Voices in Health and Wellness
Voices in Health and Wellness is a podcast spotlighting the founders, practitioners, and innovators redefining what care looks like today. Hosted by Andrew Greenland, each episode features honest conversations with leaders building purpose-driven wellness brands — from sauna studios and supplements to holistic clinics and digital health. Designed for entrepreneurs, clinic owners, and health professionals, this series cuts through the noise to explore what’s working, what’s changing, and what’s next in the world of wellness.
Voices in Health and Wellness
From Infrared to Impact: The Nimbus Co Story with Neil O’Sullivan
What happens when a corporate exec and an elite athlete team up to build Australia’s first infrared sauna studio — and it grows into a nationwide wellness brand? In this episode, we sit down with Neil O’Sullivan, co-founder and CEO of Nimbus Co, to explore that journey.
From battling personal health challenges to launching a multi-location studio, Neil opens up about what it really takes to scale a wellness brand with purpose. We discuss:
- The rise of preventative wellness and lifestyle therapy
- What it means to build a wellness “movement” vs. a business
- The challenges of bootstrapping and expanding in a competitive market
- How saunas, supplements, and breathwork fit into the future of health
- Why accessibility and authenticity matter more than six-packs and status
Whether you’re a clinic owner, wellness entrepreneur, or just curious about where the health industry is heading, this is a candid, honest, and inspiring conversation.
🎧 Available wherever you get your podcasts.
🔗 Connect with Neil O’Sullivan & Nimbus Co
🌐 Website: www.nimbusco.com.au
📧 Email: neil@nimbusco.com.au
📱 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thenimbusco/
🎥 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thenimbusco
📘 Facebook: Nimbus Co on Facebook
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Okay, so good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to Voices in Health and Wellness. This is the show where we spotlight the innovators reshaping how care is delivered, experienced and sustained. I'm your host, Andrew Greenland, and today I'm really delighted to be joined by Neil O'Sullivan. Neil is the co-founder and CEO of Nimbus Company, a pioneering wellness space based in Sydney that blends infrared sauna, contrast therapy, and community rituals into an unforgettable self-care experience. Nimbus isn't just a studio, it's a movement that's redefining what proactive wellness can look like, especially for modern professionals and health-conscious creatives. Neil, it's great to have you here. Thank you so much for jumping on. Hopefully that description was an adequate representation of your company. Is that fair to say? I
SPEAKER_01:was going to say thank you very much for that very lovely intro. I don't think we've had an intro quite like that before. So thanks. Hearing it as a movement is certainly something that we've been saying more recently, not maybe when we first began because when we started we saw ourselves as just solely an infrared sauna studio. And we were the first in Australia back then, back in 2016. But now it has evolved and morphed into this kind of, it's a way of living in our opinion, in terms of it goes beyond the four walls of our studio. So yeah, I think you nailed it right in the head.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you. So for those that don't know much about your company, Nimbus, just tell us a bit more other than what I mentioned in the introduction, which is a very high level overview, but give us a sense of what the journey might look like for somebody who's coming along to your company. space?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think, look, from a business point right now, how we see ourselves is a stepping stone towards people's own exploration of their health and wellness. And what I mean by there is what we've tried to do with infrared being, I suppose, the pioneers, as you said in our intro, was to create a brand and business that was approachable and preventative, but also lifestyle. And the last piece of all that was to make it accessible to all whilst having a high level of aesthetic and quality and services and practices and experience. But we didn't want it to be about just six packs or bikini bodies. This should be available to all Australians and, you know, all of the world essentially. So that was kind of our mission to do that. And to put it in context, I suppose, if you were to take what yoga is today and what Pilates is today, at some point, I feel like saunas are kind of like the younger brother or sister of those modalities in the sense that they're going through the same trajectory as those practices did maybe 50, 40 years ago. There would have been some point where yoga was looked at as being a bit more maybe too progressive or out there, woo-woo or whatever it may be, Pilates is probably the same. Nowadays, they're just prerequisites in everybody's health and wellness routine. It doesn't matter if you're a guy or a woman or if you're a sports person or you're not, everyone knows that Pilates is just something that you should have in your routine. And I think sauna is pretty much the same. Not, I suppose, evenly distributed, across every single country in the world, though, I will add. So if you take the likes of Finland and the Scandinavian countries, as most of us will know, anecdotally, saunas are integrated into the everyday lives of Finnish people. I even had a contact from the Finnish company Harvey come out to my home in Australia, and it was great to meet them and see what they were doing. And he said to me straight off the bat, your business wouldn't survive in Finland. Now, I know Finnish people have dry sense of humor, but what he was getting at there was that saunas are so integrated into people's homes, people's workplace, that there's no need for you to go elsewhere to go and get the sauna, because whether it's a country home or a cottage, everybody has a sauna. And that's actually a really positive objective to try and get to, not just for Nimbus, but for saunas as a whole. And if you look at humanity today and what we have to go through on a daily basis in terms of toxins and whether it's technology or perfumes or oils that we put on our skin or traveling and being under x-ray and so forth, we come across so many toxins on a given day that it's about 600,000. And our bodies aren't able to cope with that, those heavy metals that we're absorbing. Microplastics is another one that's really a hot topic of late. And saunas are the number one thing you can have to detoxify those heavy metals, those plastics, things like that, that your body just simply can't do by itself. So it does seem a bit highfalutin to think that we would have a sauna in everybody's home and somewhere in the future, but I think it's gonna have to be a prerequisite because as we go more into technology and evolution and things like that, I just think saunas are gonna be part of it for everyone. And whether you get it at home or in the workplace or in your gym, You know, we'd love to see that there is at least one place that every single person on earth can go to have a sauna.
