Good afternoon, everyone. This is Andy Karuza, and I'm here for another NachoTuesday. Today we have Jared with Wellzyperks, and we're going to be talking about work-life balance and the importance of wellness trends in 2023. Given the fact that a lot of people are coming out of COVID, many are still dealing with PTSD and reintegrating back into the office. Companies are wondering how to keep their employees happy. Jared is here to give us tips on the latest trends in 2023 for employee happiness and well-being. So, Jared, can you give us an elevator pitch and introduce your platform to us? Thank you so much for having me. Wellesley perks is essentially a wellness perks platform that aims to bridge the gap between consumers, employees, and better-for-you brands. We have negotiated directly with over 200 brands, covering various wellness categories such as food, supplements, travel, clean beauty, and more. Our platform offers members discounts, savings, and premium perks from these brands. We focus on both well-known and up-and-coming brands, providing our members with valuable benefits. What are some of the popular products on your platform? What do customers use the most? We're seeing a wide variety of products being popular on our platform. There is interest in different food items, supplements, and beverages like coffee and wine. Mental health-oriented products like the app Headspace are also gaining popularity. Additionally, home products such as non-toxic candles and women's clothing and activewear are in demand. It's been interesting to see the diverse mix of products that our customers are enjoying. By the way, if you have melatonin, I might need that for my red-eye flight tonight. We do have sleep-related products, including some without melatonin. So we can definitely help you with recommendations. Can you tell us more about how you started down this career path and why you're passionate about helping companies find better wellness for their employees? After initially planning to attend medical school, I got involved in an entrepreneurial venture with my brother. However, I always had a passion for health and healing, which led me to study nutrition, yoga, and meditation. I started practicing as a coach and eventually launched a digital media content publisher called cleanplates.com. Through my journey, I realized there were many fantastic people and brands in the wellness space, but the affordability and accessibility were challenges. This inspired me to create Wellesley perks, a platform that brings together these brands and offers affordable and valuable perks to make wellness accessible to more people. Your company's turnkey solution for workplace wellness is beneficial for companies. What tips can you offer the audience for finding work-life balance, and why is it important for attracting and retaining talent? Finding work-life balance is crucial, although I may not be the best example currently with my three daughters and a busy schedule. Nevertheless, I believe it starts with taking care of your internal world, which includes having a meditation practice. Balancing your thoughts and emotions is vital, as many of us have a dysfunctional relationship with our internal world. Taking care of our mental health and well-being is the foundation for work-life balance. It's important for attracting and retaining talent because employees who feel supported in their work-life balance are happier, more productive, and more likely to stay with a company. Providing a supportive work environment and access to wellness perks like those offered on our platform can make a significant difference. Having a better kind of control over that and like being able to see it clearly and make those decisions, even if you're feeling an impulse to be pulled to something else that's less beneficial. So, what are some common perks that a company could offer its employees that any company can get started with to put a wellness program into effect? Well, that's part of the reason why we created Wellesley perks. We're both direct-to-consumer and employee wellness. We felt that it's an all-in-one place. There are many perks platforms out there, but most of them offer different things and some elements of wellness. We are much more comprehensive and have a lot more depth and breadth. We also have a lot more up-and-coming companies because we have our fingers on the pulse of what's going on in the industry. We've been working with clean plates for almost 12 years now, so we really know what's going on. Within the platform, there are perks that offer things for the employees, such as apps like Headspace or even lab tests and functional medicine doctor visits. There are all different things, like ordering supplements, ordering food, digital fitness stuff, fitness equipment, and more. Depending on your interests, it gives you the ability to engage in your wellness, not only doing the things you already want to do and saving money but also discovering new things you didn't even know existed. We're getting a lot of feedback from people who are excited because they found companies they never even heard of and love them. No one's half the battle, exactly. It takes a lot of time to sift through and determine who's healthwashing or greenwashing and what's credible and doing a good job. We take the time to do all that for you. What are your thoughts on other perks like remote work, vacation time, and how to manage that? And what about dogs in the office? I don't want to say anything that will get all the CEOs and HR people mad at me, but this is a free space. I'm a big believer that for the most part, we should treat each other like adults. We're grown-ups. I still work virtually for the most part. If you give people the ability to be happy, they end up being more productive. We all have responsibilities, whether it's kids, pets, or passions like travel. Creating balance and allowing people the freedom to have that balance and manage their time better makes them more productive. I remember when I was in New York City before I moved to the West Coast, even as the CEO and owner of the company, I would find myself sitting there, caught up, looking busy because I didn't want to leave the office early. I could have taken care of personal stuff and still gotten work done. Being forced to be somewhere often makes us unproductive. Allowing people to be more grown-up and balance their time makes them ultimately more productive and appreciate the fact that they have a good situation. For me, it's about getting the work done. I don't look at anything as a strict 9 to 5. Personally, I'll be up at 11 o'clock at night doing emails and work. If