Mental Health for Leaders President & CTO Mindbody Sunil Rajasekar (Podcast 194)

You could be a badass when it comes to business and have aggressive goals and go after it and work really hard, but it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive from just being empathetic and kind and being like Buddha. And for me, that's a daily challenge. You know, there are some days where I do well with that balance and then there are some days where I'm, you know, where I don't and I get caught up in, you know, in my own negative cycle and then takes me a focused effort to get out of it.

Our guest today is Mindbody Inc's President and CTO, Sunil Rajasekar. Sunil has served as Mindbody's Chief Technology Officer since November 2018 and as his President since August 2020. With more than 20 years of consumer and enterprise experience, his work is focused on the company's product and technology strategy, consumer marketplace expansion and platform development. Previously, Sunil served as Vice President and General Manager at e commerce giant eBay, leading engineering and product management for the seller experience. He's also served as Chief Technology Officer for Lithium Technologies and as Vice President of Engineering Product Management of Operations at Intuit. He holds his MBA from the University of Toledo. Sunil, welcome to the Second Command podcast.

Thank you, Cameron. Happy to be here.

Yeah, I'm really excited to do this. Strangely enough, I've used your app in a number of countries. I was recently over in Italy and we were like, where the heck are we going to find yoga? And my fiance was like, well, let's just go on mindbody. I'm like, they're not going to be in Italy. Yeah, you were. And it was like dead simple, super clean. We show up and the first thing the woman even said to us when we walked in was like, did you use Mind Body to book us? Like, yeah. This is just amazing. How many countries are you guys in now?

We are in a lot of countries. We actually have offices only in a few. So we are obviously in the us. We have offices in Australia and the uk, but we are actually used in a lot more countries than just the countries that I mentioned. And it's usually customers finding us on the web and wanting to use our software, wanting to be on the marketplace. So I couldn't even give you an exact count because it's not something that we've been actively pursuing. It's all happened organically, but I would say it's probably close to 100.

Wow, that's amazing. Are you covering multiple languages and stuff on the platform or is it all just English?

No, we do have multilingual support. So that's something that we built in quite early.

Okay.

And that's. That's paid off.

Amazing. What was it that got you to join mindbody? And then after you tell us that, can you just give us a walkthrough as to what mindbody is for anybody who hasn't heard of it yet?

So mindbody is the world's leading platform for the wellness industry. So we have two pieces to our overall platform. One piece is the B2B software. So this is software that a wellness business can use to run and grow their business. So think of it like a ERP type software to run a wellness business. So this allows these wellness businesses, whether they're in fitness or integrative health, or whether they're a salon or a spa, it allows them to set up their classes or set up appointments, take online bookings from their consumers, set up their staff, run marketing campaigns. And we've continued to add more and more functionality. So we just recently launched mindbody Capital, which allows these businesses to use our platform to raise money to run and grow their business. So that's just an example. So we're continuing to add more and more functionality to our platform. So that's everything from software you need to run and grow your business, engage with your consumers, raise capital, manage your payments. So it's really fully functioned. So that's one piece. Then we have the marketplace, which is what you were just referring to, that you used in Italy. Thank you for using our software. Feel free to use more of it. And this is a direct to consumer play where we have a marketplace where consumers who, whether they're traveling or they're new to the wellness industry and they want to look at what options are there in the neighborhood. They can go to a marketplace and it's available on the web. It's Also a Apple iPhone app or a Google Android app. You can use that app to go do a search, find whatever you're looking for, and then go ahead and book and purchase as well. So we have these two pieces. Of course, they're all integrated. It's part of one giant platform. But I would break it out into those two pieces just to explain how it works at the next level. And then now talking about why I'm here. So I've been in Silicon valley for over 20 years, and all of us in the tech industry are lucky to be here at this time. There's no dearth of opportunity, and it's true for everyone in tech, and it was true for me. As well. I came to mindbody for three reasons. Reason number one, and probably the biggest draw to me was the space that we're in. So everything that I mentioned, the idea of being able to connect the world to wellness was very, very appealing to me because we all want to do great work in the fields that we're in, but we also want to have a big impact. Mindbody gives me and the rest of the company the opportunity to do meaningful work, to do interesting work, to work on marketplaces and on AI ML and all these interesting things, all in service to connecting the world to wellness. And that was very, very appealing to me. Wellness personally is something I focus on quite a bit. I flamed out, I burnt out early in my career and I ended up pivoting my focus. This is when I was in my early 20s to wellness quite a bit. I realized that I didn't have an anchor point and the shift to wellness was personally very, very meaningful to me. And I started meditating every day, I started working out and I'm not the one to lift like 500 pounds at the gym, but I still go and I do yoga, I work out and all that's become a very integral part of my life. So the idea of doing that at scale and helping others discover wellness, reason number one, strongest reason, reason number two is we have an opportunity to build a multi generational company in the wellness space, right? The way I look at wellness, it's at the same level as healthcare and education. To me, the whole world should have access to wellness, right? And that's not the case today. There's a very small percentage of people who get to experience wellness, go to classes, get a personal trainer, but it really shouldn't be exclusive. How do we make that available to all 7.7 billion people in the world? So to me that's the big mission and there's good for the world that comes out of that. And out of that we the opportunity to build a multi generational company that's like at a Google level or a Facebook or Amazon. So that opportunity was very, very appealing as well. And then the third reason, and I think this is a byproduct of what our mission is, which is connecting the world to wellness, is that the people who work at the company are different. They have focus on wellness and they're motivated by that mission. So it's not just about hey, what do we do for the next quarter, it's about hey, what can we do to further our overall mission? So I love the people that work at the company. So those are the three reasons.

