#53 Tina Schweigher: Re-Envisioning Corporate Mental Health, because #feelingsmatter
Tina founded her first business in 2002. Over the past two decades she’s experienced two exits and is now starting her 9th business called Mindful Appy. (Because #feelingsmatter) Mindful Appy is the leading diagnostic tool for corporate mental health. With no additional software, companies can compare and contrast company data by department, region, job title, and more. Today we talk with Tina about why this approach is the future of workplace happiness.
SHOW NOTES:
Transcript:
Erin 00:22
Okay. Hey everyone. I'm Aaron Massa Pietro joined alongside Michael Benatar. And this is the call me crazy podcast where we interview inspiring entrepreneurs. like today's guest, Tina schweiger, who is on her ninth business. She's a founder of mindful appy, because feelings matter. But we'll get into that later. Tina, welcome to the show.
00:43
Thank you. So happy to be here.
Michael Benatar 00:45
Thank you. Ben was saying, feelings matter all morning, because you knew your hashtag feelings matter.
Erin 00:52
I love it. I love it. So tell us about feelings matter. And
00:55
the story behind mindful happy, oh, my goodness, it's a long and winding road to get me to this point of many, many businesses that I asked, I thought your podcast title was excellent. Call me crazy, I started a business. Oftentimes, we just we just jumped right into that because of circumstances or for whatever reason. And we end up with a business. Usually, we haven't even been prepared to run one. So I was very much the same back in 2002, when I started a boutique design agency. And then over the years, I just had a bunch of employees, I learned a lot of hard lessons eventually sold that business. And overall, I what I really found is that I care about how people feel, work and life, like if you're not enjoying your work, you're not enjoying your life. And the whole work life balance thing never really made sense. To me, it was more of an integration. And at work, often people I found can get really toxic, and they can get really bad feelings. And I just was like, you know, I think it's time for me to step out of the marketing and advertising business. I'm going to get a master's degree in Industrial organizational psychology. And yes, I'm in the process of that. And I'm getting I'm figuring out how to quantify and put a numeric value to emotions so that we can monitor track them and talk about them with a little bit more data behind it.
Michael Benatar 02:20
And so with this app, are you kind of so say, we want to bring it into our company? dope dog? How do you because I was reading the website? And it seems like you don't need anything extra. You don't need anything. And it's just kind of an alert to Hey, how are you feeling? Because I know there's, I think there was an app A while ago, I downloaded that was trying to track your just your emotions. And it was kind of interesting, because you don't really think about it a lot. Throughout today, right? You just go through the day, or maybe I'm hungry. Now maybe I'm a little tired. Or maybe I'm doing this, but they actually think about it. I think it's a big step towards that mindfulness even more, because now you can know and understand like, Oh, I'm actually not in a good mood. Maybe I should do a meeting right now.
03:02
Exactly. Yeah, it's actually not in the App Store. It's not a consumer app yet. This is simply a business to business model right now. So the intention is the technology anonymizes and aggregates emotional data. So for example, if you're a business and you really want to know, how is COVID affecting all my employees, you know, how is it affecting my my frontline employees versus my IT staff, you know, versus the accounting department or the executive, or different regions. So you dispersed and collect all of this emotional data, and then it aggregates it anonymously. And then assigns a singular metric that you can look at and see where the problem areas lie. So it's a diagnostic tool.
Erin 03:48
And this doesn't exist.
03:49
I mean, I've done it. I don't
Erin 03:50
think it exists. I've done a ton of trainings with corporate America. And this sounds really, really cool.
03:56
That's really different. Yeah, that's my brainchild.
Michael Benatar 03:58
How did you kind of start it out? Because I imagine you in Excel or something like just writing all this down? Like, I don't I feel this way right now. I feel this. Did you test it on your other previous companies something similar?
04:10
Yes, we actually have a client, a channel partner with National Alliance for mental illness. they deploy it, we we built it, we tested it amongst ourselves. We tested it with a large group of over 150 people this past summer when my husband contracted COVID. And I was being inundated with all this emotional grief and couldn't bear to just continue to keep everything up and communicate with everyone. So we, we tested it with we road tested it with COVID. We've tested it with about three or four different organizations and aggregating it with Nami. They do workplace interventions for mental health and stress management. So we'll take samples of people's emotions before the events and then samples of people's emotions after the event. It helps them communicate to their clients that the product grams that they're implementing, are making a difference of some kind.
