Mohammed Iqbal - Sweatworks Fueling Digital Evolutions

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Eric, so happy to be on.

Yeah, this is uh I've been looking forward to this like I was telling you for a while. It's like over the last year or so, Sweatworks as a company, your name in particular just keeps coming up. And uh, you know, I I think it's a great opportunity to kind of educate our audience on your background, what you guys do specifically, your vision of the current status of the industry and where it's going. Uh, it's gonna be really valuable conversations. So um I really appreciate you coming on. So let's start with that, man. Mo, give us a little bit of your background. How'd you get to be the founder and CEO of Sweatworks, and then we'll get into the dirty details of the company.

Yeah, no, but would love that, Eric. Thank you so much for having me on. Uh, I'm a subscriber, love listening to every new episode. Uh so I think I know the right approach here. But let me go back. I mean, I am an immigrant born in Dubai, uh, came to the States when I was 13, actually, sorry, 11 in 1991. And, you know, back then Dubai wasn't the Dubai that a lot of people I think know and aspire to visit today. It was still very much of a multicultural city, but we didn't have all of the um trinkets that that we have now, right? It wasn't this this this playground. So coming from there to here, where I led, you know, a relatively simple life. I was active, I played soccer, you know, what they call football there uh most of the world as um A pretty you know uh clean uh for for a child. And then coming to New Jersey going down the supermarket and looking at coca pebbles and sugared up cereals, um it was just a unique you know, culture shock, really. But I dove in I dove into the American way and I gobbled up literally everything, and not only did like my health my weight explode, I think my quality of life, even though I came into the best country in the world, actually went down because I wasn't feeling healthy. So believe it or not, when I was about 13, I said something's gotta change. I didn't like the way I looked, I didn't like the way I felt, and I kind of went on my own fitness journey at that time. I picked up a book called Optimism Sports Nutrition, which kind of laid the groundwork for the way I think about macro and micro nutrients. I got into running, I I picked up some sports, but anyways, that's what got me started. And I was able to understand the impact that I think lifestyle and and really your environment played on your health and wellness, and then the benefits it had on things like school and family and just being able to enjoy life. And through college, when a lot of folks said you're gonna gain that freshman 15, it might be freshman 20 now, but right with the food plan and all that, and then going into work, I was able to still maintain my fitness and in a lot of cases improve my fitness. Um I worked at a large Fortune 500 company, spent about a decade there doing some really cool stuff, working with some awesome teams. In fact, I was with a team that built uh the first iPhone back in 2005. And that's really where I gained a lot of my design and consumer-oriented experience. But I wanted to dive into something that I really loved. Um, at my MBA in 09, I did my final dissertation on the application of data into wellness. In other words, how can we use data and mobile devices that were becoming more ubiquitous at the time to help people on their wellness journey? Because I truly felt that if we can help people move for 10 minutes more a day, drink an extra cup of water more a day, just have them understand that it's gonna add yours to your life and you're gonna enjoy those yours even better, people would do it. But at the time, a lot of fitness I felt like had a very expensive price of entry. And that price of entry might have been like if you want to do an Iron Man, you have to invest in an expensive bike to join a pool. If you want to go to Soul Cycle, you've got to, you know, dress a certain way, wear a certain type of sports bra, get these shoes that clip in, right? Or even just your local goals gym. You were intimidated from when you walked in the door. Even signing up was a bit of an intimidate an intimidating process. And then you got to the gym and you're like, I don't know what to do. So what do you end up doing? You go on the travel for 20 minutes, you do that for about three months, you fall off, and you start again in the new year. I really felt like technology was coming to a point, data was coming to a point, and consumer mindsets was coming to a point that we could bring those three things together um to really help people start and stick to a wellness journey. And with it's with that idea that I felt like, let me start an agency that's focused on that particular vertical and go all in.

Beautiful, man. It's uh it's interesting. I'm reflecting on your story too. My wife is an immigrant, she came from Brazil, she came over when she was about 21, and she always talks about how specifically her thing was milk because she drank a lot of milk. And you know, where she grew up, it was like someone dropped off the milk, you know, everywhere.

And you could know the farm it came from, right?

Yes, you knew exactly where it was coming from. And she came over here and she started drinking, you know, milk off the she's like, Oh my god, it's so cheap here, right? It's really inexpensive. You can buy a whole gallon and uh you know, within uh six months she had gained about 10, 15 pounds and um realized her health wasn't you know, not the same. She wasn't sleeping well, all those things skin, her skin was like breaking out for the first time of her life, and then she made some changes, eliminated things, and she quickly got back to health. But it is a shock, I think, for a lot of immigrants when they come over to you know a nation that is so robust and so there's food everywhere, right? There's just food everywhere. Um, but little of it is healthy. And uh so it's yeah, it's it's interesting, man. I'm so you have this journey, right? And now you're at Sweatworks as the founder. What what give us the impetus of the company? Um you know, who are some of the founding partners that you started working with? Yeah, give us give us that part of the story.

