The Wellness in Hospitality Podcast

Sonal Uberoi
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Health & Fitness

Get insights firsthand! Join top global wellness expert and author, Sonal Uberoi, as she shares insights from hoteliers all over the world, managing all types of hotels, each with their unique set of challenges (location, owners, regulations, teams, etc.), and learn their wellness in hospitality best practices.

  1. 1d ago

    181. The Golden Rule I Wish Every Hotelier Knew About Wellness

    Have you ever looked back at a wellness concept you were so proud of, and barely recognised what it had become?  Then tune in, because this episode is for you.  This episode is for my hotelier friends out there. But, if you're building any kind of wellness business, this golden rule solves the problem before it starts.  I've distilled more than two decades in this industry, plus my years in Goldman Sachs before it, down to one rule. And once you understand it, you can diagnose exactly where any wellness business is falling short.  Here it is: Wellness succeeds or fails at the level it is designed. It endures at the level it is stewarded. And the level of success you enjoy will never, ever outperform the size of your vision for that wellness business, and your capacity to hold that vision.  I arrived at this rule through several success stories, and through even more failures.  When I first started out, I thought a successful wellness concept meant a fancy brand, a big-name guru, a slick spa menu, the best facilities money could buy. It worked for a few months. Then nothing. I was designing around individual elements, not around what those elements were meant to achieve for the business as a whole.  So I started working differently. I went deep on values, on purpose, on why wellness mattered to that specific hotel. And that produced a second wave of concepts that actually worked as assets, contributing real revenue and real brand value.  I thought I'd cracked it. Box ticked.  Then, about ten years in, someone updating my website asked for success stories. I pulled up properties I'd built a decade earlier, and I couldn't put them forward. They didn't resemble what we'd created. Same amazing owners, same stress-tested concept, no corners cut. But nobody had stewarded it. That's when the second half of the rule landed: design gets you success, but only stewardship makes it last.  Later still, I worked with hoteliers turning around bleeding wellness businesses, and even after fixing the design and building the right team, some of them barely broke even. That's when the third piece clicked. You can design it right and steward it well, and still stay firmly in the sea of sameness, because the level of success you get will never exceed the size of your vision, and your capacity to carry that vision through .  Think about SHA Wellness Clinic here in Spain. People want to replicate what the Bataller family built. But they rarely know the size of the vision behind it, or the two decades of conscientious work it took to hold that vision, especially back when nobody in Spain was even talking about wellness clinics.  In today's episode, here are the 3 things you'll learn:  1.- Why wellness succeeds or fails at the level it's designed, and why chasing brands, treatments, or bling facilities will never be enough on its own.  2.- Why even a beautifully designed wellness concept won't survive ten years without deliberate stewardship, and what stewardship actually looks like in practice.  3.- Why your level of success will never outperform the size of your vision and your capacity to hold it, no matter how well you've designed or stewarded the concept.  By the end of this episode, you'll have a simple diagnostic for any underperforming wellness business: is it a design issue, a stewardship issue, or a vision issue? You'll know exactly where to look first, and you'll understand why some of the most admired wellness brands in the world took decades of held vision to build, not a single well-designed launch.

  2. Sep 27

    180. Escape The Feast-Famine Cycle

    Do you find that one day you have more clients than you can possibly deal with, and then suddenly, none?  Then tune in, because this episode is for you.  This episode is about the cycle almost every new consultant falls into, why it has nothing to do with talent or demand, and the one number that will keep you out of it for good.  I've lived this cycle myself, back when I started out. And it's called the feast-famine cycle.  You leave employment on a high. You're excited, you're telling everyone you're setting up shop, and that energy is electric. It's exactly what pulls in your first clients.  Then the calls start coming. One project. Then another. Then another. Before you know it, you've got more clients than you can handle, usually around three or four, and you're maxed out. You're delivering the work. You're also the CEO, the invoicer, the contract writer, the everything.  That's when you hit the tipping point. A contact calls with a new project, and you say no, too busy. Another contact calls a few weeks later, same answer. You don't realise it yet, but you've just burned two bridges with people who came to you offering work.  Then the contracts run out. The clients disappear. You're in famine, reaching out to a network that isn't as receptive as before, because you already turned them down once. So you cast a wider net. You sign clients again. And because you learned from last time, you push yourself to take on one more than you should. The cycle repeats, just with a wider net each round.  This isn't a day in the life of an entrepreneur.    It’s you not having built the capacity to wear and hold the different hats an entrepreneur puts on. And this capacity is a skill that you can build the same way you built your skills as an employee: through practice, over time.  In today's episode, here are the 3 things you'll learn:  1.- Why the feast-famine cycle isn't about talent or demand, it's about capacity.  2.- How to calculate your oversubscribed number, and why you need to cut it in half.  3.- The 3-step system that keeps clients renewing instead of you starting from zero : sign, deliver, and line up your next move before the contract ends.  By the end of this episode, you'll know exactly how many clients you should actually be taking on at once. You'll have a simple, repeatable system for signing clients without burning out or burning bridges.   And you'll understand why the consultants who build sustainable six-figure businesses aren't the ones who say yes to everyone, they're the ones who know their number and stick to it.