SPEAKER_00:Fantastic. And by sauna, I guess we're talking far infrared, the heating sauna, just for clarity, as opposed to the light, the near infrared.
SPEAKER_01:There's a kind of place for all. We started and were born in infrared. And the reason for that was because my wife and I both had our own health issues. journeys at that point. If you take us back to 2016, we ideated the the business six months before. We opened in August 2016, and we sat around the table at Christmas, you know, thinking about it. But there was a lot that went into it. My wife herself was a budding entrepreneur anyway. She had several businesses before Nimbus. She did healthy snacks to corporates before that became a thing. She had a very early Instagram account, which was called 7 Day Meal Plans. It was all online at the dawn of Instagram. And then I was coming from a corporate background, and advertising was my job with CEO. the American TV Broadcast Network at the same time when I started Nimbus and I have a career in semi-professional soccer. So I played at like elite level sports. Sue had a scientific background in terms of nutrition and health and wellness. And then I had a corporate background and I struggle with, inflammation. I have autoimmune conditions. I also have this condition called MTHFR, which is my body struggles to methylase, which is a genetic defect that you can get from either one or both of your parents or none. So I have a 75% loss of function in that process. So I struggle to break down, absorb vitamin Bs and folic acid specifically. And so my body struggles to detoxify and to absorb. And I When I met Sue, my wife, she said, you know, when I met her, she said, oh, a lot of the symptoms that you have are not really normal. Like I was farting a lot. Sorry, too much information. I'd wake up always feeling lethargic. I struggled to put on weight, which most people tell me to fuck off because most people would love to have that. But it was systemic things that when I even traced back my family genetics, my mom was riddled with arthritis. My granny had thyroid issues. So it's kind of in my DNA. And that's when I went down this whole journey myself and I got tested and did all that. And I came back that I had this thing, MTHFR. So Sue at the time was working in a clinic and they did have an infrared sauna, but it was very much part of a kind of a post recovery thing. Like you had a diagnosis, you do this, for four weeks, once a week, and then that's it. So it was all very clinical. Nobody was doing it preventatively, lifestyle way, accessible, et cetera, et cetera. And the only place really where we'd seen that was in the US, you know, New York, LA, places like that would be the sweat theory, higher dose. They're all kind of world kind of leaders in that sense. And the US is kind of number one in terms of wellness globally. Australia, Great Britain, and Ireland are actually in the top 10. there's a lot of scope for where I'm from Ireland and the UK where you're calling from to have a focus in this space as well. So we kind of, fell on infrared in that sense, in terms of it being a modality that benefited both what Sue and I had. She had Lyme's disease and I was trying to prolong my soccer career and I had all those conditions that I mentioned and infrared was the perfect thing. When we researched it more and more and more, we were like, this is it. We found that thing. And when we came back to Australia, we realized no one's really doing this. And that's how Nimbus was born. Now, if you fast forward to today, It's become very common folds in Australian society now, you know, in terms of any kind of new gyms and so forth. We have all kinds of what I'd call competitors in the sense of we have primary competitors, you know, straight up in front sauna studios. Then we would have secondary competitors, people who are in the wellness industry, but not a sauna studio. So that's your high-end gyms, but even things like massage parlors and hair salons, like we have our own Nimbus machines that we sell. And we've sold them to hair salons. Like who would have thought, you know, you'd have a sauna in the same business as a hair salon. And then tertiary competitors, and it's not even competitors, I say kind of loosely, it's kind of tertiary places where you can go and get a sauna would be, which is the latest trend here is any net new builds, whether it's commercial or residential, all developers now are thinking about not just infrared saunas, but wellness. So if you're building a 50 story block of apartments on the Gold Coast, they're thinking about what we need to put in a wellness level. Why? Well, you're obviously gonna make people healthier, but it's gonna give their product a more attractive look and feel in market. Because if I'm gonna buy a million dollar apartments, here and it's a two bed with no sauna or i buy it for a million dollars down the road and it's the same price like which one are you going to buy we've been speaking with a a very kind of uh infamous penthouse apartment that's coming to bondi beach in the next uh a few months and it's a 30 million dollar penthouse and they want to put in the sauna. And like, that might be the thing that gets a buyer over the line. And now that's only a$20,000 investment. Let's say off it's$30 million asset. Like you're talking tiny, tiny percentiles, but that's the power of these machines. And there are lifetime acid. And I know I kind of flippantly joked about having a big hairy goal about having a sauna in every home in the whole of the world. But now, whether it's an office or building or gyms, it's actually starting to become a little bit more achievable now. You might not have any in your home, let's say, but it could be in the building that you operate out or you're working. So that's the latest thing that we've been working on is working with these developers, working with architects, working with members, clubs to go, okay, you guys want to do this? We know what we're doing in this space. Let us be an extension of your wellness offering as the expert in industry.