That's amazing. I want to go back to something you said about flaming out with stress 20 years ago. Our timing on this is interesting. I was written up in the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2020 as someone whose career flamed out because of stress. And I was clinically redlining. So I'm curious, what happened to you? What were the signals or the symptoms that you saw? Now, maybe you didn't see them at the time, but that you can tell others to be aware of?

This was my early 20s. I was living in New York at that time. And when you're in the early 20s, you think you're invincible. You can do whatever you want and you're going to be fine. So I had a high pressure job. I was working at Oracle and I was working crazy hours. And then I also had a lot of friends and, you know, and having fun was a priority too, right? It is for most people in the early 20s. So I was trying to do it all. So I would work crazy hours, I would work on the weekend, then I would go out every night with friends and it wasn't really taking care of myself, wasn't watching what I eat. And then a lot of times, even if your mind doesn't know, yeah, you're heading down a wrong path and you're burning the candle at both ends. Your body will tell you. If your mind doesn't tell you, your body will tell you at some point. And that's what happened to me, Cameron. My body told me I ended up just breaking down. The stress was too much. I had irritable bowel syndrome. I ended up losing a lot of weight and I ended up needing to take four to six months off just to recenter myself and come up with a new system for how I needed to live. So I wasn't flaming out. So it took me a while to figure out that was a book I read at that point, which was a turning point for me. Coincidentally, the name of the book was the Mind Body Connection by a person called John Sarno. And it talked about.

I know John. Yeah.

Have you read the book?

No, but I know John. I've met him at a Genius network event and he's talked a lot about his concepts for us.

Oh, is that right? Well, I would love to meet him because his book was, you know, a game changer for me. It helped me get back on a good path and really recover because there was a time where I was like, I don't know if I'm going to come out of this. You know, I was seeing a lot of doctors and they basically said irritable bowel syndrome means we don't know what's wrong with you, so we don't know how to fix it. We can give you some high level, you know, tips and guidelines, but yeah, we basically don't know how to fix it. It's your nervous system basically being out of whack.

Yeah.

And John Sarno's book was the one that told me that the thing that causes that is the Mind Body connection and it's stress and that's what got me going down the path of meditating every day and you know, just recentering myself and working out and taking care of myself overall.

You join mindbody, what do you think that they saw and was it Josh and the board hiring you or Josh and the leadership team? What did they see in you that they wanted to bring you in that.