Yeah, so initially I was at this crosswords. I wanted to start an agency that's really focused on improving people's lives. In fact, our our vision today is wellness for all. Um, and that is really lowering the bar, lowering the price of entry to start your wellness journey, which I truly feel like is one of the easiest things we could do and has national implications. Um and I had two options. I can either go ahead and create a wellness brand on our own and build like this B2C product, or I can create tools and services to help existing brands that already had a captured audience succeed, right? So really maybe focus on how can they gain more people to enter the brand and then keep them there. So recruitment and then retention through engagement. Some of our founding brands that I'm really proud of uh include brands like Spartan Race. When I first got engaged with Jodison and Spartan, there were maybe two races in, maybe 500 people ran the event. And he said, Well, why don't you come up to my compound? Literally, it's a compound up in Pittsfield, Vermont, and run this thing with me. Like just, you know, and I'm like, I don't know. Like I was in New York, I'm like crawling through barbed wire in the cold in Vermont, jumping over fire, climbing roads. I I don't know, Joe. It's like just come do it. And I did it, and I understood what he's trying to do with that, right? And really get people out of the cities, um, really the parallels of when you overcome an obstacle on the course, you're overcoming an obstacle in life, and by the end, you literally can do anything you want. And there's something special there. So that was one of our first brands that we worked with that no one no one heard about. Another early one that we worked with was um SoulCycle, right? When they only had a few studios to now be having international exposure. Um, and then we did a really interesting project for Nike, which helped us. And what we did for them is really is created a utility that um used event photos, recognized how elastic the consumer was. And essentially, if you were someone that wore a pair of ASICs and you were in the right kind of you know, zip code or area and you were a runner, and uh we would you would get a free pair of Nikes. I mean, it was it was one of their lowest cost, most effective marketing programs, but we built technology that used logo and facial recognition, overlays that would census data to identify the right kind of consumer for those shoes. But yeah, those were some of our founding brands.

Wow. Uh so you guys do a lot. So I guess explain to me if I'm a brand, right? Like you mentioned some big ones and you gave a little bit of detail there on the facial recognition. That's amazing. Facial recognition and and what you've done with with that brand. But uh who's a typical brand nowadays? Um, and today's it's January 2022. Uh, what's a typical brand that would approach you or you would approach them? And then what what are the goals and objectives that they hope for when they come to you? And then how do you help them kind of um encapsulate that, envision it, plan it, and execute it?

Yeah, great question. I mean, our skills, skill sets and capabilities have really evolved over the last decade. Initially, when we started, we were heavily focused on more back-end data analytics and front-end mobile, you know, app experiences, because that was something that you know brands needed at the time. We still do that, and that still is a core competence of what we do. But since then, we've expanded into hardware. So we've we do you know hundreds of thousands of connected fitness consoles um that have all the integrations, and we do the um Android layer app, the streaming, the music integration, all the connected pieces that go with it and tie it with hardware equipment as well. So we do that. Um and then we do all the engineering and design. Um, but when a brand engages us, it could be for a couple of things. Sometimes a newer brand might come to us and say, look, um, we're two founders and we have a vision, we have an idea for what we want to do, but we need a company to help us strategically define the market and then execute the end-to-end solution. And that's where we'll do everything from you know ideation to UXUID uh to design, whether it's hardware, software, and see, and even sometimes post-launch support. In other areas, brands might come to us for a very specific reason because they know that, for instance, we spent the last four years heavily focused on vision-based AI, you know, as an example. And they might say, look, you you spent many, many years ideating and doing RD on Vision AI. We need to implement an AI-based application. We're gonna engage SWERTWORKS to help us do that. Um, what's helped us is I think our years of experience in the field, knowing the right players, right? And also our scale. We're approaching 200 employees now, and it's really hard to find companies with that size, scale, and depth of experience um in the wellness industry today.

And how do you guys work with people as far as like is this something where you guys come in as um you know, paid contractors to become partners in the company, do you become investors, or where, or is it very across the board? What do you guys how do you guys typically engage it's it's really all of the above.

So I think in the most basic sense, we are consultants and we are work for hire. So you might come to us and it'll be very simple time and materials and say, okay, you need X number of resources, it's gonna take three months, here's what it costs. Um, and then there are other cases where we want to be a lot more strategic and intentional about the product because our years are so close to the ground, we kind of have, you know, the the the the front row experience into this highly fast-paced, uh innovative uh space in wellness. And we'll say, you know what, we we want to be more than just work for hire. We want to be investors, we want to play a bigger part maybe in an advisory capacity, we want to have a longer-term relationship. So I think it's it's it's all of the above.

