Revolutionizing Senior Wellbeing with Health and Technology w/Lawrence Kosick

This paradox , as I view it , is the trust , interaction and communication gap that exists between fitness professionals and our medical community . This podcast is all about closing off that gap by disseminating the latest , most evidence-based and most engaging information in the health sciences , and to do that , in episode 118 , we're joined by Lawrence Kossick .

He's the co-founder of an organization called Get Set Up , and this is a online technology platform for the aging adult population , and this is going to be a very fascinating discussion around how we can engage a very underserved or , in some cases , not served at all marketplace in our industry .

I've heard me talk about this many times before on the podcast , and Lawrence and Get Set Up's perspective on this is very interesting because they're engaging the aging adult population on a platform that some of them might have a natural aversion to being technology platforms .

So , even though this is a conversation around technology and exercise in the aging adult population .

I think there are so many valuable lessons to learn from what Lawrence talks about in terms of how he understood the needs of this market , understood the opportunity , working with this market , and then understood how to collaborate with agencies , groups and other organizations to really drive a business model that effectively delivered services to the aging adult population

that they really desperately need , particularly when it comes to health , well-being and fitness , as you'll hear Lawrence and I talk about in this discussion . Any information we'd like to share with you from today's episode can be found on the show notes page . It's been going to wellnessparadoxpodcom forward slash , episode 118 .

Please enjoy this conversation with Lawrence Cossack . Lawrence Cossack , they were delighted to be joined by Lawrence Cossack . Lawrence , thank you so much for joining us .

This is a great area to touch on Before we get into get set up your organization and what you do . Why don't you give us a little bit of an idea of your background to provide some context for the discussion ?

This is a personal mission for me , as it is for my other two co-founders . I have an older father who has a voracious appetite for technology , for staying fit , for staying engaged . It was the pandemic , I think , more than anything else , that made him and so many others have to struggle with well , how do I get access to these types of services virtually ?

It's not to say that health and fitness in particular should be offline , online , and it can be a wonderful combo , but I think that we thought a lot about our personal experiences with our family and the need for a place where folks could learn new things , socialize , stay connected with others , stay healthy , and what was a safe , secure place to do that online ?

So that is the genesis of why we wanted to create Get Set Up .

But based upon your , your description , it sounds like this is partly , you know , fitness and wellness , but it sounds like it's much more . So explain the , the mission of the organization more broadly and maybe all the things you do .

We actually started the business three months before the pandemic , so about four years ago , and nobody really expects a pandemic when they're starting a business .

But suffice to say that it changed our trajectory , because we suddenly had all of us now stuck at home having to think about how to access almost every service virtually , and nobody was more impacted than than older adults .

And so we scrambled from just teaching basic tech , which was you know how to use your iPad , how to use your , your , your Android phone , your iPhone , your old laptop , update the operating system , the browser , whatever you needed to do to get into that sort of first zoom class , but , but , but .

Once you did , you became so interested in all of the other things that you want to do in your life , and so a very major concern and interest across our entire population was Well , how do I stay healthy at home , how do I eat healthy foods ? How do I have my food potentially or and or groceries delivered , my medication delivered . How do I use telehealth ?

Like it was , there was a very large health and wellness interest that caused us to think about programming and curriculum , just beyond basic tech and right and how many basic tech classes can you take before you'd like to sort of learn and do other things ? And so that forced us to really really think .

Well , what do we want our health and fitness offering to be , given that it's one of the most important categories for older adults and they're now at home having to think about how to access these services ?

So if we can help them first solve the technical friction of like getting from whatever device they have into their first video class , well we've then opened up a whole new universe of anything and everything they can learn . So what are the health and fitness classes and programming that we can now offer to help them stay healthier at home during the pandemic ?

But , but now , as a balance , they can go up , go to the gym , do whatever it is they want to do to stay healthy , but have a balance or a backup , being able to use virtual as something that's complimentary if they can't make it to the gym or they have another reason why they just need to be doing it at home , perhaps mobility reasons , they don't have

access to a car , etc .

So having that , that flexibility of being able to access this type of programming virtually became quite important for our population , and it caused us to realize Well , listen , we're really going to have to think hard about what additional programming we continue to develop , given that this is one of the most important categories for older adults .