Time, Rick Stollmeier was the CEO. He was the founder of the company. He stepped down around a year, a little more than a year ago. And Josh took over as CEO and I took over as president at that time. So he's the one who was my hiring manager. And the board was involved as well. I suspect that the reasons why they thought I was a good candidate, one was I was very open about my personal motivation for seeking this role. That was number one. Number two was the experiences that I'd had. You know, I've been very conscious about building out my experiences and I've worked in the consumer space, I've worked in enterprise, I've worked in the SMB space and all of that. I've worked in marketplaces and all of that was directly relevant to what mindbody was trying to do. We have really large enterprises that we serve like Orange theory fitness and F45. These are know really large companies. And then we also have a lot of SMBs, small medium sized businesses that we're serving. Then we have a marketplace. So I've worked in all those spaces. So there was a lot of direct applicability between my experiences and what Mind Body was trying to do. And on a personal level, I clicked with everyone that I met. So those are the three reasons.

Makes total sense too. How is the transition then when you come in under that first CEO and then you have a second CEO coming in, you know, two years later, how was that transition for you and what do you think you learned or how did you to adapt?

Yeah, so Josh came into mindbody through an acquisition. So he was CEO of a company booker, which got acquired by mindbody. So he was already at the company when I joined, and he was the chief strategy officer at that point. And he and I had built a deep relationship even during that time when Rick was the CEO. Josh does a really good job of building out personal relationships, you know, even before, you know, you start leaning in on the work relationships. So we used to spend a lot of time grabbing a drink or grabbing a coffee, so we ended up becoming friends and in addition to just being colleagues, so that base was there. So when Rick stepped down and we stepped into our new roles, it felt very natural because we already had that relationship, and it didn't feel awkward or unnatural. It felt in many ways like a continuation of what we had already built.

Interesting. All right, so on the B2C side, with Mindbody, as a consumer, you know, booking yoga or fitness classes or spin classes or whatever, it's a very clean experience. It's very kind of applesque in terms of its usability. Clean, simple, fast, and easy. Is the backend as clean, or is the back end kind of messy? You guys are really making it look good. But is it tough on the back end, or have you really got it dialed?

Gabrin, the reason you're asking this question leads me to believe you know the answer.

No, I just.

No, it is not that easy. We have a lot of complexity underneath the covers, and the reason for that is our platform. Mindbody has been in business for 20 years, so as part of that, we've been building features and products and capabilities over the past 20 years. So there's a lot of complexity there. A lot of complexity comes from we're building out these modern experiences. But there's also some parts of our platform that are older and how do we make all of that work together? And a part of our platforms are super modern, like the marketplace that you're using. And thank you for saying that. It's very applesque, and Apple sets the gold standard when it comes to ease of use, and there's a lot of work that's gone into that. But underneath the covers, with the APIs and talking to the different systems, and there's a lot of complexity.

It's interesting. I actually had that question done is how many years has it been in the making? When I was the COO for 1-800-got- junk, people used to think it was such a. An easy business. I'm like, you have no idea how long it took to get to the night before. We were the overnight success story. So when did mindbody become that overnight success? Is it like three years ago, four years ago? Was it while you were there or just before or just after?

I would say there have been different phases for the company and given how long we've been there, there's been multiple phases, I would say, you know, and I've spent a lot of time with Rick and, you know, there's a lot of folklore even within the company on all the stages that we've been through. The first pivotal moment for the company was when mindbody adopted cloud technology. Right at that point, everything was like desktop and on prem software. And then Rick, to his credit, made a decision that. And this was very, very early, you know, before Salesforce was a thing and now cloud is the default. But there was a time where it wasn't talking to others in the industry and others within the company that, hey, we need to adopt cloud technology and move into the cloud. And that was, I think, when the business really took off because it made it really simple for people to discover mindbody and to install mindbody and to start using it. That was like a key moment. Other moments, you know, when the marketplace was introduced. And then I would say we're going through one pivotal moment now. We just announced the acquisition of ClassPass, which is a direct to consumer subscription solution so people can subscribe to ClassPass and it gives them access to tens of thousands of wellness businesses so they can use the credits that they purchase every month to go to any of these businesses.

So are you guys VC funded right now? Do you have funding?

