The Achieve Podcast - Stevi Carr (WISe Wellness Guild)

Welcome to the Achieve Podcast, the show where we highlight the leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs who are building meaningful businesses and shaping their industries. My name is Jesse Warner and I'll be your host today. We're excited to have Stevie Carr with us. She is the founder and CEO of Wise Wellness Guild and the co-founder of WellNext. Stevie, it's a pleasure to have you on the show today.

Thank you, Jesse, for having me today. I'm so excited to be here.

So our audience can get to know you a little bit, give us the backstory of your business. What do you do and how did it all get started?

Yeah, so, um, what I really loved as a part of my journey is I've always believed in the power of catalyzing human potential, and I love the idea that the work that I get up and do every day and that I love to be connected with is something that is actually incredibly basic, which is tied to human sustainability. I believe in the power of whole self-wellness. That's more than just yoga and a smoothie. It's really about helping individuals connect with their values and how we can help them to have access to wellness in all parts of their lives, whether that's their occupational wellness or their financial wellness or mental health, nutritional health, all of those pieces. And for me, it started when I was in corporate America. I worked for a large, a multi-billion dollar CPG that, you know, really valued productivity and achievement. But what it did not do well, and I think that a lot of large companies do not do well, is helping to invest in their employee health so they can continue to achieve that productivity over the course of a long time. And I was seeing, you know, some of my peers that were achieving that VP, EVP level and were burning out at such a rapid rate. And I didn't understand why. I said, well, why don't you just grind harder? Why don't you just take a vacation? Or why don't you just, you know, like, take, you know, go take a walk around the building? Because for me, when I was in my mid-20s, you know, I didn't really understand the long game. And it wasn't until my own experience with cancer and burnout and a couple of other, you know, traumatic experiences that I started to realize, huh, I kind of see what they mean about, you know, blowing past those red flags. And for me, it became really trying to surround myself with healthy people, people who are in the wellness space, and also, you know, going back and getting my executive coaching certification to really uncover how you can help both individuals and organizations and brands achieve success through whole self-wellness and helping to guide them through, you know, what's accessible to them.

Stevie, when did you start your company?

I started Wise Wellness Guild in 2019, um, after leaving a stint in healthcare. I worked for a company that was a multi-billion dollar kind of academic health system. And then I started my most recent company, Wellnxt, that connects brands and municipalities with wellness consumers in cities. And we create a culture of wellness and ecosystems in cities. And I started that one 2 years ago in 2024.

And how big is your team now?

So on my team, I've just, we have 2 full-time employees and I work with a contractor model. For me, That model has served me incredibly well. We have about 25 people on our team that helps to support that. And the reason, Jesse, you know, I really love this approach is because I'm able to hire people who are at the height of their career and they love what they do, but they want to work for themselves and they want the flexibility to be a mom or to go and have multiple passions and do their photography business while they also come and do SEO for me. And so it's been an incredible opportunity for me to help grow my team and help support them in their own dreams and vision for their own scalable businesses.

It sounds like you've built a pretty good community as well. Talk to me a little bit about your community.

Oh my gosh, my community is everything. I wouldn't be anything without the support of those that we have really tried to drive through this wellness ecosystem. With Wise Wellness Guild, we really believe the power of the win-win-win. So we've a great community of Wellnux practitioners, brand owners, experts that we've built a network of those across the 8 pillars of wellness that we champion every day through trying to get them access to some of our larger, bigger brands and clients, you know, and that's really by being able to help them build their businesses and connect them to other large businesses. We're able to create a really unique funding model that allows for those smaller businesses to do what they do best and not have to be marketers. Because, you know, when you're, you know, trying to do it all, you're wearing multiple hats. The hardest thing is to get to that, you know, first million and really being able to do that. It oftentimes doesn't happen, you know, $5, $10 at a time. Happens with really big swings and contracts and being able to help support them in that. And our consumer community has also just been so rapidly growing. We've supported over, you know, 3 million consumers over the course of the last, you know, 7 years or so. And we've done that through our big partnerships with things like Kroger Wellness Festival, where we have 2-day, 200,000-person people, people down in downtown Cincinnati, you know, really engaging with wellness over the course of a weekend, or with WellNext, we're launching in Miami in April 18th and 19th, actually, and being able to, you know, really prioritize what does that mean for the Latina community and How do we really kind of curate what wellness means in Miami for people who are really trying to drive a change and not trying to just get an Instagram photo?

