Therapy Stacking: an interview with Steve Spiro, CEO of Halotherapy Solutions

Welcome to Ageless Fitness and Wellness with your hosts, Alisa and Mike McGlothlin.

Mike: Hi, everybody. Thank you for listening. My name is Mike McGlothlin. We have a very special guest today. We have the CEO of Halotherapy Solutions, Steve Spiro. Steve has over 35 years of highly successful business experience. He blends in 15 years of working at large consumer electric and technology companies and 22 years in the entrepreneurial spaces of

He's been in multiple executive roles as an angel investor. He was on the original startup team of audible.com, which was ultimately sold to amazon.com. He's a true pioneer, an expert in growing new ideas and products, which we're going to be talking about today, and also been really involved in the consumer and business-to-business segments. He has a tremendous international experience. He's lived in Tokyo, China, and managed over 60 distributors in 40 different companies. His time in Asia introduced him to the power of natural healing modalities.

Steve is now the CEO, and he has also been selected as the fifth consecutive year as chairman of the prestigious Global Wellness Institute Salt Therapy Initiative. So, thank you for taking time out, Steve, and joining us.

Steve: Thank you. And thanks for that wonderful introduction. That was great.

Mike: So, hey, I usually ask people to tell us something that we would not find on your LinkedIn portfolio, but I actually want to go back to your intro and tell us a little bit about how you got involved with Audible and bringing that to market as a startup team.

Steve: That's great. Yeah, I'd been at Motorola for 15 years. I had just moved back from, I think, China at the time. And I was hoping to get, you know, a big promotion inside Motorola. But Motorola said I'd been gone in Asia for too long. And I wasn't an engineer. So, they put me in this little desk that strategize about things. And I was pretty bored. And all of a sudden, one of my best friends called me and her best friend called her. He was starting this new company on the Internet. And I had no idea what the Internet was. This is ninety-five, ninety-six. And they said, why don't you talk to this guy? You have a perfect background. So, I talked to the person. It sounds like the most crazy idea about delivering digital audio. There was, you know, the delivery speeds were AOL 28 modems. There was no hardware. There was no content. I said, how much will you pay me? He goes, we have no money. We're going to get equity. I didn't even know what equity was. So, but I decided, you know, I've been a pioneer my whole life jumping around the world. I said, let's try it. And it turned out to be the best decision I ever made.

Mike: Yeah, congratulations. So, you just never know where business is going to end up a lot of times. So, part of that is you probably did not know where Vitality Booths would end up. First of all, congratulations on receiving the patent from the U.S. Patent Office in December for the Vitality Booths. Talk a little bit about the uniqueness of Vitality Booths and why the patent was most likely granted in your mind. 

Steve: Great. Yeah, so we love the Vitality Booth. It's our probably either first or second most popular product, which combines halotherapy and red-light therapy. It kind of came from the roots of some studies that NASA had did, but the patent process, if anybody's been through it, is long and arduous and not guaranteed. It took us four years and lots and lots of back and forth to get it, but we had such a unique offering that made basically salt therapy better,

because with the red light, it's drier and it absorbs some of the red light and the red light gets better because it can get refracted, and it goes out a million different ways inside the booth or a chamber. So yeah, it was an arduous process, but it's great to have a patent. Nobody else in the world can offer red light combined with halotherapy. And yeah, we're glad that you have that product, Mike. You were a pioneer in getting on board early. So, it's great.

Mike: Yeah, we certainly saw the benefits of it. There's a tremendous amount of intellectual capital behind that. Talk a little bit about how you got introduced into some of the different modalities, particularly SALT. I think that that's pretty prevalent over the European countries.

But did it do something for you that you just said, man, I got to get involved in this?

Steve: You know, great question. And like I said, and you kind of introduced me, I lived in Asia for a long time. I lived in Europe for a few years. And I was always, especially in Asia, as you probably know, there's a lot of holistic wellness, whether it's herbs or acupuncture, massage, as opposed to, you know, lots of pharmaceuticals, you know, being absorbed after the fact. So, I became interested in just holistic wellness when I got back to the U.S., Some of my parents and my parents' friends were starting to get COPD as they got older. As I was living overseas, I saw a lot of air pollution and people were having a lot of respiratory problems. I started investigating kind of natural remedies for respiratory health and wellness. And I came across this little, tiny industry literally nine, 10 years ago called Halotherapy. I found like the number one manufacturer in the world in Estonia who had this tiny little business. I flew out to see him and we've been going at it. This is our ninth birthday will be in a couple of months. And it's just been extraordinarily booming. And it's interesting, COVID in a weird way helped our business because more and more consumers or customers of our spas, became more interested in respiratory health and hygiene and wellness. And also, touchless wellness became huge during COVID because it was hard to get massage therapists. People didn't want to get touched. So, it's turned out to be a phenomenal business. So, like I said, with Audible, you just never know where the journey is going to go. So hopefully you make the right decisions and just keep building it step by step.