Yeah, so we were VC backed and then we went public and then we took the company private. So at this point we are owned by Vista Equity Partners, so we are PE backed. We have other investors as well, but Vista is the majority investor.

Okay, so you guys are really starting to scale again. Amazing acquisition to just do that class pass one on the B2B side. I didn't realize that mindbody had that full B2B empowerment for all of these locations. What's your revenue split in terms of percentages? What percentage of your revenue Approximately would be B2B? And what percent is B2C?

Yeah, with class Labs as well, I would say B Directionally, it's probably 70, 30.

70% B2B.

Correct?

Yeah. It's interesting. I didn't even know that existed, but now it makes perfect sense. One of my former clients and a member of our COO alliance, they have a company called Loud Roomer and they do a lot of marketing for fitness locations like F45 is a client in Orange Theory. They kind of do a lot of their outbound marketing, but these locations really do need this software to actually manage and run their business and platforms. I didn't realize that you did that. Is it clear in the fitness space that that is your niche? Like, did they all know that?

Yeah. So we are the, you know, the most full featured platform there is. And we've been in the market the longest, we have the most market share. So I would say people view us that way. But what they probably don't all know is how much we are focused on this mission of building out a fully featured platform. Because our goal is we want to get to a point where our customers, they just have one platform, right. And they can use that for everything that they need. Offers them all the capabilities that they need, and they don't have to worry about stitching together 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 applications to run their business overall. Right. And for the wellness industry. And all of this is grounded in us serving our customers. Right. And when you're running a wellness business, whether you're a large business like Ordinary Fitness or you're this tiny studio and you have, like two employees, where they're going to differentiate and where they're going to shine is by spending time with their consumers, right? With their clients. So any time that they're spending in the back office in a spreadsheet or trying to figure out how do they make all these different applications work together, it's time that they're taking away with their consumers. So that's our goal. How do we make this so drop it? Simple that they can focus on running the business. One example I use quite often is Uber. Right? And Uber, you know, there's pros and cons to the overall business, and we can debate that, but one thing they do really well that we want to emulate is how easy they make it for somebody to be a driver on their platform. There was a time where, hey, you needed a car, you needed insurance, you needed a bunch of things. And they've continued to chip away and to the point where, hey, now they give out loans for you to get a car. I think they even give you the cars.

Yeah.

So you just need to come in, right? And they give you everything from the car, the insurance, to even the clients, right? And you are ready to go. You're in business, and you're in business. We want to do the exact same thing for wellness businesses, right? Where you come in with your, you know, with your commitment and your expertise and your passion. And then mindbody gives you that business in a box. Right. And everything that you need to run your business, taking payments to setting up classes or appointments, to actually finding your clients. Right. That's where the marketplace comes in. That's where ClassPass comes in. We want to be that business in a box.

And it's funny you brought up Uber. In the summer of 2008, I brought Tim Ferriss and Garrett Camp to Burning man for their first time. And I told Garrett that it was the stupidest idea I'd ever heard. And that was six months before he hired Travis to come in. I just thought it was such a. I didn't even even understand what an app was, let alone how they were going to possibly build this thing out. Mind Body Capital, though, like my ex and I used to joke about, the best way to make money is to start a religion or a bank. Mind Body Capital is going to be huge for you. Yeah.

Yeah. And again, all of this, everything that we do is grounded on what can we do to help our customers. Right. And when we help our customers and they do well, you know, we're going to benefit as well.

Yeah.

This is all grounded in what benefit we can provide our customers. And the reason mindbody Capital was something we started looking at is Covid accelerated. And for small businesses, getting capital has always been a challenge. There are some horrific stats around how long a small business needs to spend on a loan application. And even after going through all that effort, a very small percentage of them get approved for the loan. And even those who get approved, it's not the loan amount that they suck. Right. It's a very small loan amount. So that's always been a challenge. And then Covid exacerbated it where there were not a lot of folks who were willing to give loans to small businesses. And unfortunately, a lot of them went under. And so we wanted to help our customers with that issue, and which is what led to mindbody Capital. And mindbody Capital is a very different model. It's not a loan. It is a way to give folks advance cash in advance of them actually getting the revenue. So it's based on your future revenue. So we have all your data, so we know what sort of revenue you're going to be generating in the future, and we'll give you a cash advance.