  3. Sep 20

    179. What Is Your Wellness Expertise Actually Worth?

    The number one mistake new wellness consultants make?   They price like an employee.  I see this mistake constantly with wellness professionals who go out on their own.   They carry their employee mindset straight into their consulting business. They trade time for money, because that's the only model they've ever known.  Then they compound the problem. They benchmark their price against consultants who've been in the game for decades because they think all their years of expertise entitle them to that same number.  It doesn't work like that. And I know, because I've been there.  What happens next is predictable. The work takes far longer than expected, because they've forgotten something critical: every result they ever delivered in employment was backed by a team. A department. A whole invisible support system doing the heavy lifting alongside them.  On their own, none of that exists. No team. No authority over their client's staff. No one to hand off the P&L or the PowerPoint. Just them, working double the hours, getting resentful, and eventually asking the client to pay more for time that was never agreed to.  The client gets frustrated. The consultant gets burned out. Nobody wins. And it was entirely avoidable.  In today’s episode, we’ll uncover the following three things :  1.- Why thinking like an employee is what hinders many consultants’ growth.  2.- The demonstrable value pricing model I built in my Goldman Sachs days and still use to this day.  3.- Why walking away from a client who doesn't see your value is sometimes the most profitable decision you'll make.  By the end of this episode, you’ll know exactly why hourly pricing is capping your income, and you'll have a framework to price based on the value you create, not the hours you clock.

  4. Sep 13

    178. Financial Chute First. Then Jump

    70% of businesses fail in year one.  Why ? Because there wasn't enough cash in the bank to keep the lights on. Great ideas don't keep a business alive. Cash flow does.  This episode is about the one step most consultants skip, and the reason so many of them don't make it past year three. Note: This is step five, the final episode in my five-part series on how to make money as a wellness consultant. If you haven't listened to Step 1 (One Way Forward), Step 2 (One Thing, Done Brilliantly), Step 3 (Become Your Client's Obvious Choice), or Step 4 (Overdeliver Consistently), start there. This episode is what makes everything you've built in those four steps actually last. Now, back to the episode. I started Spa Balance in December 2007, using my savings as startup capital.  I had clients. I was working hard. They were repeating with me. On paper, it looked like it was working. Then in 2008, Spain slid into an economic crisis that hit rock bottom by 2012. I still had clients, but they'd stopped paying on time, or stopped paying at all.  So my P&L looked healthy. Every invoice I issued sat there as revenue. But there was no cash in my account, because revenue on paper and cash in the bank are not the same thing.  Hence, I had to crawl back into full-time employment just to stay afloat, all while still running my business, still writing my first ebook. That experience taught me two things I've never forgotten: first, the moment a client defaults with their payments to pause works, and second, I was never again going to ask my business to pay for my lifestyle, or to pay to keep its own lights on, before it was strong enough to do so. Even after I'd published a bestselling book, I made the strategic choice to go back into full-time employment again. My business was doing well, but I'd learned my lesson about buffers. And when the pandemic wiped my reserves clean anyway, I built them back up the same way: strategically, deliberately, with my lifestyle funded separately from my business. Phil Knight ran Nike for ten years while working full-time as an accountant. If the founder of Nike needed a safety net for a decade, none of us are exempt from needing one either. In today’s episode, here are the 3 things you’ll learn: 1.- Why revenue and cash flow are not the same thing — and how a healthy-looking P&L can still leave you unable to pay your bills. 2.- How to calculate your essential living number — the minimum you need to cover your household expenses, so your business is never on the hook to feed you before it's ready to. 3.- Why this step comes last, not first — and how the emotional cycle of change explains why so many consultants skip it, right when they need it most.  By the end of this episode, you'll understand why cash flow, not ideas, is what determines whether your consulting business survives past year one.   You'll know how to build a safety net that funds your lifestyle separately from your business — a low-effort side income or strategic employment — so you're never forced to ask your business for money it doesn't have yet.   And you'll see the full five-step arc, start to finish: direction, offer, sales, delivery, and now, the safety net that lets all four of the others actually hold.

