When Malvern’s Tony Frick took over as the CEO of HUSK, he saved the Wayne-based platform from financial ruin in just five months. Eight years later, the brand is on its way to becoming one of the nation’s top wellness tech companies, currently serving more than 70 million people. All that success attracted the attention of the Volaris Group, a $70 billion public company that acquired HUSK this past September.
MLT: What brought you to HUSK?
TF: It was very serendipitous. My whole career journey has been in the healthcare space, and I actually sat on the board of GlobalFit, which was the predecessor to HUSK. They unfortunately had a pretty disastrous 2016. One day, we’re riding in the elevator after a board meeting, and my board members turn to me and say, “You wanna go run this?” I didn’t even have to think about it. I went in, and we made the business profitable.
MLT: What’s changed since you took over?
TF: We pivoted a business that was just about fitness to a whole host of different wellness verticals. With nutrition, mental health and physical therapy services, it really runs the gamut now. We’ve quadrupled in size, and we’ve grown at about 30% every year from a revenue standpoint.
MLT: Take us back to the beginning of GlobalFit.
TF: In the ’90s, employers were looking to incentivize and facilitate healthy living for their employees because they saw the impact that would have on productivity and healthcare claims. When it was founded in 1992, GlobalFit went out and negotiated best-in-class rates to big-box gyms, packaging it in an e-commerce platform and selling it to employers and insurers as a wellness benefit. It was one of the first of its kind.
MLT: What went wrong?
TF: They didn’t keep up with the times. There was the advent of studios and digital fitness, and we were still just this big-box gym company. The strategy was really to build a more progressive and contemporary wellness business.
MLT: How did you do that?
TF: By addressing cost and access. It’s expensive to engage a registered dietician, visit a licensed therapist, or go into a gym or studio. Even if you have the means to pay, sometimes it’s hard to find the right clinician or get off the waiting list. We’ve addressed this by reducing costs for the employer and the patient by taking insurance—which no one was doing at the time—and increasing access by leveraging telemedicine.
MLT: And what about the name?
TF: There’s this old Ben Stiller movie called Dodgeball. He works for a business called Globo Gym, and they’re a bad company. Sounds similar to GlobalFit, right? When I took the job, my former lacrosse teammates sent me a photo with my head superimposed on Stiller’s body and said, “Good luck, bud!” We had to do a full rebranding initiative and settled on HUSK because it’s the protective shell in which something amazing can flourish. We view ourselves as that supportive framework.
Visit huskwellness.com.
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