SPEAKER_00:Amazing. So it sounds like your personal health journeys were in sort of inspired you to create Nimbus. And is the evolution now what you're talking about in terms of how to get these more available to people wherever they might be in the workplace, office gyms? Is that your next kind of step, your next goal? Yeah, it
SPEAKER_01:is. It's the, how do we go beyond the four walls of the studio? And as I said, like, you know, it is a competitive landscape and like any business, you know, you want to evolve and grow and diversify and COVID taught us that lesson because you couldn't have a digital, well, you still can't have a digital sauna, you know, like maybe at some point in the future, the technology will be there. So we realized as a bricks and mortar service-based industry, we're quite limited in terms of our reach and scalability as a business. So, as we grew, we realized we had this ethos of preventative living, but we were kind of still unsure of like what shape that could take and move across, you know, continents. And so it's like that classic thing when your back is against the wall, you'll ideate and you'll come up with, you know, a thing that could be the thing that makes you, so it's really truly succeed so at that point we decided to launch an e-commerce arm of the business and as i mentioned soon my wife is a nutritionist and we had iterations of products in the studio since they dot like face oils and so forth but we really said let's pause let's look at our brands, look at where we're trying to go, who we're trying to approach, and relaunch a full collection of wellness products, not just a one-off face oil. So last year, we launched Nimbus Wellness, which is our kind of internal moniker for it, and we launched a face oil, a body oil, a hydration supplement called Cloudform, and they're all natural supplements. products that Sue formulates designs and packages here in Australia with recycled materials as well. And if you take even the electrolyte, for example, we wanted to try and disrupt that part of the industry because most people know hydrolytes, you know, now hydrolytes is usually associated with you being sick, hungover, you've got diarrhea. It also doesn't really taste that particularly good. You know, anecdotally, most people say that, and it has sugar in it. So, And as I said, you only take it as a kind of a post reactive kind of thing. Now there's the studies in Australia that say that 80% of Australians are actually dehydrated daily. And that's because of our really active lifestyle here. And of course our weather. So if you're 80, if 80% of the population is dehydrated, how are you going to perform mentally, physically, emotionally? You won't, it's going to impact your sleep, your focus, your performance, all of those things. So again, we kind of Nimbus. eyes and electrolyte powder to go well why can't we make this a preventative daily supplement that you take to kind of ward off the potential to have things like colds or being run down or etc etc and it has vitamin c and magnesium and three types of natural electrolyte and it has stevia so now that's been integrated into kind of more The average Australian, because our classic demographic is 25 to 45 girls with a female skew and a household income over, let's say, 75 to 100,000 plus. Whereas now with our electrolyte, we're getting more guys, sports athletes, you know, ultramarathon runners on top of our kind of standard demographic. So it's kind of pushed us into this. To be honest, it's actually been quite challenging because that's only a year and then three or four months old. And at the same time, we also launched our own sauna range. So we have never sold our own sauna machines up until this last year. And then we now have two indoor saunas and outdoor barrel sauna and an ice bath that we sell. And we have a mid tier sauna blankets that you can, that's a little bit cheaper, you know, that, you know,$699 that you can kind of, you can get, even if you live in an apartment, for example. So if space is a problem, And we even gave our blankets to the Matildas, you know, the Australian women's soccer team during the world cup, you know, and, and recovery on the go kind of as it were. So we kind of now had this full collection that we went to market with whether it's, and like I taught, I talk a lot about the circular economy. That's what we're trying to achieve with Nimbus, where you look, if you live near a studio, fantastic, we hope you can come in and experience it and get better. If you don't, we hope that you can maybe still pick up our face oil or hydration supplement, whether it's online or in LAX airport or whatever retailer we might have, or you might have us actually in your home. If you have space and you have the budget for it, you can actually put an Inbus machine in your home or in your office, as I mentioned earlier. And the final step is we do a wellness of work program where we actually go to businesses. So if they don't have the infrastructure or space to put in a sauna, but are keen about wellness, We go to corporates, not-for-profits, like, you know, all kinds of businesses. It doesn't matter if it's your Fortune 500 company or a zero to nine accountancy firm. We can go to you and do workshops on breath work, on meditation, massage, facials, ice bath tutorials, even mobile saunas. But they're, you know, as you can imagine, a bit more tricky to operationalize. But it's really cool. Like, you know, we're doing that, as I said, across Europe. not-for-profits who are potentially doing something with the fashion week here in sydney and you know which is a great link into models and they're obviously under a lot of pressure during those weeks where they're on their feet and they're tired and their skin has to be good so like a sauna and ice baths is the perfect thing for people to do those things and yeah so our portfolio is diversifying as a business which is good but it feels like if i'm being completely honest I'm back in startup mode again, because if you take a service-based bricks and mortar studio, which is nine years old, you know, we're fairly mature at this point. Now we're an e-commerce business, but even our e-commerce arm is split into two. We have this kind of similar enough audience to the original Nimbus in terms of beauty products and things like that but then we're also tapping into sports athletes and so forth and then our sauna machines are is a much wider demographic and we've had a lot of people who have bought saunas as I mentioned from a hair salon to a farmer who lives five hours inland from Sydney so they're not your classic Nimbus customer this is just your average Australian which is awesome and and to think that we're now touching on these but they all provide their own challenges in the sense of we're now trying to like i suppose naively in the beginning we just thought you know okay we launched our saunas people know us as a sauna business still people who already know us are going to buy sauna but it hasn't really been the case you know we've actually had people most of our sales coming through referrals or people who are just researching us online, you know, so totally net new customers. Like we have had a few sales from within the NIMAS community, but 90% have come externally, which is actually quite fascinating now.
