Fitness Giant MindBody is Being Sold for $1.9 Billion

Online scheduling is a great tool to attract and keep clients. One such company—MindBody—is being sold for a whopping $1.9 billion. In addition to scheduling, MindBody offers payment processing services. Local Online covered the story and we’re going to discuss what this might mean for you.

MindBody, Online Scheduling, and Google

Let’s start with some background on MindBody. Peter of Local Online writes, “Mindbody provides a comprehensive SaaS platform for its fitness, spa and salon services. While anchored by appointment scheduling software, ancillary features include payments, promotions, leads, analytics, and business and personnel management.”

MindBody is relevant because they’ve partnered with Google. Fitness, spa, and salon businesses can have their clients book service through the partnership of MindBody and Google. It’s called Reserve with Google and you can view their entire partner list here.

Increasing Small Business Revenues

Companies like MindBody help small and medium-sized businesses capture revenue. This is because some potential customers may prefer to book appointments online.

Joseph continues, “Several years ago, we noted that scheduling potentially held the key to capturing a piece-of-the-action for SMB service revenues. At that time, more than 75 companies competed for shares in the marketplace, including such companies as Schedulicity, Booker, Square, Intuit, ReachLocal, Agendize, GenBook, MyTime, and MaxiPage. Of those, Mindbody, based in San Luis Obispo, CA, has emerged as the market leader.”

There’s a reason MindBody is the market leader when it comes to online scheduling. Joseph writes, “went public in July 2015, and recently bolstered its offering and subscriber count, spending $150 Million to acquire Booker Software, a top competitor (who I consulted for). It also spent $15.3 Million on FitMetrix, a cloud-based performance tracking company.”

MindBody hasn’t only been acquiring customers through traditional advertising methods. The company has bought competitors as well. And they paid no small fee to acquire Booker Software. When MindBody bought them, they took in Booker’s customer base along with the company.

Online Scheduling and Your Business

Does your business currently use online scheduling? If not, you should consider it if your business is the type that would benefit (restaurant, fitness, etc).

When potential customers and clients search for services like the ones you offer, a number of companies will show in Google results. If they’re hooked up with Reserve with Google, the potential customer will see a “Book” button. Clicking that will bring them an option to book a service at a specific time on a specific day.

Go to where your customers are! We can help you get started with Reserve with Google. Contact us to learn more.

Featured photo by Victor Freitas on Pexels

Mindbody photo by WikiMedia