To be honest, there are days I really relate to Mrs Clinton who must wake up every day and ask herself that very question. How the hell did this happen and how did I get here? Starting a brand new business in the midst of a global catastrophe - you go my boy. Anyway, back to the story so here goes
The story of Health Architects actually started back in 1994, with 4 idealistic, ambitious and motivated young people who were convinced that exercise could change the world. The 4 dreamers were yours truly, Kevin and Tony Payne and Georgia Mandilas. We had all met at University and Georgia, Tony and I had done the same undergrad course. Kevin had a B.Sc (Med) under the belt. I had just returned from the USA where had studied further and worked in elite athlete conditioning and had a spell in professional American football. We worked from Kevin and Tony’s garage in Randburg, we dreamed of a world where everyone understood the power of exercise to be well and healthy, and we created our first brand - Pulse Wellness and because we young and brave, we opened a cardiac rehab facility in a hospital and 3 health club based facilities and there were many, many high fives all round.
Tough lesson number 1 , and the first of many, was that very few people believed us. The medical profession was hostile, employers thought it was “cute” and medical schemes were disinterested and so the band of 4 looked for other things to do. Kevin and Tony Payne began their journey to owning the dominant fitness equipment business in Southern Africa with the Technogym brand, Georgia Mandilas began her journey to being Dr Georgia Torres, and I joined Health and Racquet Club Group, and what a journey that was.
Chapter 2 - The Gym era and a (yes another) wake up call
It was the fitness boom and much fun was had and by 1999, my daughter Jordan was born, I was the senior regional GM, responsible for 70% of the 86 clubs and had just been appointed to the executive management team and was headed to Cape Town and then.... speaking of BOOOM, LeisureNet is liquidated an John Robbie was calling me on my cell phone every other day because there was no one else for him to call. My good friend Rory Sweetlove was right when he said, “Boet nothing good happens when you called to a meeting on a Sunday”
To be fair a bunch of really cool stuff happened too and I worked with amazing and talented people who worked hard. We opened 17 clubs a year for goodness sake I must recount an incident I will never forget. Travelling to CT to try and make sense of liquidation, I sat next to a very prominent judge who I will not name. He saw my H&RC uniform and asked me how it was going. He then gave me a piece of invaluable advice. He said I will learn more about human nature and business over the next 6 months then ever can be taught in business school. He was absolutely correct. I saw friends and colleagues turn on each other and and rules go out the window. I also learned how lean a business can run if it has to. I learned about value creation and the value of trust. I learned to take nothing at face value and that sometimes bad things happen to good people.
Tough lesson number 2 (this is pretty personal and messy). Money and success are not the same thing, security only happens when you surrender your ego, safety only happens when you anchor a value system into the ground and being taught and learning are not at all related because I only learned those lessons I was taught back then very recently.
Chapter 3 - Virgin Active and losing everything important.
Virgin Active purchased H&RC and I did get to join the Executive Team as Group Exec for Fitness which was everything I had trained for and worked for, and we did move to Cape Town. We turned the business profitable in 6 months. I traveled a bunch, see different markets and clubs, attend loads of conferences and established a great network of health club professionals around the world, and got to work for the very best manager I have ever had. Her name was Jennifer Turgiss, she was the global head of product and had that unique blend of steel fist and velvet glove that is very rare.
Tough lesson number 3 - Arrogance and grandiosity can kill you, and they almost did. I am going to try and encapsulate this very dark time in my life as quickly as possible. In 2004 I was married to an incredibly talented woman, was financially independent and had equity in Virgin Active SA. By 2005 Virgin Active had left me, (I will always be grateful to Chris Rolfe and Ian Burrows who treated me with grace and respect that I had not earned and certainly did not deserve.) and so had my wife. I was in rehab, and had got very close to beating my dad to a early grave. I was entitled, selfish, self-centred, self serving and self-important, and it cost me a career, a marriage, my material wealth and much more importantly, my dignity and my self respect.
Chapter 3 - New(ish) beginnings and more lessons
It was off to the Sports Science Institute of South Africa next for me. I found my love of product development there. Under the tutelage of Morne du Plessis, I got to build new products and services and find new ways to present these to customers. It was my first pure sales and marketing role as well and i really enjoyed it. Prof Tim Noakes and the team at the Exercise Science & Sports Medicine faculty at UCT were in the same building and it was just incredible to be able to access the research and new thinking almost daily.
The lure of the Health Club business was too great however and I accepted the role of Head - Product Development at Planet Fitness. The least said about this, the better.
Tough lesson number 4 - You cant do good business with bad people. And as they say in the classics “nuff said”
Chapter 4 - The intrepid 4 re-unite
In 2012 I was driving to OT Tambo airport and was trying to call Kevin Payne on my cell phone in the car. We had not spoken for a few years and these are the funny things you cant explain. My phone rings and its Kevin. The outcome was that I joined PentaSystems. There I found Georgia Torres who was finalising her Phd and just like that the 4 idealistic dreamers were back together again.
We found a market much more open to the principle of prevention and the role of lifestyle modification as a real mitigator of costs and a way to get to grips with issues plaguing corporate SA, high absenteeism, presenteeism and poor productivity. We started a new brand, Activate Health. When Kevin dug up our original Pulse Wellness material we found that the 2 were almost identical.