Michael Benatar 05:04
And with that data, say in a smaller scenario, maybe like a, you know, everybody's working from home right now, I think that might even be more like informative to know that your employee, you know, maybe he's not feeling that great because he's working from from home. And maybe you're not communicating well. But what do you do with the data after? And how do you get that, to implement something beneficial after you know, like, okay, Aaron, sad, how, how do we what's next,
05:32
the most important thing that we had to make a decision on was psychological safety. So one of the things that's really important, first of all, it's not even natural sometimes to pay attention to how you feel all the time. In a workplace, if you really dislike another person, or you're not happy with your boss, or the decisions that the company is making. Generally speaking, you don't feel safe speaking up about that. That's pretty typical, because people could be retaliatory. So we decided that 100%, anonymity on everything. So to administer this, you actually won't know who exactly is suffering, you're going to know where people are suffering. In general, how many of them, what percentage of them there's a minimum of six on any results to even be shown? So you have to have a group size of six with six responses. And see, it can't really figure it out backwards.
Michael Benatar 06:26
And so what was the importance about it being anonymous? Because sometimes would it be like in my head for some reason, I'm thinking, Okay, you're upset, you're at a big company, you go to HR and say, Hey, I, you know, workplace not doing great. And then you know, like, Hey, you know, Joe's been really weird to a lot of people. Yeah, no, get him out of here. The anonymous part, how did you come up with that part in the business because I think it's a lot.
06:52
It's just, it's feeling safe to express yourself because when you feel safe to express yourself, you can, you can give them the middle finger, and nobody's gonna know that it came from you. You can even you know, get your teammates together and say, You know what, we're all unhappy right? Now we're going to we're going to show that in our responses, and your emotions change in your state changes from day to day. So one day you could be just having a bad day, or you could be really really being the victim of a me to incident for example, the victim of corporate bullying. There's obscene reasons why you would want to have protection and safety when you express how you feel. So it's, it's it's a very intentional,
Michael Benatar 07:35
that's great, and how I mean talking more about the business, how did this become your next business? You know, when did you know that this crazy idea inside your head, you're like, I'm gonna make this I'm gonna help a lot of workplaces be a better mindful place.
07:50
It's, I am a person of service right? My business has always been a design firm and marketing firm. I've always been in the business of helping others succeed. When I got into industrial organizational psychology, which I'm taking through Harvard University's Extension School, which is very, very great. I honestly all of the research and learning how to do scientific research, learning how to do statistics to read statistics. And I was inspired by reading about she sent me Hi Mohali, which is the inventor of flow, which is positive psychology state of a total immersion in your career, I'm an artist, you have to get creative immersion, you're in painting, or you're, you're, you're an athlete, and you're skiing and, and you have a sense of time, that just it goes away and you your stress goes down, researching mindfulness and meditation and just knowing that that focus of the mind really helps stress melt. I got so inspired by the story of she sent me high in the 1970s when the pager was invented. And the painter inspired him to create experience sampling method. And here I am, you know, designer, user experience designer, I'm like, wow, I really want to study the human experience. And here's a method. Guess what, we don't have to use pagers anymore.
Michael Benatar 09:08
Yeah, no pagers were made in the 70s I for some reason, I thought they were in the 80s I don't know why. Yeah. 770s. Yeah. And so with all that, because I've heard about the flow state. I don't know in some books, you know, just talking about going to a coffee shop and working sometimes people get in that flow state because of the unfamiliarity of being somewhere with like, Tim bustle or something, just kind of getting out of those comfort zones, I guess and building into the flow state. What do you do in your normal day to not achieve the flow state but to be more mindful of your feelings and everything like that?
09:42
I do remind myself that feelings matter and it helps in my my romantic relationship, because you can always disagree and it's easy to just discount. You know what, how you feel. And I'll just say to my husband, you know what feelings matter and this is how I feel, so I'm just gonna own it. I think actually getting to that place personally allowed me to start a business where I can be of service to many more people at a bigger scale. And that's my motivation back to your earlier question. I have 25 years almost business management or owning a business, I have plenty of experience and know all the technology. I know all the marketing, I know the ins and outs of it. And honestly, it's time for me to just take my passion and own it, and launch it and make the world a better place. And I got this inspiration. And I was like, Why is no one doing this? And I just I just have to do it.
Michael Benatar 10:39
I love it. It's
Erin 10:40
hyperlocal in Austin, where your base and finding some companies to start out with or are you just taking it national right away?
