their earnings and we celebrate their value as much as we can.
In terms of patients, I would say simply that the lack of knowledge can sometimes be a huge barrier to people seeking health and wellness services. Most consumers just do not know what they need and where to go for the best advice — Google is often unhelpful! With 230 professionals across 30+ different training, treatment and therapeutic disciplines, we have everyone from osteopaths, podiatrists and massage therapists, psychotherapists, counsellors and nutritionists, all under one roof. We will soon add dentistry to our offering as well. Having all these experts in one place saves patients time, pain, and energy — they can get the coordinated and aligned support to help their holistic health and wellness needs all in one place. It’s a no brainer!
Why do you think there is a good opportunity now to improve and reform the health and wellness industry?
At Until, we are trying to change deep-seated industry perspectives with our industry-disrupting model. Health and wellness optimisation practitioners have had the same view of the world for decades and it took the Covid-19 pandemic to change that.
The pandemic was a catalyst for change in our society. An example that springs to mind is the differences we see today in workplaces with the rise of co-working and working from home. In the health and wellness sector, personal trainers and other experts went from secure jobs to not earning any income to then becoming highly valued again for the part they played in keeping us healthy and well during a global health crisis.
I genuinely believe that without the pandemic, practitioners might not have even considered Until’s business model. We were all thrown into this environment where all the rules had to be ripped up. This was the perfect environment for us to build our business, and the success is clear. We’ve opened two successful sites in London’s Liverpool Street and Soho within a year, we have a third site due to open in September, and we have ambitious international expansion plans. The time to improve and reform the health and wellness industry is absolutely now!
Can you please share your “5 Things That Should Be Done To Improve and Reform The Health & Wellness Industry”? Please share an example or story for each if you can.
I would probably place the lack of a clearly-defined fulfilling career trajectory in wellness at number one. Unlike healthcare, wellness careers are less defined and progression as well as earning potential is more complicated. By building out better accreditation programs, and creating communities that enable specialisation — wellness can be equally fulfilling to a career in traditional healthcare. This includes making sure the value is shared more equally across the practitioner and the infrastructure providers too — I am sure that this shift would allow the industry to retain and attract stronger talent.
Next up at number two, I want to see better integration across the sector. Healthcare and wellness are fragmented both as separate markets, and also within themselves.
The wellness sector requires you to attend multiple different facilities and environments to get the services you need — and they typically deliver conflicting advice as they lack integration on service delivery. Post-pandemic it has been far clearer that traditional wellness services have a critical role to play in the health of their consumers — by integrating physical, physiological and mental health. Collaboration across the industry will drive exciting developments and better outcomes for engaging consumers.
For number three, I am putting improved accessibility and discovery. The industry is too fragmented and complicated — consumers find wellness services expensive and confusing to buy. The industry needs to simplify positioning and provide an easy way for consumers to access services in a single location.
Also, the accreditation bodies do not enforce quality effectively across the industry, meaning many consumers are reliant on reviews or recommendations. In the world of personalisation, this is becoming increasingly difficult. We need to provide an ‘access point’ that helps them cut through the inconsistent quality and identify new disciplines which can support their wellness journey.
My penultimate reform is the UK to undergo a shift to prevention. In the UK — the NHS (as brilliant as it is) has developed a mindset of fixing things when they go wrong. The crucial issue here is that we can never get them back to 100% when that happens. If we were to shift to a preventative and proactive mindset, this should stop things going wrong in the first place and hopefully reduce the burden of an ageing population.
The bar around prevention is also set too low — for example, 10k steps and five portions of fruit and veg a day is not helpful as it sets an inadequate standard. It is critical that as a population we begin to introduce strength training and therapy of some sort into the lives of everyone to enable them to live happier and healthier lives.
Last but not least, I want to see a better use of our wellness data. The development of mobile technology has meant we now collect so much more personal wellness data, which can range from as simple as our step count all the way to our HRV and glucose monitoring. This data can give both wellness and healthcare practitioners a far better understanding of their client and what they may need — and more importantly allow them to prescribe a more personalised response. It is critical we enhance our traditional measures of blood pressure and blood tests, as an example, with these additional data and insights.
From the recipient and patient side of the industry, can you please share a few ways that patients and recipients should reimagine what the wellness and healthcare industry should provide?
As I touched on in the previous question, people in Britain do not have a preventative mindset when it comes to healthcare — in other words, we wait until something is broken until we fix it. We must have a more proactive approach to health and wellness and treat problems before they start.
