Expond continues expansion across SB County
It has been about three years since Expond — short for Experience on Demand — first jumped onto the scene to fill a void left by the Covid-19 pandemic.
But even now, as the pandemic becomes more a thing of the past, Expond continues expanding.
“Coming out of Covid, everybody is looking to connect, and they want experiences. They’re spending more money on experiences than they are spending on material things,” Founder and CEO Jason Baker told the Business Times.
“The other thing is, with depression and anxiety being so high coming out of Covid, nobody wants to be alone. Being around people is incredibly important and people are really understanding the importance of those two things, being healthy and being together.”
Expond, based in Santa Barbara, is an online booking platform connecting individuals and companies to health and fitness professionals offering customized wellness services.
It operates almost like Uber, with a team of 87 independent contractors who go to clients’ locations for workouts or other fitness and wellness experiences.
Over the past couple of years, Expond has been mainly making its market in the hospitality industry — partnering with hotels in Santa Barbara County such as the Miramar, the Bacara, and their most recent partnership includes all of Paradise Retreats luxury rental homes within the Santa Barbara area.
“We’ve seen this huge drive for wellness tourism and people wanting experiences when they come and they stay at these hotels and we’ve also noticed that hotels are having a difficult time staffing and getting things up and running,” Baker said.
“It’s very difficult for a hotel to have a full-time personal trainer or a yoga instructor to keep on staff, so it makes it a lot easier for them and more convenient for them to let us take care of all of that, the hiring, the vetting and provide them with what we need.”
Like it did many industries, Covid made that gap much more noticeable in 2020 and 2021, as hotels, unable to generate as much revenue with no one traveling, could not afford to keep on extra members such as yoga instructors or trainers.
That is what prompted Baker to found the company in 2021 and launch in 2022.
Baker is no stranger to the fitness/wellness industry — he founded Fitness 805 in Santa Barbara in 2006.
But Fitness 805 was “more of doing things the old way.”
“Hotels would contact us and say they have somebody interested in the personal training session and then we would have to turn around and text everybody just to see if somebody was available. It was just a very old, archaic way of doing it,” Baker said.
Expond’s app is much more streamlined, with Baker saying the platform “will allow us to scale into other areas very easily.”
According to Baker, Expond is a benefit for both the customer and the provider of services and even the company itself.
For Expond, it keeps a small percentage of what was billed our for from the hotels.
On the hotel side, Baker said, it means they do not have to offer these services on their own, while providers love both the ease of the system, the pay and the freedom.
According to Baker, Expond pays health and fitness professionals better on an hourly basis than their other options, because they don’t have to be tied to a specific location.
“We pay at the top end of what they are making and we take a lot of pride in having these really great providers and they love the freedom of being able to pick and choose what opportunities they want,” Baker said.
“Everybody’s making money from the hotel end and the provider end, it’s just a really great system and we are very proud of it.”
Baker declined to share revenue numbers but noted that the company has raised about $2.65 million in funding so far with all that being invested into the software of the company and building out the team.
Expond is currently looking to raise another $1.5 million to continue scaling the company.
That could include even one day going beyond Santa Barbara County.
“In the next few years, we’re looking at places from Napa all the way down to San Diego. We have eyeballed about 10 areas within that whole distance that we think could be a really good fit and we believe we could get there,” Baker said.
