Groundwork Studio is about the operating side of wellness hospitality. The side guests aren’t necessarily supposed to notice.
A lot of great wellness businesses start with a founder who knows exactly how they want the place to feel. They notice when the music is off, when someone on the team isn’t quite getting it, when a guest looks lost, when something technically worked but still didn’t feel right.
For a while, that works really well because they’re close enough to catch almost everything themselves. The original team learns by being around them. Everyone absorbs a thousand little decisions through proximity. Then another location opens, the team doubles, or the founder simply can’t be everywhere anymore.
The goal isn’t to replace that instinct with layers of process. It’s to understand what the founder is currently seeing, deciding, correcting, and carrying, then figure out what needs to become visible, teachable, or repeatable as the business grows.
Guests don’t experience departments. They experience the whole thing.
A first-time guest might never think about the fact that someone decided what the front desk should explain, what is better left to discover, how the next person they interact with knows they’re new, or what an employee should do when they look confused but never actually ask for help. They should just feel taken care of.
Sometimes it’s even smaller. You get out of the pool with a damp towel, go upstairs to eat, sit underneath a fan and realize you’re freezing. Is there a dry towel nearby? Somewhere to leave the wet one? Or are you now walking back through the building in a bathing suit because the restaurant and thermal floor were designed like separate experiences?
The guest doesn’t care which team technically owns the problem. They experience one place.
A lot of my work starts there.
What are we trying to make someone feel?
And then:
What has to be true behind the scenes for that feeling to actually happen?
I write about bathhouses, thermal and recovery spaces, movement and fitness studios, social wellness, and the decisions underneath the experiences people remember. Sometimes that means scent, music, ritual, community, or the way someone moves through a space. Sometimes it means training, judgment, handoffs, founder dependence, information, documentation, or what starts to break when one location becomes two.
What I’m most interested in is how deeply founder-led businesses grow without losing the things that made people care about them in the first place.