Interesting. So I guess this you're a really good person to ask this question, but if you compare the industry in the beginning of 2019 to what it is now, so January 2019 to January 2022, right? I mean, I would imagine uh, well, I I don't have to imagine I know what you guys do is in high demand, right? A lot of brands are going digital. Um they're forced to go digital, or they felt that they're forced to go digital, which has just become this eruption of you know online fitness and and tech fitness technologies and all kinds of things. It's been a very exciting two years when you look at it. Um hard for a lot of people within the industry, but very exciting um from an advancement standpoint. Um how has your life and business changed since January 2019 moving to now?

Yeah, look, I mean, I think I first want to recognize that a lot of brands uh have been through some really tough times that no one ever expected to go through, no one was was prepared for. But at the same time, it's important for us to recognize too that as a society, more people are in tune with their own health and well-being than ever before. They understand how germs can be transmitted. Uh, people understand you know the value in okay, if I wear a mask, don't wear a mask, at least understand the risk. No matter where you fall on that side of the spectrum, you know that okay, this does something for me, and then you can make your own decision from there. So that's given us a unique opportunity. Now, to your point, Eric, um, before the pandemic, a lot of what we did in terms of the digital engagement, the in-club engagement, the experiences that we created were almost seen like tangential to the core competency of a brand, right? So they were like, okay, we need to have a digital presence. Um, yeah, we need to have a mobile app, but we also have the website. You can always come in and sign up for a class then too. That's also okay. Um, it it wasn't a must-have. So what's changed in the last you know 24 months, and I think it's continuing to accelerate, it has not decelered decelerated, is the consumer. Ultimately, to me, the consumer has evolved significantly, where they have one, adapted and been a lot more comfortable with streaming services. And also we've seen some significant unlocks that I didn't expect to see for five or ten years. And what I mean by that is, you know, we started this talking around the availability or scarcity of good food and the how accessible that is. Think about the unlock that happened over the pandemic, where now you know you might not live close to a Trader Joe's or a Whole Foods or your local organic market. You can get food delivered, whether it's through Uber or some other delivery application or the local market, will come to you and deliver healthy, fresh groceries to you, even though you might not live close. And that's the big unlock. Another big unlock I think that's happened is this barriers of technology and walls that were artificially built up have been torn down. And I'm even thinking about healthcare. If you think about how you interface with your doctor before telemedicine, very few people engage in telemedicine before 2019. And now, usually it's the first call that you have, and it's a you know, don't come in. Let's do a consult over your phone, and I can maybe text to you, which wasn't even a thing that most doctors did. My doctor wouldn't text me before with some, you know, HIPAA limitation, and now all that's been been opened. So I think the unlocks that happened in consumer behavior, also in regulation, where it's really made it easier for us to get closer with the consumer and meet them where they're at, has really been an instrumental in how we can now engage them in improving their own wellness journeys.

Yeah, you know what there there's a lot of ways. I mean, I uh was talking to Shane at Dark Horse about, you know, um Dark Horse Rolling, which is a you know a very specific brand and a niche of digital rolling. Rowing or online rowing, the availability of different technologies and how to build an app, right? It used to be, well, you just build an app, right? Like 10 years ago, it's like, well, you know, it's branded, they can access some content, um, maybe schedule some stuff, and it's very simple. Now the experiences that are available through mobile and digital are vast. I mean, you can talk about obviously the audio experience, the connected experience, the uh live streaming experience, the audio only experience. Like, what what areas do you think if you're looking at the mobile and digital experience and fitness, what are some of the most exciting things moving forward that people may not see coming?