  5. Sep 6

    177. Overdeliver Consistently, Each And Every Time

    There are two ways to overdeliver. One leads to burnout. The other leads to repeat business. Most consultants think overdelivering means bending over backwards. They think it means doing extra hours, allowing scope creep, saying yes to things they don't even know how to do. It doesn't. It means something far more strategic, and far less exhausting.   Note: This is step four of my five-step process for making money as a wellness consultant. If you haven't listened to Step 1 (One Way Forward), Step 2 (One Thing, Done Brilliantly), or Step 3 (Become Your Client's Obvious Choice), go back and start there. This episode is what you do once the client has already said yes.   Now, back to the episode. Ten years into business, I had clients I was almost embarrassed to put on my profile. Not because the hotels were bad or the wellness concept was poor. The hotels were great and the concepts were excellent. I would go in and build a hotel a stunning wellness concept, they'd implement it, and I'd move on because my job was done. Except it wasn't done. Because what I hadn’t realised was that solving one problem for a client creates a new one. They now had this beautiful wellness facility and no idea how to run it. No one to manage it. No plan for what happens when the wellness director leaves. This was a new problem, created by solving the first one. For years, I saw that as a failure. I thought, "I didn't really help them." It took me a decade to see it for what it actually was: a golden opportunity, sitting there the whole time, that I walked straight past. Overdelivering isn't about doing more. It's about seeing further. It’s about anticipating the problem your solution creates before your client even knows it's coming, and having the answer ready. In today’s episode, we’ll cover the following 3 things: 1.- Why "bending over backwards" isn't overdelivering — and what to do instead that doesn't burn you out. 2.- The new problems every solution creates — and why spotting them early is what turns a one-time client into a client for years. 3.- How hotel service-recovery thinking applies directly to consulting — preempting glitches before they happen, instead of putting out fires later down the road.  By the end of this episode, you'll understand the real difference between overdelivering and overextending.   You'll know how to look past the problem you were hired to solve and spot the one it creates next, and why that's where your repeat business actually lives.   You'll also see why a high-ticket, low-volume consulting business depends far more on this step than on constantly finding new clients.

  6. Aug 30

    176. Become Your Client’s Obvious Choice

    Rarely is it a money problem. It's an understanding problem. You've heard "no budget" more times than you can count. And then, weeks later, you find out that same client hired someone else at five times your price. They didn't have a money problem. They had a "you didn't make yourself the obvious choice" problem.  This episode is about fixing that so it doesn’t continue to happen. Note: This is step three of my five-step process for making money as a wellness consultant. If you haven't listened to Step 1 (One Way Forward) or Step 2 (One Thing, Done Brilliantly), start there. Everything in this episode builds on the direction and the offer you set in those two. Now, back to the episode. For the first two to three years of my business, clients weren't hard to find. I was living off relationship equity, the trust I'd built while I was still employed, the results people had watched me deliver, the network that already knew my work. That equity is what carries you in the first years of your business, and it carried me too. But relationship equity runs out. It's not an infinite resource. And when mine did, I had a choice: learn how to sell, or crawl back to full-time employment. I'd already done that twice. I wasn't doing it a third time. Here's what horrified me about "learning to sell". I thought it meant becoming someone sleazy (like the stereotypical car salesman), someone pushy, someone I didn't want to be. Give me a P&L to build any day. Selling myself? No thank you. Then I found Donald Miller's StoryBrand. And that is when the penny dropped for me. If we imagined your client’s property or project to be a movie, your client is the hero of their story. It’s their story, and your role as a consultant is to be the guide. Your client has a problem and you have the solution. So selling isn’t about manipulating your client or forcing them to buy something they don’t want. Selling is telling them, clearly, "I understand your problem, here's how I solve it, here's why my process works, and here's the result you'll have." That's not sleazy. That's clarity. And clarity is what makes you impossible to say no to.   In today’s episode, here are the 3 things we’ll cover: 1.- Why relationship equity always runs out — and what to build instead so your business doesn't stall when it does. 2.- The sales framework that made me stop feeling sleazy about selling — and how understanding your client's entire journey, not just their wallet, eliminates price objections. 3.- Why people don't hire you for who you are — they hire you for who they become. And once you understand that, your marketing and sales process becomes one of guiding your client to the point they’re ready to solve their problem.  By the end of this episode, you'll know exactly why "no budget" is almost never the real objection. You'll understand how to map your client's journey — before you, during you, after you — so you can meet them exactly where they are.   And you'll walk away with a new definition of what it actually means to sell: not convincing or chasing, but connecting so deeply that you become the only name they think of.

