#5 A couple on an successful entrepreneurial journey in well-being

In this episode, Greg talks to Joana and Pierre Meyer, the founders of Nordic Balance, a well-being company based in London. They share their story going from senior roles in catering to personal training to creating a gym to opening multiple therapy clinics. All of this while founding a family.

Their journey has humble beginnings. Their clarity on what they wanted, their patience, their love of what they do, the complementary team they form, their openness to opportunities has led them to success.

Listen to the full story here or on your usual podcast player or read the story below.

Key Learnings

Knowing and doing what you want

Joana: I was maturing a little bit. I think up until the point where I came to London, I was very unsettled as a person, as, not really knowing why I wanted to go, what direction I wanted to go, where I wanted to be. And I realized actually, maybe the time was good to be a little bit more serious.

Joana: I realized after doing the catering for many years, that actually I very much didn't like it. I was good at it, but that's mostly because I'm good at most physical, practical things. But I didn't enjoy it. So what I did enjoy In this episode, Greg talks to Joana and Pierre Meyer, the founders of Nordic Balance, a well-being company based in London. They share their story going from senior roles in catering to personal training to creating a gym to opening multiple therapy clinics. All of this while founding a family.

Their journey has humble beginnings. Their clarity on what they wanted, their patience, their love of what they do, the complementary team they form, their openness to opportunities has led them to success.

Listen to the full story here or read the details below.was physical health and fitness and wellbeing. And so I reeducated myself to become a personal trainer. And that's how I started. That is slowly how, I guess the seed was born for Nordic balance.

Joana: When they told Pierre, you won't be able to take time off for the birth of your son, Pierre just threw the towel in and said, okay, then I quit. 

Pierre: I was then working in this job, which on paper was amazing. And, I was working with the CEO of this business and it was a bit of a fast track thing and effectively he wanted to grow his business and he thought that I was the right guy to do it. When they said, we don't legally have to give you any time off. I thought: how many kids are we going to have? We can have two, right? I'm not gonna miss this for a job. And so for me, it started becoming a reasonably simple decision at that point.

Pierre: We started to talk a lot about designing our lives to work for us. So finding a solution that would work well with our family so that we could spend the time that we wanted with them and hopefully, earn some money, doing it at the same time.

Pierre: Someone once said to me, it's one of those cliches: you're never going to lie on your deathbed and wish that you'd worked more, you're going to wish you’d spent more time with your family. That always just stuck with me.

Pierre: I think South Africans, we have no net around us you're taught to stand on your own two feet very fast. You can't rely on other people to look after you. It was never really in doubt that I would work for myself. And just the question was what I would do.

Pierre: At this point it reinforced to my family that I'd made the wrong choice. it was like, how could you do this? You've spent so much money on your education. I didn't know what the answer was. I just knew what I didn't want at that point.

Pierre: I enjoyed that idea of building something of value. And that's not financial value. Building something of value that actually does make a difference with people and that can exist without us.

Do what you love, it will be contagious!

Joana: This slightly changed things for me when I realized that actually I must be pretty decent at what I do and to gain that trust.

Joana: In order to get really great success, is not even just about the knowledge. It's not even just about having a university degree. It's about pouring your love and real attention into what you're doing. And if you love something, it will be a success. Because if you just enjoy doing what you do, it will be contagious and people will come to you. And I think actually that kind of happened to us in St. James's. We never had Sunday blues. which used to happen to us all the time previously.

Joana: It's just all about feeling really strongly about your product and then not worrying that much about what it looks like to other people. Because we have enjoyed it, it has become what it is today.

Pierre: But the downside of doing something that you love is that you take the success well, but of course you take the failures really personally. Over the last 13 years of doing this, we've had to try and learn not to do.

Humble beginnings, 18-year MBA

Pierre: I didn't know what I was going to do. I ended up doing just a bad job working in a restaurant with an honors degree in finance and economics.

Joana: It was a sticky period. I remember this very well. It's super vivid for me. For me, the priority was still PT. I only had three months, maybe not even with Finley, full-time at home. And then I came to the gym and people would come with me and Pierre would sit in the hallway and hold Finley. And I would ask people to do squats and lunges and exercises, and then they'd come back and we would breastfeed Finley, go back into the gym, do some more, go back to Pierre. And we would sit in different cafes around Piccadilly circus and basically breastfeed. And Pierre would be the person to take care of Finley and then work on some other things.