Yeah, I mean, I could work, you know, if we could stick with rowing, we work in so many different modalities. But if we were to stick with rowing, one of the brands we've been working with over the last couple of years is City Row. And and City Row is one that has both studios that are corporate owned and franchised, and also have a digital product that's available just in the phone. They also have a connected product that's available with a rower as well. And but but to your point, Eric, it's you know, I think ultimately what people want are one truly you know um fulfilling experiences that takes them on a journey. I this idea of you just doing a rowing class with no metrics, with um no engagement, no two-way communication, I don't think people want that anymore, right? Because there's so many options that afford you much more engagement than that. The second one I think is community. I think you know, for the longest time, again, uh people have had to pivot very quickly and just put up content and platforms online, but there wasn't any kind of community relevance because it was meant to be a stopgap solution, but now we know that digital is here to stay. In-person is also here to stay, and I'll and I'll come back to that in a minute. But I think creating the community is is really important. You have to do that. Having metrics that are that provide context into how you're doing right now and helping take you somewhere else is important. Um, but for 2022, the application that we see most asked about and the ones that we're working the most on is AI. And for us, AI really means two things on a very macro level. One is truly a hyper-personalized recommendation. So again, sticking with rowing, it might be you should be taking a 45-minute endurance row today. Tomorrow we're gonna give you a 20-minute recovery row. But personalizing it based off where you are. We can even bring in your sleep data. So we're gonna know based off of Whoop or your Apple Watch how you slept and maybe adjust, you know, what your um prescribed workout should be for today. The second one is vision. And we've really leveraged vision in a couple of capacities. One could just be for I've never been on a rower before again, sticking with the same theme. Though I've never been on a rower before, put my phone to the side and show me how I should be rowing correctly because you don't have the coach sitting with you. Um, and the other one is really for form correction within class as well. So for us, we've really seen um you know AI being uh a pretty large theme in terms of technology for 2022.

Yeah, I mean artificial intelligence, I think is uh it's talked about a lot, but it's not it's understood by very few, right? And when you I mean there's a I think there's a lot of difference to me between machine learning and artificial intelligence and just having a couple algorithms that run things in the back. When you talk about AI, what what is expand on it? Like how do you how do you think of it? People age are different, and the date on your license may not represent your inner biological age at all. If you're looking for ways to extend your health plan and slow down the aging process, keep the health and longevity run in your blood. That's why Insight Tracker provides you a first-point plan to boost your metabolism, reduce stress, improved squeeze, and optimize your health for the long haul. Created by weakness scientists and aging genetics and biometrics. Insight tracker analyzes your blood, DNA, and finished tracking data to identify where you're optimized more importantly, where you're not. You'll get a daily active plan with personalized guidance on the right exercise, nutrition and supplementation for your body. Add interage 2.0 to any plan for definitive calculation of your true biological age to see how you're aging from the inside out. I was proud to find out I'm a few years younger than I thought I was. For a limited time, you can get 20% off the entire Insight Tracker store. Just go to insight tracker.com forward slash future to check it out, learn more, and get your own.com forward slash future. On to the show.

Yeah, no, I think I'm one, I'm really glad that you brought that up. To me, an AI implementation is really taken up in three phases. The first one is building the business logic, and that's the fundamental um thing that you have to work on before you can really dev into AI. So once you build the business logic and you build the purpose, the next piece of it, as you mentioned, is machine learning. Now that you've you're collecting the data and you now have the business logic there, how can you train the machine to know what happens with that data? And and through machine learning, we do something called segmentation and we break you into different cohorts. And once you once we've broken you up into different cohorts, we know, okay, you are a male in your 40s who's very fit and is experienced in a specific modality. We can now use AI to then help drive the true recommendations. But that entire journey takes about a year and a half. This is not something that you say, hey, we're gonna do AI in Q2, and you just come to that conclusion and come to that product. It takes at least a year and a half to really walk through that journey.

Fascinating. Um I want to go back to something you said because I think it's it's a lot of people are chasing it and it's a it's not easy to do. So community. When you talk about community, um it's always traditionally been, I think CrossFit really, we talked about this before recording, CrossFit really identified community as a fundamental factor for how to build business, right? It was crazy, you know, being an early adopter of it and seeing how people just flocked. It was like it was like church, right? It still is to a lot of people, it's like it's like church. Um but a lot of people say, well, you can't do digital community, right? It's it has to be in person. People have to see and touch each other and and you know, be around each other and and you can't do it digitally. But yet I've seen a lot of online communities absolutely boom over the last two years. So I guess two parts of this question are what do you think makes what are the key factors that makes digital community successful? And do you think it's gonna be as successful as we kind of hopefully fingers crossed come out of this pandemic? Um, do you think digital community is gonna be as successful as it was in the last two years?