10:47
Well, we're, we're gonna fundraise. So we're I'm looking for there's a very good set of VCs right now that are looking to fund a in mental health, and be in women led companies, particularly in technology companies. So I'm going to take advantage of that I've been applying for some grants. My husband and I have been, he's my technology partner. He's the backend data, I don't do all the front end stuff. We have a small team, where we'll take on client projects. But in the meantime, in the gaps in the spaces, we're building out this technology, my we're starting our own podcast, we're doing our own marketing, we're self funding it. And then when we do land that investment money, it's just going to be, you know, expanded where we're getting public relations all get strategically placed articles. I've got a couple of plans that I think are going to make a little bit of a splash. I hope I can
Erin 11:37
tell you've done this nine times. This is your ninth business. Have you fundraising written? Have you fundraise for previous businesses?
11:47
Yes, I have.
Michael Benatar 11:48
Definitely. Well, tell us about the experience with exiting, because I think that's a lot. That's interesting to a lot of, you know, entrepreneurs, we're in our fourth year of dope dog and you know, maybe down the road, there might be some sort of an exit, and we've never done it. So I'm curious to, you know, what is that process? And what did that look like for you? It's actually I'm curious what those businesses were, too.
12:08
Yeah. So I sold my design firm to a marketing firm out of Dallas. Because it services, my clients went with it, my staff went with it. So I went with it, I had that four year earnout period. So they've gotcha in that four year period. And it was great. It's a delicate dance. In any case, you're always going to have a class clash of cultures, if you're actually going to go with you have a product business, so you may just be able to, you know, let it go to a larger thing. But if you go with it, and you may want to do that, you know, the culture is going to be very different regardless. So you have to navigate those things, the financial transaction, it's not that easy. You know, it's not that easy to navigate it.
Michael Benatar 12:48
How did you how did you find that firm in Dallas to buy your business? Because I think that is the weird part of selling a business or getting acquired. There's not just like one spot for it. It seems like a lot of the people I've spoken to, it's just random or you just kind of like meet somebody and that person knows somebody and maybe in your right at the beginning of actually starting to dog, somebody did offer to buy out 50% of the time. We obviously said no, we're still here today and doing what we're doing. But it is interesting at certain times, how did you find this business?
13:21
I found this business. It was after the economic crash of 2008 20% of my receivables were uncollectible, I was facing bankruptcy, quite honestly, I had a line of credit, I was overextended. I had started a clothing line and didn't manage my my business manager that well. And I just I was at the bottom. And at a certain point I I scraped myself together enough to rebuild. And when I rebuilt, I realized I still have tiny business problems. And I still have the clients who go bankrupt and won't pay you and then I have to go into my savings. And I'm like, this is just I'm just tired of it. I'm ready for bigger, greater and better challenges. And I just I did exactly what you say I just I went out to my network. I said, Hey, you know what, I'm looking to roll my business up into something bigger. I'm ready for bigger challenges. I've went to anybody that would listen to me and said, This is what I'm looking for. And it didn't take too long. To find a firm that was like you know what the principal owner wants to build a retirement home in Wimberley. Austin is a great place to have another location for his business. So it was
Michael Benatar 14:30
in with your with that business design business. Did you when it was I guess what I'm trying to say like when you rolled it up? Was there a big changeover of a lot of like, did you fire people or did you have also recurring revenue that you could easily say, Hey, this is appealing. So once you come over here, or keep this staff how, what was what were those interactions? Because I'm very curious because it's such a I always hear people say like, Oh yeah, sold my business. Is those those small microtransactions of like, Oh, yeah, you're gonna keep these people? Are we actually recurring revenue? So you're gonna get a lot of recurring revenue from us. And there's actually new clients, how did that all, it's a
15:13
lot of decisions kind of like building a house, you know, you have so many decisions that are always so unique to you and your situation that there's no book for the same as selling a business. Part of the challenge is valuation. You can value a business in a variety of different ways. If you're a services business, you're, you know, there's some rule of thumb for service businesses and how it's valued. I did have recurring revenue, I did have clients that had been around for seven plus years. And I did have a staff that fit the the profile of the the the gap in staffing of the acquiring firm. So there while there was a natural fit and skill, while there was a very attractive recurring revenue, a client, a client that would prove to be a seven figure value client, yeah. The how that's vested, how long you have to stay, what the terms are of the agreement, maybe you have to hit in certain sales numbers, every little point of that deal is up for negotiation. Yeah. It's challenging, really. And then all of the stuff came over. However, I experienced a huge culture change between younger buttoned down Dallas, khaki pants and your Austin tattoos and dyed hair. You know, it's, it was very different. So I had a bit of attrition. There was attrition on both sides. And, you know, it's been, it was 2014. And some of the employees are still with the acquiring firm, I still do consulting, I had a call with them earlier today, just as a subject matter expert in a couple of key areas, I jumped in, I did decide after my, my vesting period was up to sell back half my shares, so that I could cash out a bit, go to graduate school have a little bit of breathing room to explore new possibilities, while at the same time keeping my interest in the company. Because I do believe in it. It's a great, it's growing. It's, it's cool. So I wanted to have the best of both worlds. And I just asked her, and they said, Sure.