On on basic technology , my generation and younger generations don't think anything of . You know , I've got a 10 and a seven year old nephew . I mean , at this point I feel like they're almost going to be able to code by the time they're 12 .

But you know my parents generation and the generation older than that , technology isn't as ubiquitous for for that generation and it can be intimidating .

And we thought , well , maybe there's an addition , maybe there's a different way to approach the problem , because oftentimes there can be some fear and intimidation .

I'll include myself in the mix here because I'm 56 , so , collective week as we get older we can , we can sometimes have a little hesitation around sort of learning new things , particularly with tech , but but across all the other categories as well . So what we did , mike , is we actually reskilled and upskilled adults over 50 .

And we had them go through some training that we conducted and then they became the guides and instructors on our platform . One of the interesting things there was when you have somebody teaching somebody else with a similar patients and that the cadence vocabulary there's a magic that occurs because it sort of disarms the , the , the room or the environment .

It becomes a . Well , that person can do it Maybe I can as well and that really worked . There was a magic when it , when we started doing peer to peer , that just made that connection and created a comfort level to help with those sort of more intimidating topics .

I mean , we can get into all the motivational theories that exist around being able to watch somebody who's like you do the thing that you're looking to do . So that's a great strategic insight .

And before we dive into maybe what you're doing from a fitness perspective with some of the people on your platform , I'd like to take a step back from that and just talk a little bit about some of the other things Maybe you've learned on this journey in terms of your , your insights to .

You're working with the , the aging adult population , with regard to health and wellness . So we'll get into the what more specifically in a second . But what have been some of the broad insights you've learned that maybe our audience could tap into ?

So if you're trying to figure out where there's an opportunity to provide sort of health and wellness services to older , to a market , you need not look any further than the older adult space , because it's very underserved and it is the biggest , and so , thinking about you know , I think it's somewhere between 12 and 14,000 US adults age into Medicare every single

day , which means they turn 65 every single day and that number is only growing . We're simply not having babies at the rate that we used to . So that means it's an incredible opportunity and , if you think about it like that , it means it's a very large addressable market . It's very underserved and it needs a lot of help .

But there's a lot of upside in helping this population because if you also look at the amount of money as a percentage of our GDP that goes into health care and keeping people healthy , it is a disproportionate percentage of the overall budget . So it's just good business . It's the right thing to do . So . That's point number one .

Point number two is we come at things from a virtual first perspective . But that is simply because we wanted to fill a gap or fill a void . We in no way think that people should do all of their exercise and all of their health and wellness activities at or inside the home . It's just one component .

If that is more convenient as a means of getting your exercise and you can use virtual because of either mobility issues , you don't have access to a gym , a car , whatever the reason might be , we want to be there to help solve it . But otherwise we want to help people find anything that will keep them healthy and active and engaged as they age .

So we think about it as sort of an overall health picture . We don't think that you can be lonely and healthy . You can't be financially strained and healthy . You can't have major health conditions that go unaddressed and be healthy .

It is all very much related to sort of an overall holistic thing , and I think we remind ourselves of that and when we build curriculum we try to have a balance and think about this as a whole market , addressing a whole problem , as opposed to one specific thing .

The first thing you said I mean you're singing my song , that's something I've been banging the drum on for so long is that the aging adult population , particularly in the commercial fitness industry , is either very underserved or , in a lot of cases , not served at all , and you don't need to look much further than most of the advertisements for your average

commercial fitness facility , I would venture to say the average age is probably 50% or less of the Medicare age people in their 20s and their 30s , not people in their 50s , 60s and beyond . And those people , to your point , they have the time , they have the disposable income and they have the interest . So it just makes good business sense .

And the important part here is it's also the right thing to do from just an overall public health and well-being perspective , because this is a part of our population that needs this care but isn't getting it .

It's virtual and the gym , if you can do it . So what are the things you're learning in your virtual platforms with regard to fitness activities that you think would be beneficial for our audience to know about ?

That we might be able to help with , Because the very first classes that we developed were just us guessing at what we thought the classes might be . There's a lot of technical classes , maybe some basic fitness , maybe some basic entertainment . But once we realized , well , why should we be making these assumptions on our own ?