Yeah, so I think going back to CrossFit um and and what made that successful, the same things that made a CrossFit community successful. And where I lived in New Jersey for many years, there were several boxes, and you can identify them wearing the I have several shirts, identifying the shirts proudly. Why was that successful? It one, it provided a community to support and encourage each other. And it is very much like church too, because that community would hang out on the weekends and your kids would play together, you'd bring your kids to the box, you'd hang out together. Um so it provided people that you can relate to. It gave you accountability because if you didn't show up for that 6 a.m. wad, you'd get a text and saying, Hey, Mo, like what happened? You weren't there. A lot of the things that made CrossFit successful with the local boxes, I think, in spite of CrossFit as a corporation, a lot of that effort really felt on the local boxes and the local box owners and coaches. That is very much true today, even in the digital world. Um, if I were to take a simple community leaderboard on digital that a lot of people are on is Peloton. Peloton has a very simple leaderboard where you can just give a simple high five on and has it is driven by performance. Um, I don't think that that is the way of the future. I don't think that that is what people think about when they think about community. That is a form of engagement. Community needs to be a lot richer. And I think the story of how community in the digital sense for wellness is being curated, that story is still being written. Um, I do think though that there is a place for localization and combining in-person success groups with an online community. And I truly think that in order to really be successful, you need a combination of both, right? And I think that's what brands are trying to figure out right now. So what we're working on, um there's a brand that we're working on called called Grit Epic. They're a boutique out of uh New York. Um and their entire digital product is focused, it starts with community. It starts with pairing you up with groups of people that are in the same stage or their fitness journey as you are. So you're not dealing with like an elite athlete or you know, someone who you don't even aspire to be alike, but you're dealing with people that you can relate to that's maybe going through some of the things that that you're going through. They're also providing you a platform to engage directly and and collaborate before class. So now this they're creating a platform where you have a waiting room before class. Um so you can join 10 minutes early and you're not just hearing the instructor talk, but you could literally see people and you can say, hey, I'd love to come and chat with you, or it's my first time here. Who are the other first timers and have dialogue? And then there's a place after class for community too. And that that's just an evolution that we we're seeing happen. And I think that this digital community, which tries to combine more physical attributes and what made like your cross-it boxes successful and create this closer community, is happening now, and technology has evolved to a place where it's practical.

That's fascinating. Do you when you look um I'm gonna kind of put this through the perspective of an avatar? Let's say I'm a uh I'm an independent gym owner. Maybe I have one or two locations, right? Uh and I'm looking at technology, I'm uh looking at the Pelotons and all the applications and how the landscape has changed. And very much, you know, I we can argue it, but uh my belief is that you know, the gym used to be the focal point of one's fitness. That's kind of uh figuratively exploded, right? Fitness is everywhere, like the client, the consumer is now the hub, they have something at home, they have a gym to go to, all that. But when you look at it as like an independent gym owner, what what technology do you think they should be looking at to harness in order to just kind of stay in the game from a bigger perspective?

I would go back to seeing, you know, who who really owns the Rails in a lot of this. And to me, it's the larger technology companies. If you are a small gym owner with one or two locations in your local market and you've got consumers who have now invested in at home, especially during the pandemic, right? They had to go do something and they might have a Peloton, use that to your advantage. Make that a part of your programming. Make sure that you have a way for trainers or even just gym staff to know that they have an at-home product. How do you do that? Like I mentioned earlier, use the rail. So one of the Rails that we lean on heavily is Apple Health and Google Health, right? Uh a lot of apps like Peloton, you know, uh Tonal or any of the at-home products integrate with Apple Health and Google Health. It's not that hard for a gym to create their own product, create their own app that simply imports that data in. And now imagine, Eric, if you walked into your local gym and they said, Hey, Eric, you crushed that 45-minute ride with Olivia Mato on Peloton. Do you want to go do a recovery session today, or is this do you want to focus on strength today, right? Focus on the things that you cannot do at home. That, you know, it's not that hard to do and it's not that expensive to do. But that shift of thinking and that perspective, yes, it is gonna require um, I think, a change in management. You you can't do new things with by doing things the same way how you've always done it. I've always believed that if you want to do new things, you've got to change your perspective and do things you haven't done before to get to new places. So it might require retraining a staff, it is gonna require some investment in knowing your consumer better, but I think it's going to pay dividends because you can't, you know, that Peloton instructor isn't going to reach out to you, Eric, and say, hey, how's your day today? You know, um, how are you feeling? You know, and they can't celebrate with you in the winds and they can't support you there when you need someone to lean on. And and right now, that's what gyms provide. And I think they're a critical component in wellness.

I agree. I totally agree. So uh, you know, taking a maybe a step back out of sweatworks, but if you want to use, you know, any of your projects as an example, when you uh that's one of my favorite questions, but when you look at the the technology landscape from a whole, right? When you take a big step back and you look at how technology is affecting fitness, health, and wellness, um, you know, we could talk about the big ones. You know, you mentioned wearable technology and data, uh, you know, there's the VR, AR, um, you know, metaverse seems to be, the fitness metaverse seems to be coming up more and more. Um, you know, if you look at all the technology coming into play now, uh, what has you most excited? What are you keeping an eye on? Where where are you placing your virtual money bets on uh on where this whole thing's going?