Well, congratulations on that growth.

Thank you.

To get to engage so many people and to be able to make a difference in their lives.

Yeah, yeah. We really— it's— it kind of for me speaks to legacy. I, you know, when I set out on my own, I think I really saw a hole in the market for how do we really combat wellness washing and how do we really get the right businesses that are doing the right work and not smash and grab to get them to be— feel supported with their growth strategies, help them understand strategic positioning, but also build a culture internally that is going to do this for a long time. And so while I'm helping others to build legacy what's really been unique to me, and I've really been thinking a lot about this over the last year, is what's my own legacy? And I can really go back to my mission of catalyzing human potential and say, wow, I think I built this pretty intentionally. Like, I didn't know what it was going to be, you know, what it is today. If you would have told me that 10 years ago, I would have laughed in your face because it's just truly something I never had experienced before. But what I can say is the feeling of it, of being surrounded by incredible business owners, by being able to support people in, you know, advancing my own mission. I knew that I was going to be doing that. I just didn't know what it was going to look like.

Let's talk a little bit about your go-to-market strategy. What's working when it comes to sales, marketing outreach? Where are you seeing the traction?

Yeah, so I would say that for us, we have just such an incredible referral base. And so maximizing our ability to deepen the relationships with those that we've worked with in the past and you know, leverage the power of community in that regard of happy customers, that for me will always be something that is, you know, going to continue to pay off in spades. And we've— that's reciprocal, right? It's— I'm very, very invested in the growth of my current clients and then they, you know, are able— so it's very, you know, guerrilla, grassroots. But I would say that on the, on the complete opposite side, we're leveraging a tool right now called Apollo.io. And I'm unsure if you've ever heard of it, but it's a CRM that's that's really allowing for us to do more cold outreach and building a relationship over time with providing real value to new clients we've never met before through lead generation tools and being able to create a sense of community by inviting them to experiences and events that, you know, provide them special access to things like Wellness Week in downtown Miami. That's— we're a part of that as a part of WellNext. But I'm a curator and have access to 50% off, you know, codes to be able to go to a B2B conference that has the CEOs of Equinox and the CEO of, you know, My Body Green, and, you know, all of these other very high-powered decision makers in one room. And I like the idea that I can provide access to that and, you know, be able to connect with new people in new ways. And Apollo.io has allowed for me a way to do that. I guess the last is, you know, LinkedIn has really been an incredible driver for us. People, you know, are through thought leadership and discovery we've been able to really, really drive those relationships that we want because, you know, people don't always need us right away, but when they need us, they need us, and we come in and we can really help make a difference.

There's a lot of buzz right now around AI and automation. Obviously, it's changing every industry.

Yeah.

How are you using it for your business?

Sure. So a couple of different ways. For us, you know, we are automating the way that we do outreach. So as I'd mentioned, through Apollo, follow. It's really changed the game, you know. For me, I was always the business development resource of one, and now I feel like I've got a team of 20 that are able to go out and do so much on behalf of, of me through personalization and really kind of listening to my voice, um, and hearing, you know, me kind of come through. And then it allows for me to do what I get the most energized by, which is building true relationships, getting on the phone and actually just chatting with people. It's my favorite thing because I really think the combination of my, my brand strategy brain and like kind of knowing how to do some of that work. That's what Wise Wellness Guild is all about, is, you know, really being able to champion brand strategies, objectives, and KPIs and then, you know, translate that into winning go-to-market strategies. I would say that we also are using it for a lot of content. So we use Adobe Firefly right now almost exclusively to create a lot of virtual content, storytelling content, not only for us but also for our clients. And the difference, it's almost indiscernible between like what a video shoot looks like versus what we're building. And that has been a game changer for us because we work with global companies and can't always get out to London to do a video shoot. So how can we do that in a really meaningful, affordable way? It's allowed for us democratize what we do for our billion-dollar clients down to what we do for some of our mid-tier clients. And that, you know, being able to support them in that way and maximize has been just wild and mind-bending because, you know, I grew up in the age that, you know, at the CPG I worked at where, you know, these are $100,000 shoots to do advertising and, you know, you've got to have the brand agency of record on, you know, on staff. And there's, you know, you're paying for 30 people to be in a room that are literally not doing anything except eating from the snack cart. And so now I can, you know, do a quick pivot and create a full-fledged 30-second ad, you know, by just putting the right prompt in. And that's been just an absolute game changer for us.