SPEAKER_00:Amazing. So you're quite a unique niche and obviously you're creating quite a bespoke ecosystem of complimentary services and products. But are you seeing any change in the way that people are approaching wellness, like as a broader thing in terms of the people that you do see at your studios? What are they looking for that may have been different before, if anything?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, absolutely. I went to a MindBody conference in LA, was it September last year, and it's called Bold Minds. And there is, they do a huge bit of research and it was US based. But I took so much back from that because in America at that point, everybody was, the number one thing that people had concerns about was disposable income, which I think is the same for many countries around the world right now, Australia included. And we've certainly seen that in the patterns of behavior with our clients, particularly in the last decade. I'd say 12 months in turn. And to put that in context, when we opened Nimbus, we used to have, well, we still have our packs, you know, five packs, 10 packs, 20 packs. Some people would come in and buy 20 packs, 40 packs, you know, which could last you six months worth of sauna-ing. nowadays i find that that's kind of more sporadic people are just buying on a more casual basis you know they're buying when they have the disposable income they're not buying it in advance without thinking about it so i think that's a big shift in the mindset locally here is that like things are a little bit tighter than what they were two three years ago so that's definitely the similar concern to the us having said that in america what they said the number one thing that the average american wanted to focus on or would not let go of was health and well-being so if you recap there to think well people are worried about money but the one thing they're going to not stop spending on is their well-being now if you take my scenario being in the advertising world and it was pretty close to mad men you know sex drugs and rock and roll kind of thing and it was always about the friday lunches and you know if you hit your target you could do whatever you want and you know that seemed jovial and fine for a time, but then you start realizing there's more to life than just this. And I think that shift has been across all industries here in Australia. Businesses, people are spending their money more on wellness as a priority now because one of the things that COVID did teach us was that life is short. So longevity, I was asked about this to write an opinion piece for a local publication here recently. about what I felt were the top trends in wellness. And I do have a gripe about this, which I'll maybe touch on in a second. But the thing I spoke about was longevity. And the good thing about longevity is that it can have many different faces. It's a little bit like mental health. I'm a huge mental health advocate. I have my own podcast on the topic and we have the same discussion about mental health. It's a major problem. There's no one silver bullet. But having said that, there are many things you can do to improve your health and wellbeing. And that's the same in terms of what I was just talking about there. there are so many things you can do in this sense to improve your own health and wellbeing. And that's the exciting part about all this is that the sky is the limit with this and it's not going anywhere. And if I just to touch back on that toxicity, what I mean there is, wellness is kind of hot right now to really excuse the pun, but it's one thing And there's some big names here, developers and big brands who are throwing a lot of money at it. There's brands we're even speaking to, tech brands who have invested a lot of money in wellness. all with the right intentions. But it's one thing to throw money at it or to try and build something. But if it's not your wheelhouse, what we're finding is that six months, 12 months down the line, a lot of brands are now starting to unravel it a bit to say, well, we invested in a float tank or we put this gym in, but nobody's actually using it. So we're trying to plug this even more niche of a gap to say, well, let us come in and actually provide that, I suppose, industry experience that we've learned and tested ourselves to see what's actually going to work. Because the first question I have when I speak to any kind of business is, what are you trying to achieve here? And you'd be astounded by the amount of people who haven't even started there. jumping on the wellness bandwagon as it were to go and like saunas included you can put a sauna in somewhere but if you don't put it in the right place it doesn't have the right ventilation you know is there showers near to it people aren't going to find this easy to use and they're not going to use this and then it will just you know it will rot or you know it will start to not function as well because it hasn't been used and so on and so on and cleaning is a big thing as well you know so you've got to think about all those 1% in order to make it actually sustainable over time. And that's where like from a longevity point of view, like whether it's diet, exercise, sleep, breathing, saunas, there's so many things nowadays that we can focus on to prolong longevity. And as I said, that's what COVID has taught us. So people know if I'm going to spend my money, even though my money is a bit tighter than it was five years ago, I'm going to spend it on that rather than going and getting drunk in the pub.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you. Amazing. You're speaking my language. I work in functional medicine and all the things you talk about, this holistic approach is what I do. The diet, the lifestyle stuff, the exercise, the sleep, all the stuff that gets neglected when you see a conventional medical person. But you're definitely speaking my language.