Yeah, look, when I started SWERTWorks in 2012, it was really about accessibility and ensuring that, you know, um as many people as possible had a way to access or or uh start their fitness journey. And I think by and large, we have a lot of work to do there in terms of the quality of access, but access is there. You've got free programs online, you've got free content on YouTube, it's there. Um we're certainly making the quality a lot more accessible and bringing that more downstream. What excites me the most is in the next five to 10 years, and in the next 10 years this way it works, is really the potential of our industry to disrupt healthcare. And and ultimately, if you look at you know, the healthcare system in our country today, we have the best healthcare system in the world, the best facilities, the best doctors, and we we don't necessarily want to change that. But at the same time, 40% of our country are either uninsured or underinsured. And add to that that the system is really being the best at fixing you when you're broken, when there's something wrong. But today, we're where we're heading towards right now is disrupting that. I think is one focus, a big focus on prevention, um, by focusing on healthier habits, by educating the consumer. They don't need to go use the best healthcare system in the world because they're going to be fine. They're gonna live longer and live healthier lives. Um, and I think we also have the support now for the first time. You mentioned, you know, Web 3.0 um being a key player here. Guess what? All of the major tech players and non-tech players are looking into wellness today. Whereas before it might have been a niche market, right? You are Jim Gore, you are Jim Ratt. I mean, you don't hear terms like that anymore, but you probably you know recall those terms, right? Oh, why do you work out and you box every day? No one says that anymore. Why do you run every day? Right? People encourage that and and they're probably engaging in their own form of wellness. So I think we crossed that threshold. And the next one really is how do we reach more people and ultimately disrupt healthcare to make healthcare more accessible um to more people?

Yeah, that's a big task.

It is a big task, but but I think that the the bigger disruption is really going to happen again by by folks that own the rails. You look at Apple right now and the data that Apple is collecting from the Apple Watch um is is is huge. You look at what Google now has with the Apple of Fitbit, they're collecting the same data matrix as well. And finally, Amazon with Amazon Halo and all the things that things that they're doing. You could get your prescription today from Amazon. Amazon just launched Amazon Care, which is their own healthcare service in in very specific markets. So to me, those three big players are really going to help, and they're all racing towards the same goal in healthcare disruption, but they're really creating the infrastructure for us, right? They're laying the groundwork for us. But then it's up to, I think, innovators and disruptors, like the folks that listen to your podcast, to really now come up with the solution and build the bridges between technology and healthcare. And I think that's really where we're in the crux of today.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, and when I look at all that, I see all the tech-enabled opportunities for that. And I agree. I think, you know, the uh future of healthcare has to change, and I think it is. It's it's got to. It's it just has to. Uh when I look at what needs to happen, and I think I try to boil it down, it really comes down to uh accountability and people taking responsibility for their own health. I mean, I I don't want to get political on this podcast, and you don't have to touch this, it'll be my words, not yours. But you know, if a lot of people just looked at vaccinations in the last two years, and you know, I vaccinated everybody just for the record. Um but it it was like, okay, I just get this shot and I don't have to be responsible for my health anymore, right? I don't have to be responsible for improving my health, my immune system, all of these things. And I think the accountability and empowering people to do it. Um, and now I think people are really starting to feel like, wow, you know, geez, if I just lost 10 to 20 pounds, my life improves drastically, right? My health markers improve drastically. Like that's that's fundamental if you just lose weight. Everything improves, right? Um, so when you look at that as kind of when you boil down the problems, people aren't really accountable to them. They're not holding themselves accountable. Um, they're not taking responsibility enough yet in their own health. How do you see technology kind of coming in and tasking that?

I think this is small nudges, right? I think you've got a cohort of folks like you and I that are truly invested in our health and wellness, right? And it's a life that we lead is part of our lifestyle. But with the everyone else, one, there's data coming out right now. I mean, it's going back to vaccinations that that show that if you are vaccinated and boosted and you're in great shape, your vaccines are 50% more effective, right? Just by that. Additional data is coming out showing that people who have a high level of fitness are much more um prepared to fight off diseases like COVID or just even your regular diseases. So there's a lot to be said. As that comes out, it's a matter of now people understanding that the gap from where you are sitting today and losing the 10 pounds, right, is not impossible. And I think that's a mental issue that we have to fix. Um, the way to address that, Eric, I really feel like is mindfulness. You have to get your mind right before you can get your physical body right. And we're really focused on that. So a big category for us is really focused on mental uh well-being, especially now that people have been holed up in their homes. Um, it's so easy for us to say, hey, go and do this 20-minute or 45-minute workout digitally or at the gym, but you've got to be in the right state of mind to get there. And if you're not in the right state of mind before you're entering on a weight loss journey, then you're probably gonna fall off and you're not gonna stick to it. So, what we're working on is ensuring that you know how do we get people's minds right? I'll even add to that is one of the biggest, most debilitating things to your nervous system is stress and anxiety. And if you ask people uh what has been an output of COVID that has been negative, they'll say, I feel more anxious and I don't know why, I just feel more anxious and I feel more stressed, and and they can't really name a reason why. Well, that's a part of wellness too. So I think as a broader wellness community, how do we nudge people towards those behavioral habits is to say, go out for a 10-minute walk and just move a little bit. Um, forget the actual performance side of fitness, but just focus on movement and motion, right? Um, do these 10 moves every morning when you wake up as an example. Something that I do um every morning is I have a morning ritual, right? But I literally, it's just like a minute long, but I have a morning ritual to myself. Uh, I take some deep breaths in, I do some movement, I drink some water, and then I also have an evening ritual as well before I go to bed to kind of prime my body, get my body set for sleep because I know the importance of good sleep. Um, but if we can just expand that to the broader community and say, we're asking for three minutes of your day. Can you start there and give us that? I think those little things can go a really long way.