As you try to scale, what are some of the constraints that keep showing up for you? Time, people, systems, capital, leadership. What are you seeing? What are those constraints?

I think that people and capital are probably the two. And while they're connected, I think that they are, they're different in their own right. You know, one thing that has been challenging for me as a leader is I love to invest in people. But what is very clear to me is what got us here isn't going to always get us there. And so knowing that you have the right resource that got you to a certain level, they might also be the thing holding you back and, you know, plateauing your business because they don't necessarily— nobody's going to ever be as invested in your business as you. And the, you know, being able to wrap your head around that and say sometimes that you need to make changes that are right for the company are— that can be very difficult and challenging. What I would say that in leading to capital is for me, because inherently I'm a very, I would say, relatively risk-averse person when it comes to financial business. I've never— I've always bootstrapped everything I've ever done. And I've done that because I got some mentorship early on that said, you know, you know, everything you make, reinvest back into the business. But what I've realized very quickly is that, you know, there does come a time where, you know, just whether it's for cash flow purposes or injecting capital into, you know, for resources and things like that, it's absolutely necessary to get you to the next level. So most recently we've been, we've taken on a line of credit through our key partner and it's the first time I've ever done that. And it's been very, it's such a, I'm like, oh, this is how people do it. This is how it's done is, you know, kind of getting you there. But I've, you know, we've explored other— because of the work we do is more social impact. There are grants available that we've started to explore now is, you know, other and other like more government partnerships because we're solving a lot of the same challenges with their own health and wellness goals for America and what they're trying to achieve. So we're, we're exploring some of those options.

When you look at the next stage of growth, What are you most excited about?

Scale. I'm really excited with, in particular, with Wellnext. We are launching in Miami. We have New Orleans in November. We have following that Houston and then Orlando. And we're hoping to be in 12 cities in the next 3 years. And I feel as though my partner and I, his name is Mike Millay, he's a former vice president at Disney. He started the Disney marathons and, you know, did open ESPNY World of Sports. Just incredible guy. Between the two of us, we absolutely see the vision. But what it's doing is so much more than just bringing, bringing the wellness circus to town, right? Because that's what it could be. It could be these two-day festivals that go from city to city. We are aggregating and curating the best in wellness in each of these cities and, you know, bringing big business in to support the gaps in what— but really heroing and highlighting the local businesses that are doing the right work. We use AI. I didn't mention that previously, but we're using AI to aggregate the best in wellness and we pull it together with our own proprietary vetting methodology. And so when we go to these cities, we go to Miami, we go to New Orleans, we go to Houston, Orlando, The flavor of what wellness is is so different in each one of those cultures and how we bring that to life is different. If you can imagine, New Orleans culture for wellness is very different than Miami's and who we serve and being able to really maximize that experience, make it feel unique to each culture and respect the culture and the differences there, I think is really crucial. And what I would say is I'm, I'm most excited because it's catalyzing a movement of wellness in these cities that didn't previously exist. Um, maybe in Miami it existed. They are the number 2 wellness city in the country, but definitely not in these other cities. Um, there's not anything that really is centralizing this and putting a tentpole in the ground and saying, you know, we really want more and better for our citizens, and we want people to come here and visit us because we're a wellness city.

Let's look back at your journey for a minute. 2019, 7, 7 years. Talk to me about some of the wins and the mistakes or some of the lessons you've learned along that journey.