SPEAKER_01:And do you know the funny thing about all this, right? And people keep laughing at me. Anytime I speak, I basically... promote not to use my business. But I do feel like that's a sign of like, you know, a good person. It's like when you try and hire someone, you try and convince them not to take the job. And if they take it, you know, you've got a good person. But like I ingest there. But like what I mean by that is, look, saunas are so amazing for you, of course. But it's not about having that high end, highfalutin gym membership, you know, which you can do. And that can be great. After 10 years in the wellness game, I've realized that most of the things that actually make us healthy and keep us sane and balanced and whatnot are the most basic life things. And they're usually free. And you mentioned a few of them there. Sleep, for example. Sleep is the number one thing that falls over when people struggle with mental health. In our podcast, we speak with so many people, and whenever people are low, if you prod and ask them a question, and if you ask about sleep, I guarantee you they will not be sleeping because of X, Y, and Z stress, or they're burning the candle at both ends, or whatever it may be. So by changing little things like how you eat, how you sleep, doing some form of exercise, which doesn't need to be high rocks or one of those ones, like walking daily is proven to be for prolonged longevity, it's been more studied than like HIIT classes, you know? And it goes back to those kind of blue zones of Sardinia and Okinawa and places like that around the world. Like they all have similarities in terms of those pillars, you know, diet, some kind of exercise, having a sense of belonging, having a purpose, you know, they call it the icky guy in Japanese culture. And these are all basic things that don't cost you any money. So when I hear people going, well, I can't afford a sauna. Yeah, I don't have that. It's all a load of bull crap. You know, it really, in my point of view, because if you make a shift in your lifestyle change, I'm like, I did this myself because on the 1st of January, I haven't really been drinking alcohol for quite some years now. I'd have a beer on a Friday night with my dinner or a glass of wine. That's kind of been where I've been at for the last few years. If there was a wedding or something like that, okay, yeah, you might go a bit more crazy for a day or two, but I would also dread it. And then I'd be anxious for a week and it would make me feel terrible. But on the 1st of January, I decided, because I still have my inflammation and all those things that I mentioned, I'm not supposed to have alcohol, I'm not supposed to have gluten. And I was kind of living the 80-20 rule, which is actually something that Nimbus promotes anyway, because going back to that toxicity of wellness, the whole thing you see online with social media and people training five times a day and doing this and doing that, it's not attainable for most of us. I'm a parent, I've got a three and a half year old. Most people will say, like, I don't have the time to do that. I might get 15 minutes a day to exercise. I don't have the wherewithal to be able to, go to the gym twice a day or whatever it may be so that's a big challenge that i think and that toxicity that we have is to kind of cut through a lot of that white noise and actually promote realistic positive messaging which is what we try to do at nimasa look we're not perfect i'm not perfect i do drink i have taken drugs before i do i eat burgers you know sometimes areas of my life are not in good shape and i have to work on them and I think that's much more of a positive mindset to be in rather than being, you're not good enough, or you could do better, or why don't you have a six pack? And that's the big thing. That's the big issue that I have with all that kind of stuff is that there's virtually little or no regulation in terms of the information that goes out online. And it can be a dangerous space for someone who is genuinely trying to explore their own health, but has been given information that might be good for me, but could be detrimental for you. So I think there's still a huge role around education and around positive messaging that we all need to do, governments included and clubs and things like that. But yeah, the simple lifestyle changes are the ones that mean the most. And to finish on this note, with my podcast, we ask all guests at the very end, what's the one thing you would recommend someone to do in their day to make them feel better based on your own experience? life experience. And they all say the most mundane, basic things. Go for a walk, step out into nature, have a swim in the ocean if you can, you know, hug somebody. It's all these kind of basic things. So, you know, like, you know, you've got the likes of your Brian Johnson's in America who's taken 90 supplements and IV drips seven times a day and all that. But I just don't believe in that. I think it's a load of hash. You know, I just think how on earth... can 7 billion people in the world do what he's doing? It's just not achievable. However, focusing a little bit on your diet, no matter where you are or where you are in the classes of life, doing some form of exercise, having relationships, being in a local club, having a purpose like gardening and things like that, everyone can do that. And that is what's more meaningful than putting IV drips in your arm all the time, even though I believe in IV drips, they're great. But you know what I mean? They're not the be all and end all. Saunas are not the be all and end all. Ice baths are not the be all and end all. And even if you think about ice baths, again, I say this all the time, it's like, it goes against my business because people come to pay to have an ice bath, but you can get the exact same benefits from an ice bath from a cold shower.
SPEAKER_00:And many of the things you mentioned are free as well. Yeah. Going for a walk and a swim in the ocean are all free, which is, you know,
SPEAKER_01:And the other one I will have to mention is breathwork because breathwork has literally saved me so many times. I struggle with depression, anxiety, and panic attacks and a little bit of agoraphobia as well. And it's taken me so long to get on top of that and manage through all this. And breathwork is the biggest ally I've ever had because breathwork you can literally do anywhere. Now, I'm Vedic trained, Vedic meditation trained as well. but I do not do my two 20-minute meditations every day. I'll tell you that straight now. What I do do is the physiological side, box breathing. I do spotting. These are all things you can do on a busy train, a busy bus, if you're lying in bed with ideas swirling around your head before nighttime. And breath work is the two, outside of saunas, the two things I say that really rock my world in terms of wellness is my very first ice bath and learning breath work.