Is it like a factoring company or.

I'm not too familiar with factoring companies. I do know there's, like, a negative connotation to those companies, so I don't want to say, hey, yes, it's like factoring what I tell you is it is a cash advance based on your future revenue. And the way it works is. And then once you and you get an offer, there's no application, there's no credit check. We give you the offer based on what we know about your data. And let's say, hypothetically Speaking, it's a $50,000 offer, right? You get to decide, hey, am I going to pay it off over six months or 12 months. And then there's a nominal fee, there's a fixed fee that comes out of it. And then the beauty of this model is it's a fixed fee no matter what. So let's say, you know, Covid, God forbid it doesn't happen. But if it happens and there's another shutdown, right? And my yoga business needs to shut down for a month, the payment, because it's deducted, you know, based on, from your future revenue, based on whatever, you know, time frame you've adjust. Yeah, it'll just get, it won't even adjust. It'll just get pushed out. So if you're close for a month, it'll just get pushed out. There's no increase in fee, there's no negative implication. It just gets pushed out.

There's a company out of Canada called Clearbank that's doing something similar. I think on this I'm intrigued with it because my sister runs a company. She's 180,000 people playing co ed intramural sports. That ties into the mind body space for sure. I'm going to talk chat with her about it. Do you guys have any relationship with mindvalley? Do you know Vishen and his company mindvalley at all?

Yeah. So a lot of the folks that you mentioned are people that I'm aware of. And on a personal side, I listen to mindvalley podcasts all the time. I'm a big Vishen Lathiani fan. One of my favorite books in the last year has been Buddha and the Badass, which he wrote. And I also read some of his other books as well. Same with Tim Ferriss, who you mentioned earlier. Huge Tim Ferriss fan. I listened to his podcast every week. So a lot of things that they talk about, right? Continuous learning and needing to focus on your mind and your body to live a full, complete life. Those are things that have had a huge impact on me personally and by extension it's something I take into the company as well. We don't have any business relationship, but they've had an implication on just how we think about the world and our.

Mission in tech right now. It has been really tough in the Bay Area for technology companies to attract talent because of the Google and PayPal and eBay's biggest buying talent. It's almost like predatory pricing and now it's like predatory hiring. Right? They're just coming in and throwing money at all these people. How do you compete for that war on talent being a tech company? And then secondly, has this started to become more of a global issue now that employees can live anywhere? Now you're living in Ohio and the big companies are going to poach you there with the big salaries too. Are you seeing anything there at all?

The answer is yes to both the fact that there is a war on talent, especially in the tech world, and now with COVID It's across every industry, but it's always been there in the tech world and it's gotten even more intense. So, yes, we do have a challenge with finding and retaining top tech talent. The thing that we have going in our favor is the mission. Again, the reason why I came, I would say it's the number one reason why others come to mindbody as well. Because of the fact that this is a chance to help people connect to wellness and actually have a direct line of sight between the work that you're doing and somebody feeling healthier, fitter, more confident in themselves. And that's very, very meaningful. I frequently talk about how we attract a lot of missionaries as opposed to mercenaries, and that plays to our favorite. But having said that, we do live in the real world and when folks come calling and they throw obscene amounts of money, it is a challenge. And we've managed to keep our top talent. We've lost some along the way, and in a perfect world, we wouldn't lose anyone, but we have lost some. And I think it's just the reality of the world that we live in. But we've kept a lot of our top talent and I think it's because of this whole missionary versus mercenary point that I just made.

Yeah, I think so as well. When people deeply care about what they're building versus just, you know, they're building some, it, they actually, it matters to them. How was the impact of COVID on the business? Because, you know, well, I guess again, it's only. No 100% of your revenue really got impacted with that. When, when your customers are really operating fitness locations and they had to shut down for that period of time, what was that like on the business? How did you manage the emotions and the fear of all the employees that were probably freaking out. Walk us through some of that.

