Nearly 20 years later, CFO Trent York tells us that he can still hear the finance executive’s exact words.
“Trent, I don’t need you to tell me how not to do something—I need you to help me to figure out how to work through the issue and what needs to be addressed in order for us to be able to expand,” recalls York, placing just enough emphasis on the word “not” to expose a degree of anxiety that still lingers.
At the time, York was a newbie controller for Golfsmith, an Austin, TX–based golf specialty retailer that in the 2000s was opening dozens of stores annually as golf enjoyed newfound popularity nationally amidst the Tiger Woods boom.
Read More“We went from 20 retail stores at the time I joined to close to 80, and we actually took it public, so this was really a build-and-scale moment that was quite exciting,” explains York, who advanced into the vice president of finance role as the golf retailer began to prepare for a public offering that ultimately debuted on NASDAQ (symbol: GOLF) in June 2006.
Beyond gainful employment and resume enrichment, Golfsmith provided York with a series of “build-and-scale” moments of insight that allowed him to confidently step into yet another fast-growing Austin phenom of the 2000s, HomeAway.
“HomeAway was about scale. There was meaningful organic growth, and we were very acquisitive along the way, too, because the market that we were looking to bring together was fragmented,” remembers York, who would spend 13 years at the company and enter the CFO office a year after its sale to Expedia Group in 2015. Later, HomeAway was rebranded as part of VRBO.
“Following the sale, we pivoted our entire business model from being subscription-based to being transaction-driven, which was really more aligned with the marketplace—and to pivot like this was not an easy thing to do,” reports York, who adds that his lesson or takeaway from “the pivot” was coming to understand how making complex tasks simple could help an organization to achieve greater agility.
Says York: “The ability to be agile or stay fluid within a changing environment—and to drive through it—comes back to keeping things simple.” –Jack Sweeney
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CFOTL: Tell us about Restore Hyper Wellness …
York: From a mission perspective, what we’re trying to do is to make wellness affordable and accessible to everybody—not just athletes and people training for events and so on, but everybody—such that people can really do more of what they love to do in life. Often, we get into this negative feedback loop—especially as we start being more active or aging or feeling pain—in which we start to become less active. This becomes a negative feedback loop that kind of just encompasses us.
What we’re trying to do is to switch this up and really drive a positive feedback loop in which you become more active. You have better wellness options, if you will, from a recovery perspective, plus everything that we can offer from all of our therapies and modalities. As a result, you feel better. So, the more you do, the better you feel, the more you do. This really boils down to the mission of what we’re trying to do.
Read MoreNow, what do I mean by “wellness”? Wellness is everything from having a healthy lifestyle to boosting your immune system to faster recoveries to potentially kind of reducing your risk of long-term health challenges. What we offer in our 75+ retail locations around the U.S. is an environment to basically help people to thrive and to meet these objectives.
The services that we offer include cryotherapy, or cold therapy, and heat therapy. We can provide whole-body cryotherapy, through which you’re actually really kind of bringing your body temperature down to reduce inflammation and/or pain, as well as local cryotherapy, which you do on your elbow only or your wrists—things that hurt. We have heat therapy, including saunas and infrared saunas. We also have IV therapy, through which you can really replenish from a nutrients perspective, and compression therapy, which is really all about helping your muscles to contract to really help recoveries for blood flow and so forth.
All of these things have been around. They aren’t necessarily new things. They’re backed by science, but they haven’t really been available to the masses. We’re trying to bring all of them together and democratize all of these wellness initiatives so that people can again do more of what they love. Our tagline really goes right to what we’re trying to do: “Restore, do more.”
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Restore Hyper Wellness | www.restore.com | Austin, Texas