Over the next 8 years we landed some really high profile corporate clients (Barclays, SAB, Hollard, Anglo American, Liberty to name a few. These programmes were based around a onsite fitness centre, using the world class Technogym brand and technology. We ultimately opened around 40 of these. It makes really good reading in a Powerpoint presentation. We were very busy and very distracted by many many things.
In reality however, our goal of changing the world using the power of physical activity was as far off as ever. We had found a different set of naysayers, a wellness model of Health days, EAP platforms, posters and flyers, and pretty reports. We found managed care programmes, owned by schemes that used drugs and case management as the intervention. We found HR teams that were happy to tick the box and tell their boards about the exciting health day and the “biggest loser” challenge. We were still outsiders.
I remember the day it all changed very well. Kevin Payne ripped all of the fluff away in a meeting and challenged us to prove that what we were doing had any value at all. It was a sobering meeting. The challenge was simple - no more random facility based programmes unless we had real value proposition.
The outcome was the only clinical trial we know of in an SA employer where we measured the impact on absenteeism, presenteeism and associated productivity of exercise based interventions in a cohort of apparently healthy, at risk and people with existing chronic disease. Designed and executed by Dr Georgia Torres it was a real watershed for us. The programme was recognised by Technnogym as a global best practice and Dr Torres and her team published this study in the academic litetrature.
Incredibly this line in the sand, was not the start of the beginning but rather the start of the end, and that may sound weird so please dont hear what I am not saying .
Chapter 5 - Becoming an activist and no turning back
Having proved the efficacy of exercise based intervention programmes, Dr Torres and I were tasked with opening a dedicated medical wellness centre at the Campus in Bryanston, Johannesburg. As usual, Kevin and Tony Payne backed this to the hilt with equipment, start up capital and energy. The facility was everything we believed we needed, including a team of allied health professionals and trainers, world class technology, and situated in the heart of the most affluent suburb in Southern Africa.
In no time we had a medical scheme create a bundle code for the 12 week programmes, we signed satellite agreements with very prominent physiotherapists in Johannesburg and sports medicine physicians in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town. We had facilities in a national commercial health club chain. We personally met with over 140 GP’s and medical specialists, dietitians and nutritionists with universal support. We were able to test and update our interventions and had amazing success stories.
To top it all, I met the man who started it all for me with his book, The Complete Heart Recovery Guide, all those years ago. Dr Torres and I were introduced to Dr Neil Gordon, CEO and founder of the worlds premier health coaching business INTERVENT based in the USA, and world renowned scientist in the field of preventative healthcare by Prof Demitri Constantinou, Director of the Centre for Exercise Science and Sports Medicine at Wits University. He liked what we were doing around exercise and we liked what he had built around health coaching and behavior change and so a partnership was born.
There was something missing however, and that was the ability to scale. We tried everything and I mean everything. We made the fatal mistake of getting emotionally connected to things that dont work. Kevin and Tony remained resolute, we spent a bunch of their money, without finding the answer. We came within a hairs breath of the contracts and clients we needed to break through but only to have them slip away at the very last hurdle.
One day I started reading a book that Kevin gave me - and everything changed. I am cautious with the word epiphany but in this case I am crystal clear. The book was the Innovators Prescription written by Clayton M Christenson, and there on pg 483 was a hand drawn diagramme, that described a model for the disruption of Healthcare. I really recommend this book to all of my colleagues in this space.
The model gave me an immediate sense of clarity and also the inevitable path ahead. We had to become a provider of solutions for customers and not a provider of services. Below was the introduction from the document I wrote that would form the basis of Health Architects.
“The key to the disruption model suggested by Clayton Christensen in his book, The Innovators Prescription, is the change in the remuneration systems. This has proven to be the most difficult part of the incumbent model to get past due to its legal and legislative power. This leaves the disruption paradigm short of the business model leg. It is however starting to move and if we can push that along by assisting customers to both understand the model and the process and then to build integrated multi-layer solutions that include Fee For Value (FFV) or Fee For Membership ("FFM") type products and services”
In order to be a solution provider, I needed to head out on my own and be prepared to back myself, the experience gained and the many failures endured. Looking at the Christenson model, I realised that I had worked in traditional healthcare, cardiac rehab, health and fitness and corporate wellness. I knew how facilities work in both the commercial, clinical and corporate environments. I knew how technology can be utilised to create a single patient view. I knew how services could be developed to tap into new alternative funding models like Fee for Value (“FFV”) and Fee for Membership (“FFM”).
And just like that Health Architects was born.
Dr Torres remains a key part of the mix, as our scientific advisory team. We consult to Employers, Clinicians and Heath and Fitness operators and help them build integrated, technology enabled, prevention focused solutions for a highly challenging market place. We can bring world class services from vendors like INTERVENT, technology and equipment from Technogym and help our customers maximise their value.
I remain as convinced that physical activity and good lifestyle choices can change the world, I have had success and failures, learned some very tough lessons along the way but I am excited about the next chapter...
Steve Murray 24/03/2020
