Meet Wyatt Chapman | Founder and CEO of VeraVia Health and Wellness

We had the good fortune of connecting with Wyatt Chapman and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Wyatt, every day, we about how much execution matters, but we think ideas matter as well. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
As the CEO and Founder of VeraVia Health and Wellness, I have learned to embody VeraVia’s comprehensive mind, body, and spirit approach to health. My work experience has taught me the importance of discovering the relationship among one’s internal elements (physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual) and mastering them to achieve the highest self, allowing for true success and an optimal life experience.

Prior to starting VeraVia, I served as President and Principal Architect of an award-winning architectural design firm. During this time, I led the cutting-edge sustainable design and construction of numerous large-scale projects across the country, including recreation and fitness facilities, comprehensive physical and mental wellness facilities, rehabilitation centers, dormitories, aircraft hangars and maintenance facilities, and more. Over a relatively short time, the firm grew by over 300% and I managed the extremely competitive proposal phase as well as the design and construction of over 130 projects that were awarded to the firm, with a cumulative total of over $2.5 Billion.

While finding “success” professionally and financially, my health, energy, productivity, and personal life suffered. The constant stress and burnout from working seven days a week and constant lack of sleep left me with extreme fatigue, lower productivity, missed time with my family, and severe chronic back pain which took away my single most favorite hobby and stress reliever, working out and lifting weights.

I’ve always loved exercising and eating healthy! But I just wasn’t able to maintain any of my normal healthy habits and my health continued to suffer. Doctors only wanted to prescribe me medications to mask the pain. I struggled with anxiety and depression. I sought out numerous alternative healthcare practitioners, and while they were helpful, they sometimes contradicted each other, and I just wasn’t able to figure out how to get back control over my physical and mental health. I didn’t have enough tools for how to balance what I thought were my work responsibilities and commitments to other people with healthy habits that were good for me.

In architecture, I enjoyed creating buildings using sustainable strategies that are proven to improve people’s well-being, quality of life, and productivity. But I came to realize that even if a person’s external environment were designed for optimal wellness, this external focus would not be able to have a significant impact if a person’s internal environment were not consciously being created to promote optimal happiness, productivity, or quality of life.

I realized that in order to have true lasting health, you must treat all aspects that makeup a persons wellbeing including physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.

From these experiences, I became more and more interested in how a person’s internal elements (physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual) might be designed for that person to achieve their highest self, allowing for true success, and an optimal life experience. This set of skills is not only rarely taught but also receives very little focused attention, yet prioritizing this as a mission would have the most significant potential to impact ones quality of life. Nothing could be more important than this! Mastering these parts of yourself would be like creating the strongest most resilient foundation from which all the rest of life’s experiences can be built upon and experienced!

These overarching concepts, as well as a lifelong passion for health and fitness, led me to leave a successful award-winning career in architecture and sustainable design to start a new kind of company, a comprehensive integrative wellness retreat, where people can go and have a multidisciplinary team of health and wellness professionals empower them to regain control over their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. I wanted VeraVia to be a place where people with different health goals could each go and experience a personalized wellness program that addressed their specific goals. At VeraVia, we help our guests discover their true path to wellness, and achieve their highest potential!

Alright, so for those in our community who might not be familiar with your business, can you tell us more?
I’m extremely proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish so far with VeraVia. It’s been an exciting and rewarding journey, but definitely not a smooth road.

As a start-up company in a completely new field, I had to quickly learn a lot of new business skills. The first hurdle I ran into was with our name. I thought of a great name for this new business and designed a great logo and branding identity, only to learn that if I wanted to use that name it would be difficult to expand the business because I wouldn’t be able to trademark the name I had chosen. So I immediately had to work with our new marketing company to come up with a new name that could be trademarked.

Then the marketing and sales side of the business was completely new to me and proved to be the biggest learning curve (and still is!). At first I thought that if I created a great website that described (in detail!) all of the reasons why VeraVia was the best choice for someone wanting to transform their health and wellbeing, then guests would naturally want to come experience our wellness retreat. Well, I quickly learned it was not going to be that easy! It took years of trial and error and working with different marketing companies and business coaches to learn the basics of marketing and sales. I also had to learn a whole new industry, which was travel and hospitality. In the beginning since we were providing a high-end luxury experience, I thought that we had to accommodate any request that a guest had no matter what. I learned very fast that this approach would not be sustainable or scaleable, so we had to implement a number of standard operating procedures to manage client expectations and learn how to say “no” without offending our guests.

There were a number of other “bumps” along the way, but the biggest one by far was having to shut down our business completely due to the Covid pandemic. Just as we were gaining consistent traction and year over year growth, with a team that was best-in-class and all of our standard operating procedures running smoothly, we had to completely shut down our entire business and lay off all of our staff due to Covid. We were closed for one year and that was probably the most stressful and uncertain time in my career because I didn’t know if we were going to be able to reopen and survive or not. Then when we finally did reopen, we experienced all of the ongoing struggles with staffing and fears around traveling and fears around spiking positive Covid cases that many other businesses did.

Thankfully throughout this long journey I’ve had the blessing of having some amazing people that work with me at VeraVia. Their passion for what we’re doing and their loyalty and commitment to our overall mission have made all our success possible!

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
VeraVia is located in Carlsbad, so I’m much more familiar with that area. If my best friend was visiting me some of my favorite places near us would be Batiquitos Lagoon which is a beautiful natural lagoon adjacent to our resort. It is also a bird sanctuary so you’ll see lots of wildlife. Then I’d take them a bit further south to hike in Torrey Pines State Reserve, probably the most beautiful hiking and beaches around! If they want to do some personal pampering I would take them to the Aviara Spa where VeraVia is located, inside the Park Hyatt Aviara Resort. For a nice lunch and site seeing I would take them to eat somewhere in La Jolla and then walk down to see the seals and sea lions.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
Some key books or articles that had a big influence are:

“Be Excellent at Anything: The Four Keys to Transforming the Way We Work and Live”
-By Tony Schwartz
(Previously published as The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working)

“Beyond Money and Power (and Stress and Burnout): In Search of a New Definition of Success”
-Arianna Huffington

“Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom”
-Rick Hanson

“Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One”
-Dr. Joe Dispenza

Website: https://veraviafit.com/

Instagram: @veraviafit

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wyatt-d-chapman-89081a4a/

Twitter: @veraviafit

Facebook: @veraviafit

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/VeraViaFit

Image Credits
VeraVia