Yeah. Yeah, I love uh one of my favorite topics is hearing people's morning routines. Um I think it's just it's so critical. So maybe walk us through. What are those three minutes exactly?

Yeah, well, it's really, it's really one minute. It's just me of, you know, one getting up. I don't check the phone, I don't start with my phone, I use my watch, my alarm, uh, tracks my sleep, and then I just take some deep breaths for a minute, have a timer that goes off. I take some deep breaths, I drink a big cup of water uh in the morning, and then I I go right downstairs, I'll read the paper for a couple of minutes to catch up on the news, and then I go right to the gym and I work out. So I typically take about 90 minutes uh on the workout. That includes, you know, um prehab, post hab, strength, some cardio. Um Um, but I take that to myself with no distractions.

Yeah.

And that's that's key. And then I kick off my day.

Yeah, it's it's really critical. Uh and I find that most people who are healthy, you're right, you know, uh to your point, is they do have rituals within their life. And those little rituals are built up habits, and those habits in the long run make a huge difference, maybe not this month or next month, but over a span of years. And that's uh, you know, habit and behavior change is really the fundamental if you're a fitness and health professional, it's really what you do. It is a business of behavior change.

Someone asked me the other day, you know, you know, how important are your workouts? And I have to say, like over the last five, six years, I might have missed, you know, six workouts. Um, I I work out um every day. It sets my mind and my body right for what's there. And I think it's made me a more effective, you know, husband, father, entrepreneur, leader. It's impacted me in so many positive ways that I wouldn't change it for the world.

Yeah, and I would imagine too, I mean, there's I I know a lot of entrepreneurs. I was uh listening to one speak last night here locally in Whitefish, the uh founder or CEO of NeuroID, which is a really interesting company outside of fitness. But um, you know, I find a lot of times that founders, CEOs, executives, as a business grows, one of the first things they do is they let their health and fitness go. Um, it just becomes not they don't have the time for it. So Yeah, I don't understand that. Yeah. I don't get it either. But I as like I guess as you've grown, you know, in multiple roles through multiple businesses, and you guys are, I would imagine you guys are very busy right now.

It's what we're we are, we are really busy, but we we encourage that, right? So for instance, my calendar is is public to my team and I put my workout in there. And sometimes I might have a 6 a.m. call with my team in London or my team in China. I move my workout up, so it's not the first thing that I do, but everyone can see that. So we hold ourselves accountable and and we actually encourage you to take time for yourself to give you some self-care. So if it is a walk that you're going, put it on your calendar so no one bothers you. And then we use tools like Strava, who's one of the brands that we work with, um, and also great, you know, fitness product for community, and we built our own little Strava group on there. All the things that we do to really focus on that is for this year for the first time, we're offering our employees what's called like um self-care days, three self-care days a year, which is the entire company shuts down, and we are all focused on some sort of self-care activity, whether it's for 10 minutes for 10 hours, doesn't matter, but no working, focus on self-care, because I think you've got to one celebrate and make sure it's not like, you know, I'm sure you can you can relate to this, but when I was working um in my former life, I'd work out over lunch and rush back, and I never want to tell people that I like ran to the gym. It was almost like you were ashamed to work out, right? Or if you had therapy as an example, right? It was like you were ashamed to have to tell people that you have a therapist. I mean, we've got to knock those walls down. And I think by and large, we've certainly done that. Um, but no, I think again, encouraging that, celebrating that, and doing it together is is is key to success.

So when when you look at uh let's talk about Mo as an entrepreneur right now. How do you uh and I apologize for some background noise, um when you how do you balance? Like I know a lot of entrepreneurs, right? Hard-hitting, fast burning entrepreneurs who work weekends, right? Who uh will take any call whenever it comes. How do you set boundaries?