SPEAKER_00:Brilliant. So everything you said about Nimbus sounds like things are going really well, but have there been anything frustrating or harder than expected, especially as you've got multiple locations, you've got an ever-expanding ecosystem? What's kind of challenging you at the moment from a business perspective? You
SPEAKER_01:asked that question because it does look glamorous on the outside. People would say like, we've got seven studios and people go, wow, it's so good. And I'm like, am I? Cause under the water, my feet are going like this 24 seven, the size of my eye. And you know, there's a lot going on. And as I mentioned it, Ron, I feel like we're back in startup mode again, almost like, It's like as if we have three businesses. We have our studio business, we have our e-commerce and saunas, and then we have this B2B arm. Now they're all completely different sales pitches. They're completely different messages, completely different clients. So we're trying to almost launch and mature three separate businesses, which is really, really tough. We're family run. We are fully bootstrapped. We have no... big cash piles behind us that is making it so everything we do is on a knife edge. We make one big mistake, it sets us back or it could kill us entirely. So that's the biggest frustration and challenge that we have that we are trying to promote and try and build and grow our business. But when you're self-funding that whole operation, it's hugely challenging. And we've had some wins and some losses and you know,$50,000 gets sunk into this and then everything else gets some pause. And then we put more pressure on the studios, which are our cash, you know, I suppose cows in that sense. So that is a big challenge, you know, developing and growing our business without that backing is hugely, hugely challenging. And, you know, we have 45 staff, I think nationally now who work mostly in the studios, you know, and that's why there's also challenges there in terms of there at the co-phase doing the business, which looks great, but then we're in the background trope growth, but then we put pressure on the studios to perform. So that is definitely number one challenge for us. The second one I would say is probably resources. Like we do have a quite small and nimble team and you know, my wife's creative director, I'm CEO. I kind of sit over head of sales partnerships. You know, we have social media marketing and then we have like kind of designers on contract. So it's like we have a very satellite team that's spread around the country. We don't have an office. So it's still very much startup mode in that sense as well. And from a high level C-suite perspective, like we do lack some very key people. I would say resources and talents, you know, in terms of CFO, we don't have a CFO. And so, you know, we're still very much in that multiple hat wearing entrepreneur space. So yeah, it's not without its challenges and every, every chance we take, we've got to get it right. Because if I don't get it right, I'm in trouble and that's difficult to live with. It's difficult to go to bed at night. there's been numerous times where i've put my head on the pillow thinking i don't know how i'm going to get through this next week or month people chasing you with invoices and outstanding bills and things like that and i spoke about this in another um podcast more recently about like you kind of have to kind of come to terms with the fact that you could go bankrupt and that's like a very like potential thing that could happen and Whilst a lot of stuff online says fail and fail quickly and move on and failure is good and stuff, which it is in theory, but when you've got 45 mouths to feed, including your own and your wife's and your three-year-old son's, going to bed worrying about how you're going to pay for things, I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. It's the
SPEAKER_00:plight of every entrepreneur, isn't
SPEAKER_01:it?
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Part of me is like, it's sort of like how I try to manifest mental health in the sense of like, oh, one day I'll be okay. But it took me a long time to realize you can't think about that. And it's a bit like that probably with an entrepreneur. Like I suppose naively I would think, oh, I'll get my break one day or maybe an investor will listen to this call and call me up and give me$50 million and away I go. But even if I got that, it wouldn't be the end of it. There would just be more of this in some other shape or form down the track. And that's the thing. You've kind of got to live by the sword, die by the sword. And when you do have your back against the wall, that's really when you're at your best in that sense. But obviously, I'll caveat that you have to look after your own health and well-being and me being in wellness as well. I'll put my hand up and say at the moment right now, as I speak to you, I'm not. a 10 out of 10, you know, we just launched a studio that I'm calling from here today in Fitzroy, Melbourne, and that's pushed us to the bitter end, you know, and we had another studio launch only yesterday and a third studio only open at the turn of the new year. So three studios in the space of four months is unheard of in, in, in our short little history. So it's definitely pushed us to the limits and yeah. it's not easy. It's not easy. If you, if someone came around tomorrow and said, look, well, you know, give you your payday and you could stay in the business. That's the kind of dream. If we did have a big backer who could bring someone who could have scaled businesses like ours before, but wants us in the business, that would be the dream, you know?
SPEAKER_00:Amazing. Um, that was something I was going to ask you.
