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.

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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 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.

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