If we have a community and we have users , why don't we ask them what they're struggling with , what their daily activities are , what those gaps may be , how we might be able to help solve them ?

And this is where we started to understand what kind of programming we needed to develop , and so even now I think we get probably hundreds of suggestions on a daily basis of different sorts of classes and programming that we should offer , and we figured out a way to take these ideas that are almost community sourced and put them up on our website as class cards

and have people vote on those and once we get 50 folks who say , yeah , this would be really interesting , Notify me when this goes live . Well , like , oh , that's significant interest . We should produce this class and push this one out in the next sort of seven to 10 days .

Now , when we looked at what those suggestions were comprised of , yes , there was a lot of early basic tech and a lot of sort of learning the most popular apps but they were disproportionately health and wellness and so they would be . Help me with healthy recipes at home . Where should I look to buy healthy groceries nearby ?

Where can I find discounts , deals and coupons to maybe access those ? How do I exercise at home if I don't have a gym near me ? How do I use telehealth or an exercise app or those different sorts of things ?

It really started to build what I believe is now probably close to 35 or 40% of our overall classes in programming would probably be broadly in the health , wellness and then in fitness category .

Right , Older adults thinking through what they need to be healthier at home , independent , longer , and so it really did build quite a large catalog and it continues to be amongst our most popular category . Fitness is one of the few categories on our platform that's a daily activity . If you think about other things that you might want to learn .

Do you need to learn technology every day ? Probably not Once in a while when there is a specific use case , but it is not a daily activity , like fitness is . So fitness is quite unique in that it's something that we all need to think about and do each and every day .

So that requires us to develop different programming more often and more frequently than our other categories around tech and entertainment and other workforce development and whatnot .

You need to find like-minded individuals that are willing to go on that crusade with you , and that's exactly what I found at the MRF Institute . The team over at the MRF Institute creates educational content for fitness and wellness professionals who are serious about becoming a part of our healthcare continuum .

Getting on the healthcare continuum is all about leveling up our skills to be looked at as that valued resource provider . The wellness paradox is certainly an avenue for you to do that , but we need many different levers to pull if we're going to get there , and the MRF Institute is definitely one of those levers .

You can go to their website , mrfinstituteorg , to find all kinds of great , informative , free , informational content and if you choose to engage with any of their paid content , they've created a coupon code specifically for wellness paradox listeners . You can enter in WP2022 .

That's WP , and then the number 2022 to the website at checkout to receive a 15% discount on your purchase . I highly recommend you go check out MRFInstituteorg . Now back to today's episode . Yeah , I think it's a great point where you started , which is , you know , try to not assume that you know what the market wants .

I think it's a when you start , you have to start somewhere . So that's a good place , but as soon as you could start to actually ask the people you're serving the things that they want and the things that they need , that's a much faster path to providing a valuable service .

But usually the right answer comes from asking the community what it is that they want and needs to learn , and then , when we realize what that is , then you know finding the subject matter experts who can help sort of guide those that programming , and then it really starts to sort of take shape , because then we can , we can better understand , you know , are we

dealing with mobility issues ? Are we dealing with time issues ? Are we dealing with technical issues where folks might have the intent to exercise but they struggle with , you know , getting on their computer and turning on Zoom each and every day and following along ?

And so there's a whole host of different kind of friction points that we really watch , that we try to address along the way to make this friendlier for folks over 60 .

But before we go there , I don't want to pass something that you said earlier , because I think it's such an important part of this discussion and I think our , our space and the work that you do plays such a role .

You mentioned loneliness earlier and if anybody has heard the surgeon general , as of late he seems to be on a podcast road show to talk about the epidemic of loneliness and what that's doing to our health and well-being as a country , and you mentioned that earlier on the senior population is certainly a group that is very much prone to loneliness because of all

the circumstances of aging . So just just touch on that a little bit how , how you're addressing loneliness with what your group does , maybe some of the the health implications of that , and then maybe what our audience should know .

But if they don't , we can get them there Once we've gotten them there , because we think a lot about interactivity and engagement and socialization , it's caused us to sort of develop our programming and our curriculum such that it's not just one-way video . We certainly have on-demand videos , but we have a very large catalog of live and interactive classes .