Oh man, um, one of my favorite stories to tell is, uh, I started Wise Wellness Guild actually as a social club, and it was intended to be a social club for women, that there was going to be a physical brick-and-mortar location that people could go to and they could get access to the best in wellness. So they could get, you know, they could take a nap, they could meet with a financial advisor, they could do sound bowl healing. And, you know, we were— it was February of 2020 and I was getting ready to sign on the dotted line. And luckily I didn't because I kind of had heard of this virus this happening in China, and I wasn't sure what that was all about. And so I— the irony of all of it is I was in New Orleans in March and came back and said, I think that we've got to pause on this. And I had already fundraised, I had already had founding members, I had already had capital, you know, I had sunk cost invested in this. And I realized very quickly that I was going to have to pivot. And so, you know, big lesson and, you know, big with on the main idea of what I left my full-time job for in October of 2019, you know, really became this huge opportunity to say, what does the world need it to be right now? And I am very proud of myself for pivoting so quickly and learning and iterating. And what I came to realize that so many other founders, you know, you can go in with the best-laid plan, but you can't see a pandemic coming. I mean, it's just not possible unless you have a crystal ball, which if you do, hit me up because I would love to commission you to sit next to me so you could just tell me what to do. But I think that, you know, some other things that I did right and maybe some things where I whiffed on is, you know, I started with what I love most, which is relationships and just getting on the phone and talking to people, listening to people's needs. And one of the big pivots that we made is we took that community that we had already started building in real life and we were going to translate to being members of a clubhouse and took them online and we started doing online wellness programming almost instantaneously. And that was when a lot of larger corporations had never done remote work. I was fortunate that my friend, my former employer, was global and I had always done WebEx and, you know, Zoom and things like that. So it wasn't new for me. It was kind of second nature. So that gave us just an initial kind of ability to really see the opportunity and seize the moment, take the opportunity to really maximize value for our clients and step in and solve a real problem. And then we kind of dug a little deeper and said, how do we maybe use this as an opportunity to learn? Um, one of my biggest flubs, I would say, um, you know, I think taking on more than I maybe was ready for, um, you know, too big of a project maybe, you know, like I definitely believe I have that gene that you know, I'll always figure it out. And I do believe that, but you just sometimes need more resources, capital investment, and things like that. And there have been a few projects where I look back and I say, I could have done this better, you know, I could have been more clear on the brief, I could have, you know, gotten a little bit more from a revenue standpoint, and maybe taken on jobs that I shouldn't have taken on because the client wasn't ready, but they thought they were. And so push back a little bit on it, I, you know, took because I wanted to help. And so where I think we've really learned a lot in this phase of our growth has been, you know, it's okay to walk away from things that aren't a good fit, whether it's personality or whether it's scope, you know, whatever that looks like, and do what we really do best. And I think not try to take on more than maybe we are quite ready for, which a lot of times is in, you know, more tech stack development, things like that, that that are just, you know, not necessarily always in our wheelhouse. And we found a lot of good strategic partners to be able to refer to.

My last question here: any final thoughts or advice that you give to other entrepreneurs who are on a similar journey?

I would say that pay attention to your own gut more often than you listen to what your brain is telling you, because— and to be able to do that means that you have to really know yourself and be honest with yourself and not lie to yourself. And I think that if you've gotten to the place where a lot of your listeners are, which is they're not startups anymore, you know, they're in growth mode, in order to be able to sustain yourself as a leader and to show up as the best way, you really do have to put systems in place to invest in your wellness. And so that's my number one thing is like not even business related, but you're the number one asset that your company has. And I really do see it as that. And I say that it's like, you know, I probably take a few notes for myself this week, just it's been kind of crazy. But I think that the second thing is to really have a clear idea of your funding strategy. Going into things and know how you're going to, again, sustain yourself as a founder. A lot of people say, you know, founders eat last, and I don't agree with that. I spent the first 4 years of my business not paying myself a dime, and I almost quit, you know, and then I finally had a really great business coach sit down and say, why? What made you think that this was a good idea? Like, why did you do that? Why did you reinvest everything? You're part of the investment, Stevie. If anybody's ever going to buy you, you know, if they're going to want you, you know, they're going to want Stevie. And so that really recalibrated a lot for me of saying what is absolutely necessary for you to take home and how can you invest in yourself as a founder to keep doing this? And then I think the last piece of feedback that I heard, you know, maybe guidance that I would give is, you know, find a really great group of contractors that can step in. They don't have to be full-time resources. That are just really, really experts. They're like ninjas in AI, or they're ninjas at like certain things that you can like turn on, turn off, and like let them manage and grow it without you having to be involved in everything. Because when you can build trust and respect with a few key like really great resources that you don't need to have on full time with full benefits and all of that because they're getting that elsewhere, man, that's been a magical combo for me. I'm like, it's been really wonderful and given me a lot of flexibility over the years.

Well, Stevie, thank you so much for sharing your story and insights with us. I really appreciate the conversation. Love the enthusiasm. Clearly there's a lot of passion behind what you're doing. For those listening, if you want to learn more about what Stevie is building at Wise Wellness Guild, you can visit wisewellnessguild.com. And that'll wrap up today's episode of the Achieve Podcast. A big thank you to our sponsor Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional executives for growing businesses. And if you enjoyed today's conversation, follow the show, share with other entrepreneurs who'd also find value in it. And again, thank you for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Achieve Podcast.