Michael Benatar 17:20
What was the second company that you saw after that one? Because I feel like that was your first one you got. Got it.
17:27
The first one was a merger. Yes, it was a merger. And that was directly during the throes of the 2008 crisis. Okay, I was I had a staff of 12. And I think I just I had to layoff like 75% of people at once, I had encountered other firms that had competing skills, and it was really like, you know, let's band together, let's, let's let's, you know, consolidate our clients, let's consolidate our staff, let's consolidate all of our expenses and survive, you know, so the first exit, it is a business sale, it's just a different kind, where you're just combining it at equal levels, and you're sharing. And then the second one I had was that full kind of just like you own it all the original city is no longer and you know, I'm part of something different.
Erin 18:18
So the first one, it was technically a potential competitor that you ended up just going in together on exactly how you would cross paths before. And you already knew Did you know of them? Or was it kind of like,
18:30
Whoa, crazy, it was a little spontaneous. Okay. And we did have some personality conflicts were just some some pretty substantial life changes had me had us taking turns where we just kind of sold I, you know, my ship my my assets, my recurring revenue clients, the value of that was purchased out. So then when we split apart It was like, we had to sort of this is the challenging thing. untangle, you know, kind of like you take the chocolate milk that you made, and you want to have chocolate and milk doesn't sound
19:11
science.
Michael Benatar 19:13
Sure. Okay. So with with your new company now mindful, happy. Where do you see this going? Like after you get your first round of, you know, five finances, you're raising money? Where do you see that going? Like, what do you want to try to try to do with mind flabby? Do you want to know how to take over the you know, work from home crews everywhere because I think that's a big place that could definitely use something like this.
19:38
Well, the employee experience is my first target. This the technology I built is quite applicable for customer experience. I've just decided to focus on employee experience, I think customer experiences fully explored. This technology is something that will be quite different for the employee experience area, given that there There's a lot of targets that I would have for a potential exit, which is what I would like to do, which is build it to a certain level of valuation. Because it's a SaaS model, because it's a product because it's not based on service, my valuation is going to be at a completely different level than a services based business. So I want to maximize that and go after a large target for acquisition. Maybe it's a survey form firm like Qualtrics, or, or Gallup, or, you know, an HR software company that's very large a staffing company. Google, I don't know, you know, though, that I think my professional goals are, you know, after all kinds of decades slogging through the tiny business, you know, I'm ready for, you know, just got my big guns on and I'm gonna go for the big goal here.
Erin 20:54
Well, it sounds like you already have a different mindset going into this, you know, and having having opened and sold so many businesses, you kind of think about it with a bigger scale, for sure. And now I have the benefit of
21:07
I'm sorry, No, go ahead. Go ahead. I just thought my it's important to know my co founders, my husband, he's a technology entrepreneur, he's had exits. You know, he went through, it was about to sell to jack Dorsey, a technology firm that he created. The last 24 hours before we were literally packing up to move to San Francisco, their new lawyer came in and said, The deal is not going to happen. And you put a nail in it, what would have been a life changing, you know, event where we would have left 10 years ago and been a resident of San Francisco. So I can't even tell you what an amazing asset it is to have him just partnering with me. Everything that I've learned and gone through, especially in my my second exit, I've benefited from his experience. So it's amazing to have that partnership.
Michael Benatar 22:03
And how do you how do you like working with your husband? Because we are, we're gonna get engaged soon. I mean, no, get married, too wordy engaged. But now, the you know, we're what we've been working together, we live together we work. It's a lot. togetherness. Yeah, so how that has
22:20
that been with you? Oh, my gosh, you know, it's not easy. I'm not gonna lie. I love working with him. It was when we were first together that engagement and getting married, it was hard to work together. So congratulations, we did not do it. So well, at the very beginning. We both had really strong ideas and opinions, and we just couldn't, you know, we're very stubborn. But I tell you, what we have done is develop the utmost respect for one another in our professional skills. So there's areas where he knows that I'm going to be the one that makes the decision.