Pierre: We had to get good trainers. I remember the first time placing an ad and getting people in and sitting down in a coffee shop in a cafe near Jermyn Street and interviewing these people who wanted to come and work for us. And we were like: you got to realize, we don't even know what we're doing here. We have no clue! Are you sure? It was astounding that people actually wanted to come and work for us! 

Pierre: There were six paying members of the gym at the time, on St. James's Square. You look at it and you're like, wow, that's pretty bad. Because it was pretty bad. But we always had a sense of wanting to improve it. We then took quite a slow route to get to that place. I was listening to something previously, this guy had worked in the same place for 18 years. Then he went off and started another business, which became a runaway success. He said, I had an 18-year MBA. it was just a learning process for him. And that's what we did.

Basing big bold and risky decisions on values and gut feel 

Pierre: I remember landing in February. February in Cape town is a fairly amazing time of the year. I'd been on the beach in the morning. I got on the plane. I still got off the plane in Heathrow wearing shorts, flip flops, a t-shirt and a little jumper, sand on my feet. And obviously you've got met with London in February. People don't write a lot of poems about London in February. It's a fairly dark time. So that was a bit of a rude awakening I think is probably the best way to put it.

Pierre: I was working as a consultant at the time. And Jo was just about to go on maternity leave, when working self-employed! There was no safety net. It was basically just the two of us. And then I quit my job and said let's do this thing.

Joana: It was all very much unstable at that stage. We both felt that there was something more there to be had. And so we keep going. I think it was not even something we'd discussed: should we do this? Is this right? Is this gonna work? We were maybe a little bit more naive.

Joana: We'd never even discussed plan B. Pierre: To bear in mind, this is 2008, 20th of December. So the world had basically fallen on everyone's heads. If you think about it, it's not maybe the smartest play. Joana: still we didn't question it. Thinking about it now, not questioning, it was really crazy.

Pierre: We both believed that if it didn't work, we could probably end up getting a job, doing what we were previously doing. We had good enough contacts that probably if push came to shove, we could have gone back into it. It felt like we had a bit of a safety net.

Joana: Gut feeling: You can feel it’s right, or it can feel it's wrong. Often we overthink things, we over discuss things and then we just go. But if it feels right now, then I act on it right now. it's what's led us quite a lot.

Pierre: We've never been guaranteed that we would succeed. But we've taken an opportunity and we've zigged and zagged along and we've gone left and right and you get to a place where you have something that's worth value. But if you didn't make that decision in the first place, you didn't have that conversation, you didn't go with it, then you would never really know.

Overcoming your fears when making a transition

Joana: Because I was a bit older when I became a Personal Trainer, I was very nervous. Most PTs are very young, 19, 20, 22, very fit, slim. It's fast. I was not bad. And while I was fit I was also very nervous. I came from a highly paid job to nothing, and I thought, gosh, who's going to want to train with an old personal trainer?

Joana: When we did get pregnant everything was thrown back into the deep end of things. I started to immediately alarm bells going off. What now? And what are we going to do financially? And then we were both out of work, with three days before the birth of our first child, which was far from ideal. And at that point, we were forced to think laterally and Pierre came up with this idea that we'll get somebody on board that will take over my clients. I was a little bit reluctant. And then I realized I actually had to go with this because otherwise [all my work gaining clients] will amount to nothing.

Pierre: A lot of the time we are our own handbrake, that doubt comes into you and it's oh, I can't do this. Oh, it's going to be really hard and there's going to be discomfort and things like that. And there is absolutely going to be discomfort. And it happens all the time. The downside of all this stuff is that it's uncomfortable. But being uncomfortable shouldn't be the reason not to do it. For me, that was a bit of a light bulb moment where instead of doubting myself, it became more about actually I can do this.

Magical things happen when you accept the power of serendipity and stay open to opportunities

Joana: And so I reeducated myself to become a personal trainer. And that's how I started. That is slowly how, I guess the seed was born for Nordic balance.