During my time in the US during the earlier stages of my career, I saw a completely different mindset and approach to healthcare. The US health insurance industry has a much stronger commercial agenda to keep their clients healthier, and avoid costly and expensive admissions to hospitals. They are so much more sophisticated in their healthcare delivery, working to stop patients and recipients from going to the emergency room in the first place. If you have a family history of heart disease for example, there will be a whole structured programme in place to support you. The same thing applies if perhaps you are obese, or have diabetes. There’s much more investment in fixing it before it goes wrong. It is not a perfect system, but there are certainly some practical points to learn from.
But in the UK, as a consumer you traditionally went to see someone to solve your problem. Often, you are not sure exactly what the problem is, you just know that you are in pain and know the general area of where the pain is coming from. This might lead to you seeing multiple health professionals, investing a lot of your own time, and healthcare resources, before you receive the correct diagnosis and treatment. Sometimes you might even receive the wrong aid or advice along the way.
But with what we have created here at Until, you can come to our state-of-the-art wellness optimisation facilities and see an osteopath, a physio and a PT, all under the same roof to diagnose that problem for you. Until have a whole team encompassing all health and wellness aspects who can identify the problem and help you fix it.
What do you think are the biggest roadblocks to reforming the industry? What can be done to address those hurdles?
Firstly, there are structural issues within the health and wellness industry, and because this is so ingrained, I would call it the biggest roadblock to change. Ultimately, we need to make health and wellness careers a much more compelling choice for everyone from doctors and nurses, to physios and PTs. A physio for example, despite being highly specialised, typically won’t earn more than £25k for the first 10 years of their career. There has to be a marked shift towards valuing the expertise of health and wellness practitioners way more.
Another roadblock, which I’ve touched on, is that we need to be much more proactive in terms of our healthcare system. The NHS is a wonderful thing, but the challenges facing it are well documented — an ageing population, a growing obesity problem, cancer on the rise — I could go on. But the NHS only tackles these issues when they arise. We need a model that tackles the issues from the outset and helps people stay healthy and happy for longer — and from an earlier point in life before trouble comes knocking.
I’m very passionate about the topic of proactive versus reactive self-care and healthcare. What do you think can be done to shift the industries towards a proactive healthcare approach? How can we shift the self-care mindset for consumers and providers alike?
I talked about it earlier but the pandemic definitely brought out some positive changes for the wellness industry. Wellness went from something some people focused on to being part of everyone’s radar. So I definitely feel the wheels are in motion in terms of shifting towards a proactive healthcare approach.
Thank you for all that great insight! Let’s start wrapping up. Can you share your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Why does that resonate with you so much?
I definitely live by my mantra, ‘live in the grey’. I am not one to place labels on everything; I think magic in everything actually happens somewhere in the middle. Solving issues and stimulating new ideas comes from learning to push away from the typical edges and challenge the norms.
My mantra applies to Until where we are forming a business between the black and white of the current health and wellness space, through the creation of a fresh category within the grey — in between the two colours. I am certain that success is to be found here — especially when it’s so often overlooked.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we both tag them :-)
You know, I would actually love to have breakfast with Adam Neumann. Despite being a super provocative figure, he built up WeWork, an almost £50 billion business, from scratch with limited previous experience. There are definitely common points between our businesses, which people often highlight to us, so it would be interesting to chat about them and draw further parallels.
Chatting about the controversy around his career would only make the conversation interesting and I would be keen to hear his version of events — or perhaps what he would have done differently.
Aside from the professional, I used to have similar length hair to Adam. We could also discuss hair care routines and treatments if the conversation needed a moment of levity!
I appreciate your time and valuable contribution. One last question, how can people reach or follow you?
You can connect with me on Linkedin at https://www.linkedin.com/in/vishamin/?originalSubdomain=uk. Alternatively, you can get in touch through the Until website: https://www.until.co.uk/
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent on this. We wish you only continued success.
About The Interviewer: Maria Angelova, MBA is a disruptor, author, motivational speaker, body-mind expert, Pilates teacher and founder and CEO of Rebellious Intl. As a disruptor, Maria is on a mission to change the face of the wellness industry by shifting the self-care mindset for consumers and providers alike. As a mind-body coach, Maria’s superpower is alignment which helps clients create a strong body and a calm mind so they can live a life of freedom, happiness and fulfillment. Prior to founding Rebellious Intl, Maria was a Finance Director and a professional with 17+ years of progressive corporate experience in the Telecommunications, Finance, and Insurance industries. Born in Bulgaria, Maria moved to the United States in 1992. She graduated summa cum laude from both Georgia State University (MBA, Finance) and the University of Georgia (BBA, Finance). Maria’s favorite job is being a mom. Maria enjoys learning, coaching, creating authentic connections, working out, Latin dancing, traveling, and spending time with her tribe. To contact Maria, email her at angelova@rebellious-intl.com. To schedule a free consultation, click here.