UNKNOWN:Um,
SPEAKER_00:Oh yeah, so being in the industry that you are, I guess you're keeping a close eye on the ground as to where things are going. Do you have any specific metrics or client behaviors that you kind of keep an eye on to give a sense of that you're doing the right thing, you're expanding in the right areas? What do you kind of monitor and track to kind of help guide you with what you do to expand?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, outside of sales reports, we have a couple of things that we monitor very closely. One is occupancy rate, and that's if you think about inventory in terms of like bums on seats in the studio we monitor that quite closely you know it's a we we operate anywhere between 50 and 60 percent which is not too bad when you think of like we're open let's say in bondi which is one of our flagship studios 12 hours a day seven days a week so you're never going to be fully occupied right but We try to move the needle on that quite a lot. The other one is our retention rate, which is around the 60% mark as well. But there are two everyday evergreen metrics that if we move the needle, it goes directly to our bottom line. And also with the fact that our costs don't necessarily increase, there is a bit of an economies of scale with some of the things that we do. know sometimes at busy times during the year we'll have a second staff member on at certain times because it's so busy so we do kind of monitor those two extremely closely um and spending behaviors is another one as well like as i said that's changed a lot in more recent times so now we're having to pivot and go well okay if our clients aren't buying 20 packs anymore how do we tap into that bit more and like you know after pay and things like that you know can solve some of those things as well but we're it's made us work with brands like class pass and we're just about to onboard another app business called fit mate and you probably have class mass and class class pass in the uk but our big issue is off peak times so weekends after 5 p.m you know we don't need to really worry about that they're usually filled off-peak, 9 a.m. to 1, 2 p.m. is kind of our quiet time. When COVID was released and we came out of lockdown, we were busy all day, every day because people were working from home. But that's slowly gone back to normality now. I think most people are working at least three days a week back in the office if you're in corporate. So we're back to our kind of original patterns. So we kind of face a lot of economical, environmental issues all the time, as I said, like inflation goes up and things like that go up. So we have to monitor all that. We've called it a bit of a huddle with our team of directors for this week, just to think about like our business model has to evolve and adapt almost on a, I'd say a minimum six month basis, if not more regularly in the sense that things like what services we're providing, what our price point is, what kind of packages we can do. And then, you know, we've been leaning a lot more into this B2B space. As I mentioned, we were looking at including branding opportunities. So I have a whoop on my hand here and we've started to do activations in the studio where if it's a relevant brand that is associated, is pseudo associated with what we do, they can take over our studio for a month. which is a really cool thing that we're doing. And we took 40 or 50 of our clients across the country, gave them a WHOOP, gave them a sauna protocol and an ice bath protocol, and we've gone away and tested it. And we're about to launch the results of that in a bit a week or two. So yes, we're constantly having to battle that, constantly having to review, constantly having to look at our pricing. And that's challenging for a business because, especially if you're in the service game, because it's like a cup of coffee. There's only so much you can keep charging a coffee till people go, well, I'm just going to make it at home now for a while. And rather than having a coffee every day, they have a coffee maybe on a Friday on the weekend. And it's very much the same for us with a sauna business. We've seen people scale up and scale down their saunas and people are pretty honest about it. People say, look, I love you guys, but I can't afford to come in three times a week anymore. It's really one day a week and that's all I can do. So yeah, behaviors are changing all the time and it can change an election. It can change at the drop of a hat. And I do feel like from a global point of view, this kind of looming recession kind of thing is definitely having an impact on how customers are behaving, you know?
SPEAKER_00:Got it. I've realized we're going over time. I just want to ask one last thing, if I may. If you could wave a magic wand to solve one big operational growth challenge, and you've alluded to some of the things that are sort of challenging you in the business at the moment, what would it be if you can pin it down to one thing?
SPEAKER_01:I'm going to be real classic here and just say, like, capital investment. Like, we've always been quite... avant-garde in what we do. We have so many ideas. We kind of have a very clear vision on what we want to do and what we want to be as a business and how we can get there. Our biggest limiting factor is the capital to go and do that. So that is definitely stunted our growth as a business for sure. And if I could sneak in the second one, it would be having that partner with us who has maybe successfully rolled it out. And you see it quite a lot. Like there's, There's a sauna business in New York I mentioned at the top of this chat called Higher Dose and, you know, similar enough to Nimbus, but obviously way ahead of us in America. And then they were bought out a few years ago for, I think, 25 million USD kind of thing. And, you know, I'm a big fan of How I Built This, you know, the podcast by Guy Raz and, you know, all the entrepreneurs that are on his show carry a somewhat similar trajectory. You know, they have a bit of success. They do well. You know, they usually then get an investor at some shape or form. Sometimes it goes against them. Well, more often than not, it goes against them. I think most founders tend to eventually get pushed out of their own companies. It's just kind of very common fold. So, you know, but I've kind of... very passionate about what we do and what we believe in, but also have been able to sever the cord in the sense of like, you know, life is too short, even for ourselves, like we're under a lot of stress. It's like, you know, is it worth all the stress trying to do absolutely everything by yourselves? Or is it worthy to give away some of your pie or your shares in order to put trust in somebody else to help you grow and expand the thing that it is. So that's hard when you're an owner, because it's your