Mindbody BOLD 2021 recap

by Matt McGunagle

Each year we attend the BOLD conference I’m reminded of when I first had the idea for StrengthPortal right before graduating from Cal Poly SLO (the college located in the same town as Mindbody Headquarters). I would share the business idea and plan with professors and mentors to receive feedback and inevitably the same question popped up over and over, “Doesn’t Mindbody do that? If they don’t yet, won’t they? Aren’t you worried about that?”

Fast-forward to eight years later, not only are we a Mindbody Partner listed in their Partner marketplace, but we were recruited by the MB partners team to be a sponsor for this year's BOLD conference. While my co-founder Ken and I attended the Partner meetings, met our customers, and introduced ourselves to Mindbody customers interested in learning more about our software platform I couldn’t help but think back to those early days in San Luis Obispo. As a company and software product we’re starting to realize some of the goals that we had many years ago, it’s been quite a journey. Reaching the point where we could be a sponsor at an event like BOLD is a wonderful event to experience. Throughout it all the teams we’ve worked with at Mindbody have been fantastic mentors, partners, and advocates for us and we look forward to continuing our relationship for many years to come.

Mindbody Announcements
From the Partner meetings and Mindbody Product team announcements at BOLD these were the highlights for me:

  • Mindbody Capital: A new business funding opportunity that will be available to Mindbody customers, this is a perfect fit at a perfect time for the Mindbody customer base. The program, from my understanding, will be modeled after other programs that have popped up from major payment processors such as Stripe with Stripe Capitol. Since Mindbody helped thousands of businesses process payments it’s able to create models that allow the company provide low-risk cash advances to fitness business owners that need it based off of their finances that flow through their Mindbody accounts. Have you been a steady customer for a few years with a reliable cashflow and are caught in a short-term jam? Mindbody Capital should be able to provide the financial help you need to you efficiently based of the data it has with competitive rates. When you compare the experience head to head versus getting a loan for your fitness business elsewhere this new program may be tough to beat. I’m excited to see this program help the Mindbody customer base with the financial fuel it will surely need as the industry recovers from the challenges of the pandemic. Click here to read more from the Mindbody team.
  • Mindbody AWS: Announced before the conference, the Mindbody team was ecstatic to announce that they have completed the migration of their services and services to AWS. As a company that started by shipping software on CDs to its customers twenty years ago and has gone through multiple iterations while growing like crazy this is a big step forward. Simply put, AWS is the top cloud provider for a reason. The auto-scaling capabilities AWS offers have been unmatched for years. From a customer standpoint the biggest difference you’ll notice will be the improved speed and reliability of their platform throughout the year from here.

Takeaways
Personally I was pleased to hear the continued focus that Mindbody’s Product and Partner teams have on their target customer, boutique fitness and wellness businesses that have 1-10+ locations. As a company that grew through providing high-quality software for SMBs I’m sure it’s super tempting to start to focus their product development more on midmarket and Enterprise customers, but they seem to be bullish on the continued opportunity of their customer segment. Product announcements indicated that they are putting their energy into continually improving their core Mindbody software offerings, which will help retain the customers they have and convert the new prospects coming into the industry post-pandemic.

Additionally Mindbody continues to emphasize their Open API approach to filling gaps in their software platform through partners. They know what they are good at, they know where they can improve, and they clearly understand that the smartest strategy is to stay focused on core business tools. When you look back at Mindbody’s product announcements and acquisitions over the past few years it’s clear that they are mainly focused on only adding new tools that serve their customers across each health and wellness vertical they target.

What’s next for Mindbody and StrengthPortal?
On our side we’re looking forward to continuing to meet the needs of Mindbody fitness business customers that need software to help manage and scale their training services. Our integration with Mindbody was designed to make it incredibly easy for businesses offering personal training services to use StrengthPortal’s software platform as a complementary tool to manage 1on1 private personal training, semi-private personal training, hybrid personal training, and online remote personal training. Whether you have one personal training studio location with a training team or scaling your business with multiple locations, we’re excited to help you grow your business.

If you’d like to schedule a call to learn more about StrengthPortal’s software platform you can use this link. We’ll see you at the next BOLD conference!