So that means that the learners can ask questions , they can dialogue with each other , they can brainstorm together , and they'll do more of these in some classes than in others .

Exercise oftentimes can have less conversation and be a little bit more follow along , but that depends on the subject matter and the size of the class , because we think a lot about engagement and getting people to really participate , like our early milestones were how do you get somebody into a class and then to turn on their camera , potentially , or ask their first

question or connect with the teacher or somebody else in that class , and if we could solve some of those over time and sometimes it took multiple classes to make that happen because if you think about an older adult who's at home who maybe doesn't have regular interaction with friends , family or loved ones because they just don't have them and they don't go outside

maybe perhaps because of mobility issues like there's a bit of a barrier that we need to work to break down . But we can oftentimes do it over the course of a few different classes .

But we know that magic happens when they ask their first question or they fire their first emoji or they turn on their camera , but any one of those things means we've hit a milestone , and then we know that we're doing good work when we see them come back together , come back to classes with other people they met in a previous class .

That's a wonderful thing too , and we know that if you're making a few friends in your first month on the platform and you come back and you're taking classes with them at some level , we've helped reduce loneliness just a little , right , maybe a lot , but those are the sort of things that we look for that make us encouraged to kind of keep doing whatever it is

needed to pull somebody into a class and into the participation and into more engagement .

Like talking to their friends is the primary reason to come . Exercising is just kind of the bonus for coming , and so that socialization piece is so , so key .

So my father , for example he's now 94 . He was 89 when we started this business . He's quite active , he exercises every day , but he's also interested in tech and traveling , all of the other subjects . But he'll regularly say to me I just took a blockchain class or a cryptocurrency class . I'm like , why , dad , you're 94 . Why are you curious about that ?

He goes . Well , I took my first basic tech class from the teacher , the guide Wade . He does a lot of our sort of basic tech classes and my dad really loved his style , his demeanor , his delivery , the types of people that went to that class .

So he just signed up for everyone of Wade's other classes , which also seemed to include , you know , intermediate tech and then advanced tech , and so my dad was getting exposed to all of this interesting , different content and programming because he was following the instructor .

So for your audience , you'll find that also with older adults , the ones that really connect with you will really want to stay with you and learn and do whatever else you might also be teaching .

But you mean you broke into a new market in a new business and obviously you know that presents its challenges from a marketing and a customer acquisition standpoint .

So , just before we end , maybe teach our audience some of the lessons you learned in terms of how you marketed your services , acquired a market that you weren't working with because you were a startup business . I think a lot of people are listening to say great .

I think working with the age of the adult population would be a very worthwhile thing for me to do . How can I start to engage with them ? What's effective ways to market to them ? So what would be your perspective on that ?

And early on we struggled with our business model because we realized that in our case we were teaching basic tech to older adults , and oftentimes older adults are told don't buy anything online , don't pull out your credit card , don't download things , and that can often be good advice .

But what that also means is that you're going to have a struggle if you decide your business model is going to be a monthly subscription done completely online by swiping a credit card , because that just doesn't really scale . If you're helping somebody whose learning basic tech isn't digitally native , that's not a natural transaction to make .

It's changing over time as we sort of educate people as to how to do that safely .

But we had to decide how were we going to scale a business that was friendly and approachable for older adults that eventually allowed us to provide enough value to back into a business model , and so where we ended up is we were able to offer a lot of our classes either at no cost , or at no cost because they were subsidized with wonderful partnerships , like

we have with the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services , which is to say , we were able to find organizations who cared about the health and wellness of older adults and at no time more than the beginning of the pandemic , and they had available budget , assuming that we were teaching the appropriate health and wellness program , and we were , so it was a

wonderful fit . So we were able to help people at home who needed to learn almost every service virtually , but much of it health , wellness and fitness , and that became a nice fit .

So we were able to figure out how do we reduce friction to get as many users into classes possible , but also find a natural sort of payer partner for the relationship , and so I'd encourage , you know , folks that are entrepreneurs that are trying to think through well , listen , how do I get started here ?

It's a very big market but there are some natural friction points . And so think about the other organizations that are that already reach a lot of fitness folk like those the gyms , the YMCA's , the senior care facilities .