baby, right? You're like, well, it's my baby. I know what's what's right. And you know, it's my wife has another business called foil and they do have investors and you know, it's like that growth trajectory in entrepreneurism. You think, oh, I'll get an investor, all my problems are solved. And then in actual fact, sometimes it can actually cause more problems than it's worth, you know, and set you back and it can be disastrous. So I'm not saying this to be an end-all, but it certainly would help us. And to put it into practical sense, like it's not just about putting studios all around the world, but whether it's the sauna machines and education and content, like spreading that message globally, because, you know, mobile phone and we do invest a lot in content and webinars and videos and pdf guides and things like that that we kind of potentially could spread nimbus around the world but if we were to do it by ourself we'd probably still be talking about it in 20 years you know and that's the danger and the problem for us is that because it's such a lucrative industry that's growing at an exponential level the danger we have as a family, small boutique-y businesses will just be left behind. And as I said, it is competitive now more than ever. And if we don't grow and we were the first and for a few years it was just us, but now that's gone and no one cares really if you're the first anyway anymore. You have to kind of just continue to grow and evolve or you'd be left behind. And that's our danger with the conglomerates and big backers and people who are... huge investors and things like that that they can come in and just throw their money at the ideas and like it can stick you know even though i did say that you know it's not just about throwing money at it it can stick and then it's that classic analogy of like you don't have to look at wellness to see how even things like you know you look at restaurants you know largely been impacted globally you know five-star hatted restaurants you know under pressure now or fast food chains coming in. The local kind of cafe is under pressure. It is harder for the smaller guys now to compete with these bigger guys. I don't know if you have Guzman and Gomez. Do you in the
SPEAKER_00:UK? I think we do. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. They're like a Mexican kind of fast food. They're just grown on an outrageous level. They're everywhere here in Australia. And it's not bad, to be fair. But the analogy with them now I see right in front of your face, you don't need to be a real estate person or a developer or anything like that to understand this. You just have to, it's happening right in front of your eyes where, you know, there's institutions in Bondi Beach, for example, that have been there for 10, 20 years, and then they just can't survive. And then they close down and next minute you see like a Guzman and Gomez there. And obviously the advantages for those guys is that They can go into a Bondi and maybe take a hit for a few months and, you know, take the sucker punch like the kind of McDonald's model. And even if they need to, they can just shut down the store and they just scratch it off the list and move on. Whereas the Nimbus type businesses out there, we can't do that. Or if we do do it, that's really going to hurt us. And it could even close us down. And Bondi is an insane place. for fast pace growth and business. Like you go away for two or three weeks on a holiday, you come back, something shut down, something's really, something's opened. It just moves. Like I used to laugh when I go back to Ireland because the only thing that changes in Ireland, we say is the grocery store used to be a Sentra. Now it's a spa. And then next time we go back, it's gone from a spa back to a Sentra. So not much changes when I go back to somewhere like Ireland, whereas like Bondi beach, Things change all the time. And that is frightening as a small business that it doesn't take much to knock you off your peak, you know. And if you don't have much of a safety net, you know, there is inherent risk there.
SPEAKER_00:I don't think those are unique to your business, are they? Pretty much anybody in this space, entrepreneur trying to grow and expand, capital is a major limiting factor. But also having that person who's got the kind of done it before, who can kind of accelerate things forward, finding that person. I think most people would love to have somebody like that. Exactly.
SPEAKER_01:And I suppose the second part of that person is almost like connections or getting your foot in the door because not to sound egotistical here, but Anytime you have a conversation about your business with a person, whether you bump into them or whether they come into your studio, and even at a brand level, like we have a very strong brand reputation. You know, you mentioned our name, everyone says, oh, I love Nimbus. Like I had someone tell me that today. The amount of people I meet who I say I work for Nimbus, they say, oh, I love Nimbus. So you can have all that, but it doesn't really necessarily mean evolve into a multinational multifaceted like like company um so that's kind of the real thing that we're trying and not that we're trying to crack at the moment for us is like okay well how do we grow our business to the next level maintain who we are never deter from who who we are what we stand for but moving on to a place where it's going to the next level That's the hard part. And by having those people in high places, let's say all I need is to get in the room. If I can get in the room and have a two minute conversation with someone about what it is that we do at Nimbus, you're obviously not going to get everyone across the line, but I feel like that's the hard part for people like me. It's like, it's just getting in the right room with people, getting a chance to pitch or to, know speak to those type of retailers you know because retailers are notoriously hard to get in bed with right you know so australia here we have sephora and mecca and brands like that how do you get into the room with these guys you know that's where sometimes those allies can come in very handy
SPEAKER_00:got
SPEAKER_01:it
SPEAKER_00:Neil, thank you so much for this conversation. I think it's been a super insightful conversation. Really grateful for you sharing your perspective. I think a lot of listeners are going to really resonate with your approach. But really, thank you very much for your time. And I know I've kept you well beyond the end of the time. And I know it's very late where you are. But thank you again for your time this afternoon.
SPEAKER_01:I appreciate it. Now, thanks for having me on. I'll have a cup of tea in true Irish and UK fashion before I go to bed. And I'll be right as rain. So yeah, I hope people got a lot from that. It certainly has been a journey and long may it last.