you have to do a doctor's appointment or something in the middle of the day, just get it done as long as you meet your goals and get your work done. I work a lot more than I'm supposed to because it makes me more productive. I start feeling guilty, like, "Oh, I had to go to a doctor's appointment." You feel like people are watching over you. It just becomes an unpleasant feeling that you then relate to your job and not wanting to stay in it. And that's, you know, I think, yeah, happy, you know, motivated people are always to... but work, and, you know, do you find that they just actually put in any more hours? Yeah, they care about this, yeah, they care about their company, they care about the circumstances. They don't, you know, they appreciate it, so they don't want it to change. Yeah, yeah, if you love what you do, you know, in my opinion, you never work a day in your life. Like, I wake up every day excited to do stuff like this. So, exactly, no, for sure. Um, so what do you see wellness perks and trends going, uh, evolving over the next few years? So, what kind of trends do you think are going to be really important for corporate wellness? I think the big thing I'm hearing, which I know I've said a few times, is really around mental health. Like, companies that I'm speaking to, like, everybody's really, like, that's their primary focus. And, you know, like you were saying earlier on when you first opened up about kind of, you know, PTSD with COVID and going in the transition from remote work to an office, there's just a lot of stress. And then just in general, life is stressful. And, um, feels like it's speeding up. And so, I think the mental health thing is a big thing. I also, the other, some of the other trends I'm seeing, like, more and more, and some of it relates to, like, insurance and where insurance is covering certain things. Um, but, like, in... I was mentioning there's, you know, kind of a stream of form of medicine, which, you know, these are our medical doctors, but they practice called functional medicine. Um, which is a little more, you know, they're based on getting to the root cause. They have really good testing to figure out what the root cause is. And they're getting, like, there's a company called Parsley Health that is, like, a subscription functional medicine doctor practice. And they're, like, getting covered now by insurance. And so, they're working on relationships with, like, employers to be able, so for the employees to be able to get visits with these functional medicine doctors and get the proper testing. And so, I think, like, a lot of stuff like that is also, like, coming down the pipeline more and more. Um, so I know there's been a big push to get more coverage through insurance. So, I would say, for me, those are the two big things I'm seeing and hearing about. But definitely, the mental health is far and away, like, where people are focused. You know, and that comes in different forms, from, like I said, like, you know, whether it's the meditation apps or these, like, telehealth services. And, um, you know, and then, like you were saying, like, just some of these other, like, kind of loosening up of restrictions, of, like, you know, of that, like, work-life balance and allowing people to, you know, function with a little more autonomy. Yeah, no, it's just, uh, rushing to the office every morning, wasting an hour in traffic both ways. No, absolutely. Yeah, no, Well-known a keto instructor, and it's really interesting, but he kind of applies it to both, both kind of life, but also to business and like the, you know, the process of becoming a master and like which never really ends. There's never, there never is like an end result. So I'm really uh enjoying that. That's actually it's really well done. The true wise man knows that he knows nothing. Exactly, yeah. So um, I guess what's one thing potential customers should know about your platform and why they should pick you guys over, you know, say some other program that might be out there? I mean, the choice is obvious for me, but I'll be watching. Yeah, I think for me, it's a combination of a few things. One is that it's um, it's a really well-curated mix of brands that are really doing a great job, which doesn't exist elsewhere. There's a lot of like kind of general platforms where you see platforms with some like wellness brands, but it's like the common ones everybody's heard of. This is like a really good mix of like very popular ones and ones that are really up and coming, and we're constantly looking for new ones. And so we're, I mean, that's a big focus for us, is the curation. The fact that it's also like all wellness brands. Um, and then we, we really make a point to negotiate really good deals directly with the brands. And like I said, like, where you, it's not just on the first purchase. So if you really like a brand, you can get savings every time you engage with that brand, which is hard to find anywhere else out there. And then because we're really passionate about our mission, we're able to be like, we're and we're early on to some degree, we're, we're really being super flexible on the pricing. So it's very, you know, for companies that are looking for a really, like, affordable way, you like to offer a really high-value benefit, we're being very aggressive with it, with the pricing. We really want to, you know, build our membership and really just get it out there so more people are engaging with these brands so we could fulfill our mission. That's great. So what's next for you guys? I mean, obviously, you're gonna be adding a lot more great perks. You got any other, like, platform features coming out or anything like that? We're thinking about it. We're, you know, we're also even exploring a lot of like AI and how we could kind of leverage that. Um, so yeah, what's that like AI-based like meal planning based on people's diets or whatever? Yeah, potentially, related to meal planning, relating to like, you know, just good content. I mean, we're also thinking about doing like a whole event series. Um, you know, we have all these like experts in general, we have relationships with a lot of experts in the field, but then also like a lot of these, you know, what I realize over time is a lot of these founders of all these different companies because they have a passion and an expertise, they develop their products or services, and they're a great wealth of information. And so like even like I'm interviewing right now. And so like, yeah, just like doing some kind of like, you know, event series. Um, so yeah, we have a lot of ideas. Where kind of the core focus since it's early on is like just adding