Yeah, that was really tough. Cameron. Our business was and is directly impacted by Covid. Right. Because all our customers have storefront locations. Right. And yoga classes where they're bringing people in, or, you know, salon and spa. Right. And March of last year was when this all started playing out. And we all who've lived through this will remember March really well. There was a time when I thought that, hey, this is a quick thing, and in a couple of weeks where it's all going to turn around. And then I think it was around the end of March where it struck me that, man, this is more serious than we thought. And then we started seeing all the closures, and our businesses, our customers, all ended up shutting down very quickly. Right? And their business all went from 100 to zero in a matter of days. And I was very worried. There was a phase where I was worried about our customers. I was worried about the company, I was worried about our employees. And then there were signs even then that we are going to be resilient and things are going to come back. One example was a lot of our customers started getting creative. They started offering classes outside. A lot of them adopted virtual classes. We very quickly put out a virtual platform that our customers could use to stream classes or record videos and then make that available on demand for their consumers. So I saw how creative and resilient our industry was and is. So that gave me a lot of confidence, a personal experience that I had. I remember walking by a studio where folks were working out inside, and this was a time where we were not supposed to be doing that. And I'm not advocating for us to do this, we do need to be careful. But just seeing people who are working out despite being asked not to, told me that, hey, this isn't something optional. Wellness isn't optional. Back to my previous point. So the same level as education and healthcare and folks are going to find a way. I personally started doing a lot of streaming. I started hiking, and people find a way. To me, it led me to believe, and I have a lot of strong conviction on this, is that even though, yes, we've rebounded quite a bit, there's a lot more that's going to happen. And we're not just going to rebound. It's going to be much higher than we were in 2019 pre Covid. Because I think, if anything, Covid has proven, it's that we all need to focus on wellness. Not just about physical wellness, it's about mental wellness. As well. Right. And there's going to be a wave and a lot more people are going to be focused on the mind, body connection and focusing on that in addition to all the other things. Right. Like family and work. Personal focus on wellness is going to be much, much more important. It already is, but I see that need to grow and it's going to be good for our customers. It's going to be good for our business as well.

That was the single biggest frustrating thing for me with COVID was shutting down of fitness facilities and gyms and yoga. I'm like, these are healthy people trying to stay healthy and we're trying to shut them down and tell them to get medicine. This doesn't make any sense to me. The ClassPass acquisition was that easy?

Well, it's a big acquisition, so it wasn't easy. It took a while. We started the conversation a long time ago. We've been partners for a long time. And even during those conversations, every once in a while we would be doing these hard negotiations on contracts and there would always be that at some point we should think about how we bring these two together because it was so complementary. We're both solving for growing the wellness industry. ClassPass has a heavy focus on bringing new members into the wellness industry, and that's something we've been focused on as well. So there's a lot of synergy when it comes to our mission. Even though the words are different, if you look at our mission statements, they look very, very similar. So it's all about growing the wellness industry. We just approached it from different ways. So we approached it from a, hey, we're going to help the businesses get up and running and then we have a marketplace for new people to discover it. ClassPass was like, hey, we want to create this membership and we know there's a big segment of consumers who are looking for that type of offering where they want to discover and try a lot of different modalities and then pick one. And they're going to be some who are like, yeah, I want to continue down that path. So they went after that segment. And the thing that I keep telling people is there's 7.7 billion people in the world. They should all be participating in wellness and there isn't going to be like one model that they're all going to be using. Right. All 7.7 billion are going to use Apple Fitness. Well, that's not going to be the case. Some segments will only want virtual and they like Apple and they will use that. Great. Do that. Right and that's wonderful. There's going to be one segment which loves going to the yoga studio down the street and that's all they want to do. Awesome. MindBody has solutions for those businesses and those consumers. They're going to be some who want to go to that yoga studio. But hey, I also want to augment that with, you know, with Pilates. Right. And I want a little variety. We can support that as well. And some who also want to do virtual, we can support that as well. So it's not like there's going to be one company that solves the world's needs. 7.7 billion. That's a lot of people. There's a lot of solutions and we are approaching it with a different lens, which is we want to help these SMBs and boutique fitness and wellness providers and that's who we are going to continue serving. And ClassPass and Mindbody are focused on that segment.