Mike: Yeah, I know the co-founder of Vitality Booths, John, he was telling me that they were actually able to open their doors into one of his gyms that had a Vitality Booth because the state recognized the fact that there was some benefit here during COVID with respiratory illness and stuff like that. So, it's great to have that in our facility. We have four different booths.

Talk a little bit about how far is Europe ahead of the United States in terms of touchless wellness and alternatives in your mind?

Steve: Yeah, it's interesting. So, I believe Asia is probably further ahead in just generally natural remedies to things. I think Europe in certain countries is maybe further ahead, but in some cases they're further behind. I think this whole push on touchless wellness is really accelerated and amplified, frankly, more so in the U.S. now. So that's what we're seeing. We're seeing more and more, call it spas that used to only offer massage or med spas that offered esthetician, you know, Botox, getting heavily into the touchless wellness space. We're getting gyms, like you said, that were only concerned about building bigger muscles, getting into wellness or recovery through touchless wellness. We're seeing tanning industry. We're seeing all kinds of people and companies getting into touchless. So, I wouldn't say we're really far behind anybody at this point.

Mike: All right. What do you think, besides firms like ours educating their clients about Halo and Red Light, what should the typical American do or go to in order to find out more information to get comfortable about these different modalities?

Steve: Yeah, there's a bunch of different places to go. There's the Global Wellness Institute has some great articles. The World Halotherapy Association has some great articles and information. Our website, halotherapysolutions.com has a lot of website, has a lot of information and just Google halotherapy reviews. And you'll see that there's just literally thousands and thousands of people that have benefited in many ways for either do for their asthma or their skin conditions or seasonal allergies or athletes in recovery, or just general kind of, you know, sleeping better and just better. You know, we kind of call halotherapy the toothbrush for the lungs. It just makes your lungs healthier. So, you have more endurance and just can combat potential illnesses coming at you too.

Mike: We just invested in a machine to measure metabolic health and VO2 max. We're looking forward to being able to see the client going in and having a baseline and then seeing what halotherapy does for them in terms of their VO2max, their respiratory health, and just general wellness with their lungs and respiratory health. We love the equipment that we get from you guys. We've also had customers gravitate to our center because of the information that we've been able to provide on EMF levels, especially with the Halo IR Sauna. Can you talk about the quality of the equipment and also specifically about the low EMF levels in the Halo IR?

Steve: No, that's a great question. And it's really, really important too. So, when I first started the company almost nine years ago, we were all only about halotherapy, dry salt therapy. And the education process was very long and arduous too. So, we plotted it along for a few years. And then we kind of looked around and we saw that the infrared sauna business was just exploding in terms of popularity. And we kind of said, wow, wouldn't it be great if we could combine those two things together in terms of maximizing wellness in a given footprint?

And it would be easier kind of explaining to people that this would be like a sauna plus halotherapy and trying to just explain what halo therapy does itself. So, we looked at the top four or five manufacturers in the world of infrared saunas. After a lot of analysis and talking to a lot of different companies, we concluded that Clearlight Jacuzzi had the best quality sauna in the world, infrared sauna in the world. We approached them about becoming a private label partner. As you probably know, salt and humidity is not a good match. So, they custom-engineered a sauna for us to protect their infrared panels. And we integrate our halogenerator on the outside, with their control panel on the inside. So, it's all seamless and integrated and it's become just a phenomenally successful business used by both the top resorts in the world to the smallest day spas, tanning salons, gyms. It's become incredibly popular product, marrying those two together. And they had the lowest EMF as part of their offering, which was really important to us and our customers.

Mike: Yeah, that's so important just because the quality equipment, the quality of company that you're dealing with, with Halotherapy Solutions, going out and getting the best vendors and the best products inside of all the booths. And it's so important to be able to deliver that as part of a quality service. You've obviously been interested in this wellness industry. What do you think are the biggest trends around the corner here in the United States over the next couple of years?