Michael Benatar 22:52
It's okay,
22:53
I know, he's gonna be the one that makes the decision. And we're really careful where where that boundary line is, and that exists. And we maintain that utmost respect. So it's, that's if you can have that utmost respect. You can put it aside and go on a date night and try not to talk about your children or your business. That was just hard
Erin 23:14
for you talk about your dogs.
Michael Benatar 23:16
Talk about it, because it's hard to really have those boundaries to when you're working together. And just trying to make it feel like a work environment when it clearly isn't. Because we're you know, we're in our den room right now. And you know, at dinner, we'll talk about what we're doing. And there's no real escape sometimes I think that's, especially with working from home. But even so, like even I'm even thinking like, oh, wow, down the road would be great to just have an office to go to the have that separation to get out a little bit. And that's so I don't know, that's just something good and
Erin 23:52
bad. It's good, because you know each other so well. And you know, you can move things along and have the conversations over dinner if
23:58
you want, but it's so intertwined. So that becomes a challenge and a benefit at the same time. So true. I mean, you get to navigate it in your own way. And I think if you have that commitment, and you have the love and you have the good foundations for a marriage, you can absolutely make the business part of it work. I think it could strengthen it. Yeah, sure. So good luck.
Michael Benatar 24:19
Yeah, we're doing it. Um, so I'm excited about everything. Aaron, do you want to ask the question the the call me crazy question.
Erin 24:27
Let's let's have you phrase it this time.
Michael Benatar 24:29
I never do well. This is call me crazy. We always ask the question. Call me crazy. What is that point in your life when somebody calls you crazy about doing a business move or a life move or just something funny? It doesn't have to be wild, but I feel like there's always a story where, hey, Tina, why are you so crazy for doing x? That's how I would phrase it.
24:53
I don't know why but the first thing that popped into my head was Tina, why are you so crazy. You're you get up at Why is my dog chewing up the paper? You get up at 442 in the morning before high school to go swim in 50 degree water outside all year round. And you're a student athlete like that I couldn't do it anymore. You know, that was crazy. I'd get up at the dark 30 and go go swim, but I guess it taught me the dedication and discipline to undergo unpleasant situations for greater outcome.
Michael Benatar 25:28
Yeah, they could at least heated up the pool for you or something. 50 degrees. It's
25:33
good to jump into cold water. Yeah, it's good.
Michael Benatar 25:35
But it's not comfortable.
25:39
At like five in the morning, like Who does that? That's
Michael Benatar 25:41
crazy. It's just not. Yeah, not fun at all. Okay. So your website is mindful app calm, a great website, the checkout. And I think when people go there and get like a free sample or try it out,
25:57
yeah, let me give you my status. So we right now you could go and sign up for a daily pulse. It's free, put your phone number in, we don't know who you are, you just throw your number in there every year, they get a question to check in on how you do, you can look at the aggregated responses and see generally how everyone else is doing that's on the same list. Right? It's just by text message. So it's fun as a mindfulness exercise to learn how to start thinking about and paying attention to your emotions. In the future, I'll do an app for that. And there'll be all kinds of other cool stuff with it. The business side of it, we are getting ready to roll out I would say probably six to eight weeks away where a company can actually go in and create their own account and get their first free emotional tracker for their first group of employees for free. So stay, stay tuned with it, because we're gonna be leveraging our very first year of collecting all this great data with a whole bunch of free offerings for people to try this out for free because feelings matter.
Erin 27:00
Hashtag, matter. I love it. Well, we're gonna
Michael Benatar 27:03
sign up. We're gonna
Erin 27:05
put all the information in the notes because I think Yeah, having more data to see and being able to see what everyone else replies, you know, anonymously, of course, I think is really cool. So that's interesting.
Michael Benatar 27:16
Yeah, it's definitely interesting. So it's mindful, appy calm. We'll put it in the description. Tina, thank you so much for joining the show.
27:22
So great to meet you. Yeah, follow your progress. If you have any questions about sales, m&a, finding companies deal points and you just want to get a sanity check on it. I'm always happy. Just I got a book the link in my email, you can book me anytime.
Michael Benatar 27:38
Great. We might even have you back on the podcast too. And maybe in the future. wosk is Yeah.
27:44
A pinpoint in that maybe like six to eight months away. That would be a really good time to do it.
Michael Benatar 27:50
Yeah, that'd be great. Okay, cool. Man, that'd be great. Thank you so much. Bye.