Were you really merging these two companies together or was it an acquisition and they're going to remain as a standalone under a parent company?

We just closed the deal a couple of weeks ago, so it's still early days. The high level thinking is, yeah, there's going to be synergies. There are some customers of ours who will benefit from Class Pass. Right. And we want to make sure that they're aware of that. It's optional of course, but we strongly believe that once they look at the value that ClassPass provides and again back to the Uber model, we can plug them in with new consumers. ClassPass is another way to plug these businesses into new consumers. We strongly believe that once they learn more about it, that they'll want to adopt that and that that's going to help our consumers. So we will have ClassPass running the subscription business. So that's going to continue, but we will continue to find synergies again, all in service to how we can help our customers.

How about merging the leadership teams? How do you have the discussions with the Finance Group at MindBody and the Finance Group at ClassPass and talk about merging them together and who's going to get left out or who's going to get replaced? How do you think through that and have those discussions or will you need to.

Yeah, so finance is actually a easy one because we do know those teams are going to come together. We're not going to have two sets of books. Right. And in the medium term it makes sense for us to have one set of books. Right. And it makes sense to have one closing date one way. How we do Forecasting and planning. So those are coming together timing wise. It worked out well because the mindbody CFO and he's been with the company for a while, Brett White, incredible colleague, he made it very clear that he was stepping down. He's retiring. Yeah. So when this happened, ClassPass as a CFO, Tom, who we really like. So he's taking over as the CFO and the teams are coming together and there's going to be one finance team. Now we're having a similar conversation across multiple functions.

Yeah. Marketing.

Some teams are going to stay separate, some teams are going to come together and the way we're looking at it is we want to solve for accelerating the business, accelerating the value we can bring to the industry. That's the number one priority. Right. And the integration will follow that. If it makes sense. If we need to go fast in this area and we need to bring these teams together, we will do that. We're not approaching it inside out, which is like, well, we have these teams. Let's focus on bringing the teams together. We're doing it, you know, reverse customer bank. Yeah.

Right. All right. I want to go back to the 21, 22 year old. Sunil. You're just graduating from your undergrad, you're getting ready to start off on your career. What advice would you give yourself back then that maybe you know it to be true today but you wish you'd known, you know, at a much younger age.

Advice number one would be, don't burn out. That was.

Yeah.

I wish somebody had told me that I wasn't invincible. I don't know if I would have listened, but I wish somebody had told me that. I think another thing would be don't forget to have fun and, you know, and be grateful and live in gratitude. And something that I've tried to do ever since I burnt out and I tried to do it to this day. I have a gratefulness exercise that I do every morning where I spend time thinking about all the blessings I've been given and the fact that I was born to the parents that I was born to and they were wonderful, my sister and my wife and the kids. And I spend time thinking about all of that and just being thankful for all of that. I also believe that what you focus on is what's going to grow and it's so easy to fall into that trap of, oh, man, this is a problem. Oh, I have this issue at work or I had this disagreement and it's so easy to get caught up in that. And I still do. Right. And it's not like I ascended to a level where none of that bothers me, right? And that's when I think you become a saint. And this is why Buddha and the Badass is a book that really resonated with me because. Because it talks about you can do both, right? You could be a badass when it comes to business and have aggressive goals and go after it and work really hard, but doesn't have to be mutually exclusive from just being empathetic and kind and being like Buddha. And that's what I'm trying to do. And for me, that's a daily challenge. There are some days where I do well with that balance and then there are some days where I'm, you know, when I don't and I get caught up in, you know, in my own negative cycle and then takes me a focused effort to get out of it.

Sunil Rajasekhar, the President and CTO for mindbody. Thanks so much for sharing with us today on the Second Command podcast. Really appreciate the time and the insights.

Don't be so mean. There's a reason why I'm in the role that I do. I very organized and like things a certain way. As I've gotten older, I've realized that that stuff doesn't work so well in long term. It does a lot of damage and you have to do a lot of undoing to rebuild trust with people and get what you really want out of them.