  7. Aug 23

    175. One Thing, Done Brilliantly

    The thing you are best at is not always the thing you should build your business around. You can be highly skilled at something and still feel no desire to spend your life doing it. Because building a business requires more than expertise. It requires choosing work you care enough about to keep doing when the road becomes difficult. I am very good at numbers. Finance has always come easily to me, and that ability was sharpened during my time at Goldman Sachs. I was good at the work. But I did not want to build my life around it. I wanted to work in wellness (even if it wasn’t called that way back then). When I made that transition more than 25 years ago, wellness was not the industry it is today. It was harder to explain. Harder to sell. And far harder to build a profitable business around. There were periods when I had very little money. I had to return to full-time employment and find other ways to support myself while continuing to build my consulting business. What carried me through those years was not that wellness came easily to me. It was that I cared deeply about it. I had the raw passion and the deep desire to keep going, keep learning and become brilliant at the work I had chosen. That experience taught me that your business should not simply be built around what you can do. It should be built around work you want to become exceptional at doing.   In this episode, we uncover: 1. Why the work you are good at is not always the right work for your business A skill can come naturally to you without giving you the energy or desire to build a business around it. Your experience and ability matter, but they are not the only criteria. You also need to care enough about the work to stay with it through the difficult years of entrepreneurship. 2. Why more services do not automatically create more value Many wellness professionals try to demonstrate their value by showing clients everything they can do. But a long list of services often creates confusion rather than confidence. Your client does not need to understand the full extent of your expertise. They need to understand the one problem you can help them solve. Less creates clarity. And one thing done brilliantly creates more value than an entire kitchen sink of disconnected services. 3. How to bring together passion, expertise and a problem worth solving Passion alone does not create a viable business.  Your one thing also needs to matter to the people you want to serve.  The opportunity is to connect:  The work you love doing.  The expertise you have spent years building.  And a meaningful problem your client is willing to pay you to solve.  That intersection becomes the foundation of a strong signature offer.  By the end of this episode, you will understand why your business does not need to contain every skill, qualification or service you can offer.  You will begin to distinguish between the work you are capable of doing and the work you genuinely want to become known for.  You will also see how to connect that work to a meaningful client problem, so your offer is not only aligned with you but valuable to the people you want to serve.  Most importantly, you will understand why deep desire matters.  Because expertise may help you begin, but your passion for the work is what helps you endure long enough to become brilliant at it.

  8. Aug 16

    174. One Road Forward

    There are many ways to make money as a wellness consultant. You can become an internal consultant. You can work project by project. Or you can carve out a specialist niche of your own. All of these paths can work. But you cannot build momentum while trying to walk down all of them at once. When I started consulting more than 18 years ago, I tried to do everything. I became an internal consultant for a hotel company. I took on project-based work helping a boutique hotel open their spa. And at the same time, I began creating what would eventually become my own education platform and specialist methodology. On paper, it looked like I was creating multiple opportunities. In reality, I was running in several different directions. I took whatever came my way and measured success by how much work I could collect. But when the financial crisis hit Spain in 2012, I had to return to full-time employment and move to another part of the world. Looking back, one of the biggest reasons was that I had never chosen one clear path. I wanted to be on all of them. And when you keep jumping from one road to another, you never stay on one long enough to learn what works, develop the right skills or create sustainable momentum. That experience taught me a lesson I have never forgotten: All roads may lead to Rome. But you still have to choose one. In this episode, we uncover: 1. The 3 paths available to wellness consultants You can become an internal consultant, working closely with one company and advising them from inside. You can become a project-based consultant, coming in for a defined period of time to deliver a specific result for a fixed fee. Or you can become a specialist consultant, carving out your own niche, methodology and way of working. None of these paths is inherently better than the others. The right path is the one you choose and commit to.   2. Why constantly changing direction keeps you stuck When clients do not come quickly, it is tempting to assume that you have chosen the wrong path.  You change your offer, your positioning and your audience.  You can even start again. But every path comes with its own challenges.  What looks easier from the outside will still require you to learn how to communicate your value, solve the right problem and deliver a result your client cares about.  Changing direction every time something feels difficult does not create progress.  It delays it.  3. Why commitment matters more than choosing perfectly You do not need to find the perfect path.  You need to choose a path and stay with it long enough to learn what it can teach you.  Like choosing a route on Google Maps, there may be several ways to reach the same destination.  Some may be faster.  Some may be longer.  Some may include unexpected traffic or road closures.  That does not mean you chose incorrectly.  It simply means that the route has challenges you could not have predicted.  Progress begins when you choose one road and start moving.  By the end of this episode, you will understand the three main paths available to you as a wellness consultant.  You will be able to see which path best fits where you are today, the type of work you want to do and the business you want to build.  You will also understand why choosing one road does not mean committing to it forever.  It means committing to it long enough to develop the skills, experience and confidence you need to make it work.  Most importantly, you will see that clarity does not come before action.  Clarity comes from choosing a path, walking it and learning as you go.

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Get insights firsthand! Join top global wellness expert and author, Sonal Uberoi, as she shares insights from hoteliers all over the world, managing all types of hotels, each with their unique set of challenges (location, owners, regulations, teams, etc.), and learn their wellness in hospitality best practices.

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