Joana: [The gym I was using] closed down and one of my clients just said, oh, I know this really bad Gym in St James’ Square, it looks really rubbish and there's like mice on the floor. I don't know if you want to go there, but you can train me there. I said, okay, let's go and check it out. And we checked it out and yes, it was awful. It was the really thick TVs on the screen. The carpet on the floor was broken and frayed and it looked really pretty scabby. We started to train there and slowly, some of my other clients came along as they must have loved me. There was one client who said, no, I will never come back here. So some people didn't love me enough. Obviously some people did.

Joana: the very scabby Gym we were producing these PT sessions in decided to throw the gym out to tender. His eyes then lit up and he was like, yeah, let's do this! And I was maybe a little less but I realized at the time that was the right thing and yeah, we decided to go for it and we got it!

Pierre: We started looking at it and saying, actually, we've got an opportunity here to do something. Serendipity kicked in: a series of things started to happen around us, which we were very open to. It allowed us to get a gym on St. James’ Square and allowed us to get a corporate arrangement with a local business, which was effectively how our humbled things started.

Joana: The best things that have happened to me have been the unexpected. I didn't expect to be in London. And I've been here for 23 years. I didn't expect to meet my future husband in a restaurant where I worked and here we are. I didn't think I wanted a house and I have two. I definitely was very unsure that children were something I wanted to have in my life and I have two. And the last thing now we got a dog that I never thought I wanted and I love him.

Pierre: [One of the biggest drivers has been to] be open to opportunities. The difference between a lucky and unlucky person is often just the ability to keep your head up and look around. If someone wants to have a conversation with you, sit and talk to them, engage in what they're doing, listen to what they have to say. They might not be a driver in your life at all, or they may be, you never really know. But if you don't talk to them, there'll never be anything. A lot of the stuff that we've got in our lives has really come off the back of that. Being open to experiences.

Building as a couple - she loves graphs, he’s got ambition! 

Pierre: The thing about this was that Jo really never wanted to do this.

Joana: Whatever will happen, we'll be okay. We will be okay because we've got each other and we can do this. And if it doesn't, if it's not okay, then there will be something else. It was strange, but we never actually considered quitting.

Pierre: We are a husband and wife team, and I think there's so many bits that are weird for lots of people, but there's so many bits of it that actually make a lot of sense. When you get to know us, we are massively different. What I don't do well, Joe does well. And what Joe doesn't do well, I do well. So I think between us, we're reasonably complete. And we maybe knew that on a subconscious level, quite early on that actually we could figure it out.

Pierre: You can't just have a me and you can't just have a Jo, because weirdly between us, we would never do anything in the way that we do it now. She tempers my ambition a lot and makes things a lot more realistic. I push her on to do things that she wouldn't have done previously. And I think we find that sort of middle ground.

Joana: We've grown in confidence together, slightly different stages of it. At times we've pushed each other into something that the other one was maybe hesitating a little bit and other times, I've slowed things down when things were going too fast. Pierre: What I also realized is that Jo likes a graph. As soon as I would pull together stuff about different bits of our business and show it in a graph form, all of a sudden she'd be like: oh wow!

Pierre: We have a good culture in our business. because it's us, we're a husband and wife team, because we're personal. We treat it like a family business. You're going love it or you're going to hate it. Some people come into it. They're like, oh my God, I can't work for a husband and wife. It's just ridiculous. But other people come in and they feel like they've found their home. And that's what we want. We want people to feel like they've found something where they're a part of it and they're engaged and they feel like they're not just a number. They're not just a cash cow effectively to make the bosses rich so that they can go off on extravagant holidays and things like that. It's not like that at all. 

To scale or not to scale? 

Pierre: After doing it for years and years, it just felt like we needed to be a little bit more ambitious about what we wanted to do. Joana: You need it to be more ambitious! Pierre: We started to gain a lot of belief in how we did things. That helped things to take a nice big step forward.

Joana: That's where I really struggled, actually. I struggled to recognize the fact that we have a company and it's actually really great. I tried to play it down. Often people say, what do you do? Oh I've got a little Gym in St James’ Square. I don't even call it a Gym, I call it a studio. And I always wait, it can't be, we are not like this big company, how did this happen?

Joana:  I wanted to slow everything down because I had so much self doubt. In the end, I went: fine! Let's get another place. And we went out and it was very much a gut feeling. We were driving around. Maybe here, maybe there. It was like there, and we both went. Yeah, there! Let's go. There. Let's do this. And a year later we have a clinic there.