They are all struggling with meeting fitness experts , expertise , teachers , guides and whatnot for group , for one on one sessions and all things in between , and there's a pretty interesting opportunity there to go deeper and partner with those organizations , both for in person but also virtual , because we see them , you know , asking us well , how do we get more access

to more teachers , more experts , more guides to do in person and online ?

We can't possibly fill all of that gap that gets set up and we don't want to , but we think many of the folks that are listening here today could creatively help solve that problem and partner with those organizations , particularly senior care , senior care facilities that really , really struggle with how to help their older adults with this .

And one thing I know that we do very well in our field is we make people stronger , we improve their balance , we improve their proprioception and we reduce fall risk . And so for those senior care facilities , as my friend who works in that space was telling me , the things that exercise professionals do are actually a retention mechanism for these businesses .

And , on the notion that it's always easier to keep your current customers than get new customers , the senior care facilities are very interested in keeping their residents healthy and independent enough to be in those spaces , and I don't see our professionals looking at that as as viable of a market as some of the other things that we tend to really focus on in

our field .

That is perhaps the single biggest , the single biggest problem that we can oftentimes help with and help with quickly . So that is a good place to focus . But you need to look no further than the cost drivers for Medicare , medicaid and Medicare Advantage and see where those health plans are struggling to keep older adults healthier , happier and at home longer .

And you very quickly discovered fall prevention , nutrition , management of chronic illness , a whole host of things that your audience is very skilled at and could help older adults with .

But that is a good way to follow the data , to see where there is demand , because these organizations , whether they be senior care or health care their businesses anything that can be done to sort of reduce the cost of care is something that they can't afford not to do .

And then they need your help and it is in their financial interest and , quite honestly , in the interest of just better care and the right thing to do to engage folks like your audience to help solve these problems .

So I mean there's all these , there's a great conversation around that , but I do not want to take us off on that tangent right now because that's another episode . So , lawrence , before I let you go , you guys are doing a lot of great work . Where can people go to find out about the great work you're doing ?

But you'll be able to see a whole host of classes that are being offered every single day that are general interests , their health and wellness . I think the audience here can sort of look at some of the health , wellness and fitness classes to see what we think has been resonating with older adults .

And that's maybe a clue for where folks could double down and think about ways that they could sort of offer that kind of programming , maybe in conjunction with a local organization or local senior care facility , et cetera .

But feel free to visit our website , have a look at the programming and see what we're up to , and if you have an older friend , family or loved one who might enjoy some of our classes , send them our way . And for the older adults of Michigan , the classes are free , offered at no cost , courtesy of the Department of Health and Human Services in Michigan .

Before I let you go , the last question is going to take us out of this discussion into the general premise of this podcast , which is , I consider the wellness paradox to be this trust , interaction and communication gap that exists between exercise professionals and the medical community to some degree , or just talking about as an outsider to our industry , if you

could offer one piece of advice to exercise professionals on how they could bridge that gap , what would that one piece of advice be ?

So if you really do want to tap into the huge potential that I believe the older adult fitness market offers , you're going to want to start thinking about if you haven't already the style of communication what is empathy , patience , cadence , vocabulary , look like with this market and how you talk to this market .

In many cases , if you are already looking after an older parent or friend or loved one , you have much of those skills that you can repurpose here , because I think that is where the magic occurs is treating this audience a little differently again collectively , myself included Because if you service this audience in the way that it wants and needs to be serviced ,

there is a huge opportunity . It just requires us to think about the access points , the friction , the devices , the accessibility , all of which is addressable .

But if you think about that , that is where the opportunity is in you being better and able to offer that to older adults in a way that most of the society today really doesn't do a job , a specific job of differentiating .

My example of this is it doesn't really matter whether we go buy a new set of headphones at Best Buy or open a bank account at Wells Fargo , we're almost always given a QR code or a website URL . There's an expectation that everybody just knows how to access all of these things . Do not make that assumption for older adults .

Think about everything from an accessibility first , and then you're approachable , you're welcoming , and that's what will make your business grow with this audience .

Forward slash episode 118 . Please be on the lookout for our next episode when it drops in two weeks , and don't forget to subscribe through your favorite podcast platform . Until we chat again next , please be well .