Rick co-founded MINDBODY, Inc in his garage in 2001, and today serves as their CEO and principal visionary. MINDBODY is leveraging technology to improve the wellness of people around the world. Their cloud based software powers over 60,000 wellness businesses in over 130 countries, and connects over 300,000 wellness practitioners with millions of people who are seeking to live healthier, happier lives.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Rick is passionate about helping people realize their dreams and live healthy, happy and productive lives. As CEO & Co-Founder, he emphasizes that the core values are the guiding light for MINDBODY. He spends a lot of time ensuring that they keep their values fresh. They also make sure that they evolve by understanding what is going on in the industry they serve.

A day in the life of Rick involves direct leadership either with individuals or different teams in the company. They always need to be reminded on their ‘why’ so communication is essential.

Their company doubles in size every year but the biggest hurdle for them to grow even more is their ability to deliver exceptional customer experience to every new customer that adapts their platform.

Their transition to mobile was huge and the hardest part of all was having a giant set of database so they need to reengineer most of their codes so they could surface their functionality to any device. This is where majority of their energy was spent in when they transitioned over and was a hefty undertaking as they were servicing about 10k clients at this time.

To allow them to customize and make changes, they are continuously studying and interacting with customers. This includes AB testing, usability studies and prototyping. Just like other great changes, they have experienced those which were triggered by a crisis. For them, there were two – that their was not a lot to their usability to be desired and, as far as going from waterfall to agile, was that the release built time were getting longer and longer due to the additional functionalities that they were adding.

In dealing with culture change, they got connected with Jared Spool and they brought him into the organization for engagement and learning methodologies such as observational research which aligned perfectly with design thinking. Simultaneously, they sent themselves to school to learn how to be scrum masters and product owners to understand the different stakeholders in an agile scrum. This was adopted from CEO down to team members.