Steve: Yeah, I think you're going to see more and more of companies offering, say, one modality, maybe say IV or a gym offering fitness or a tanning salon. Everybody seems to be moving to these integrated, you know, multiple modalities offering in their facility. And especially from a halotherapy perspective, you know, we call it therapy layering, where you get synergy between the halotherapy and say the red light or the halotherapy and the infrared, like the salt, you know, if you go to a salt room, it's typically cool or cold with, with the infrared, the warmth of the infrared opens up the pores on your skin. So, it's better for your skin conditions and it slowly opens up your lungs. So, you have a more of a surface area and it's just a better, more comfortable experience being a little bit warm. So, we think therapy layering is the single biggest trend that's going to happen and just multiple modalities in, again, everybody's kind of moving to become a wellness center, if you will. So, it's gonna become interesting to see what people offer and frankly, how they differentiate themselves.

Mike: Yeah, we think that the stacking of modalities is so important. And that's why I love talking about the vitality booths, because besides the halogenerator and the red light, you have the oxygen compression going in, plus the negative ions. You can get so much done in 20 or 30 minutes that would normally take you an hour, an hour and a half to do in any type of gym. So, it's really efficient in today's busy world.

Steve: And from a facility, I totally agree. And from a facility perspective, it's all in a relatively small footprint. You don't have to have four separate machines taking up hundreds of square feet. So just a great return on space. You know, we talk about return on investment, return on time and return on space. And the Vitality Booth offers all three of those in spades.

Mike: So overall, why are you so excited about being an innovator in this industry? What gets you up every day on that?

Steve: I'm getting old, you know? You know, seriously, as I've gotten older, right? And I'm all about, you know, not just longevity, right? But healthy longevity. I want to live a long time to, you know, hang out with soon to be hopefully one day grandkids. And I just want to be active and healthy my whole life. Travel. And I think it's great. It keeps my brain very active. And frankly, there's nothing more important than my personal health and wellness, my family's personal health and wellness, society's health and wellness. If you're not feeling good or if you're sick, money doesn't matter. Right. So, it's my drive to help people feel better naturally around the world. And also, personally to learn as much as I can about all the different wellness technologies to apply them myself. I'm 97 years old. I look pretty good. That’s the red light!

Mike: Yeah, well, at Ageless Fitness and Vitality Booth Wellness Center, we always say movement is life. And we're starting to see people transition over to our personal training side and our personal training side over to the wellness side because they can see the benefit of both, you know, touch and exercise as well as I call it working inside out with the HaloIR, with the red light with the halo working inside of your body as well. So, hey, Steve, what's next for Halotherapy Solutions?

Steve: You know, I think one of our most important things now is really to, we spend a lot of time not as just a vendor, but as an educator. We really want to work with, we work with each of our customers like yourself. We have literally thousands now around the world, making sure they're successful and they have all the tools to educate their local population. And just on a nationwide global basis, we're just trying to spread the word about how important wellness is and how halotherapy, especially combined with red light or infrared is just fundamental to somebody's long-term, short-term, you know, basically, I've been using the term, you know, healthy longevity. It's just core. So, we're just trying to educate more, and we'll continue to come out with new products that are, that our customers like yourself want or their customers want.

And again, I think you'll see more and more of this kind of therapy layering. But right now, we have a lot of products. I think it's a lot more about education and helping our customers become successful. That's what we focus on every day.

Mike: Well, that's what makes you such a great partner for Ageless Fitness and Vitality Booth Wellness Center is the education, the ability to go out and educate our members and our clients about going to different modalities and, like you say, just having the vitality to live a better life on top of longevity. So, Steve, thank you for all that you do at Halotherapy Solutions.

We love the product. We love you. what our clients say about your product and so congratulations on a successful business your sales support your service is outstanding as well so thank you for all that you do

Steve: Well, thank you for being a customer and we want to make we want to help you and as much as possible, so we're driven by helping people around the world get healthier that's our mission.

Mike: Well, I encourage anybody listening to this podcast. We're the only wellness center, Vitality Booth Wellness Center in the Estero area and within about a 20-minute area. Come by, stop by, try out one of the modalities, talk about what you're trying to get accomplished, and our program director and our wellness technicians can guide you into which modality would be most helpful. So, again, thanks, Steve. And we will talk with you next time.

Steve: Take care, Mike. And say hi to Alisa. Bye bye.

Thank you for listening to Ageless Fitness and Wellness.

To learn more, call us at 239-301-4121 or come see us at 10011 Estero Town Commons Place, Unit 101A, Estero, Florida.

Check out our website, agelessfitnessfl.com.

We look forward to helping you achieve lifelong vitality.