Yeah, I mean one, um, Men's Health interviewed me about this for the November issue. I'll send you a link later, Eric. You can take a look at that. But I walk through my whole my whole schedule. So to me, there's really two big boundaries, right? The first is carving a time for family. That's the first one. Because if not, in this at-home world, what always on, it's so easy just to get lost, connected, and forget about everything. So the first one is carving a time for family, the second one is carving a time for myself. So the myself part is taking care of with my morning rituals, my morning routine, the hour and a half to two hours that are just focused on me. And the family part is really, you know, for me, it's from like 6:30 to about 9:30 at night where I'm cooking dinner, eating dinner, playing with my kids, spending time with my wife, putting my kids to bed, doing all of those things. Um, and then on the weekends, it's really being intentional. I think you have to be intentional about your behavior. So be intentional about work and not just say I can work whenever I want. But if you are intentional about saying, this is when you're working, this is what you have to do, you're gonna find yourself being a lot more effective. So the weekends for me, I know that I'm not gonna lie to myself and say that I can't focus on any kind of work. So I do block out the two hours or three hours on a Saturday and Sunday where I'm gonna engage in follow-ups and preparing for the week or reflecting what happened last week. But I I carved that out, I'm specific about it, and the rest of the time is spent um on weekend time.

That's great, man. Um, I I know we're kind of butting up on time here, but I uh this is one of my favorite questions asked too, because it's in the spirit of camaraderie and and collaboration within the industry. But as a as a company, as an entrepreneur, what what are one or two of the biggest needs you have right now, Mo?

I think definitely talent and people, right? Like we're we are scaling up to just over 200 and continuing to grow. Um, I think finding talent and then creating a culture where we could develop people. We just finished our 2020 kickoff last week in Montevideo, and our theme was really on focusing on um investing in our people. And what I mean by that is one, you know, making this the place where you want to come to work and making sure that we are attractive enough where if you're in fitness and you're in wellness and you're you're an engineer, you're a USUI designer, you're a product owner, um, that you want to come work here, that we're an exciting place. And so if you are one of them, please reach out to me, would love to chat with you. But once you are here, then really focusing on your career development. I mean, knowing that just like fitness, your career is a journey. And I think even though we've grown over the last 10 years, what we haven't focused on enough is on career development and our own team. So we'll hire someone. We might not we might not do a great job unless they take initiative on say, hey, what's next for you? You know, what could we do for you? Uh and less of a what can you do for us. So to me, those have been the two hardest things um over the last couple of years has really been getting the right people and then once you get them in, grooming them for success.

Yeah, yeah, man. It seems to be a very common theme in the last two years. I mean, uh, I guess for lack of better term, human capital, right? Of of maintaining, grabbing and maintaining good talent is is certainly been challenging, you know, uh, you know, from a personal perspective. My wife's a VP of a very large company and talent is constant. I mean, people are leaving and going after just a few months of time. And, you know, because there there's always seems to be something greener on that. It's just a, you know, I think it's a screen.

But they're going somewhere. I mean, everyone talks about the great resignation and what's happening right now, but those people are are going somewhere else. So, you know, we would love to be the place where people land.

Yeah, awesome, man. Well, Mo, this has been really insightful. Uh, I really appreciate it. And uh I would love to get you back on um you maybe towards the end of the year, beginning of next year, and just kind of get an update and you know, uh your insights and technology are invaluable for people. So really appreciate it, man. If uh people want to get a hold of you, Mo, where where do you send them online or where would you just generally like people to go online?

I'm I I'm usually the most active on LinkedIn. I think it's the only social network that I'm actually really active on. And you can go to our website as well, um, squatrobes.com.

Awesome. Well, once again, Mo, thank you so much. Uh great story, great company. Uh, you know, obviously you're a very well sought out uh, you know, solution for for a lot of businesses in the industry right now. So I'm great that uh I'm grateful that we get to carve out some time and chat about it a little bit. So yeah, ladies and gentlemen, Mohammed Iqbal.

Thank you, Rick. This has been awesome.

Uh hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Minutes. If you did, I'm gonna ask you to do three simple things. It takes under five minutes and it goes such a long way. We really appreciate it. Number one, please subscribe to our show wherever you listen to it. iTunes, Spotify, Catbox, whatever it may be. Number two, please leave us a favorable review. Number three, share. Put it on social media, talk about it to your friends, send it in a text message, whatever it may be. Please share this episode because I put a lot of work into and want to make sure that many people are getting value out of it as lastly. If you'd like to learn more, get in touch with me. Go to the feature of finites.co. You can subscribe to our newsletter there, or you can typically get in touch with me. That's I'd love to hear from our listeners. So thank you so much. This is their countdown, and that's the feature of finites.