685 Brittany Driscoll:

Entrepreneurs are visionaries.  The best can truly see, truly feel, the reality of their dreams made real … long before they transform from the early etchings to profitable, scalable enterprises. Just as my guest today – Brittany Driscoll – describes how she envisioned the massage company Squeeze with its growing franchises nationwide.

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and Happy International Women’s Day! Welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys,

epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m a 5-time serial entrepreneur who has lived and breathed the ups and downs of starting and growing businesses, currently the game changing social podcast app Podopolo. Wherever you are listening to this, take a moment and join the Wings community over on Podopolo, where we can take the conversation further with your questions, perspectives, experiences, and advice for other female founders at whatever stage of the journey you’re at! Because together we’re stronger, and we soar higher when we fly together.

Today we meet a phenomenal marketing whiz and veteran C-suite executive who took DryBar from $30M to more than $100M in revenue … before taking the leap into entrepreneurship by co-founding Squeeze, a way better massage experience inspired with the founders of DryBar.

Brittany Driscoll is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Squeeze where she is now responsible for, well, everything. Today she shares her transition from corporate executive to entrepreneur, what she’s learned along the ups and downs of the way, how she’s building Squeeze, and why we all have the power to change the world for good – a powerful message any day but especially today on International Women’s Day.

If you’re an entrepreneur, you know all about what Brittany Driscoll calls the “chaos of the unknown”. Feeling on top of the world one minute, in the depths of despair the next, and joyous rapture moments later. It’s part of the entrepreneurial journey because there are so many things beyond our control, so many unexpected challenges, failures, and opportunities along the way – each an opportunity to keep growing and learning.

Right now, Brittany is building a unique franchised massage company Squeeze – more upscale than the Massage Envy’s of the world; more affordable than the 5-star hotel spa experience. There’s a gap in the massage market Brittany is determined to fill – a gap similar to the one DryBar filled in the hair space, and she’s well-placed to grow Squeeze fast, having spent four years running marketing for Drybar to take the company from $30M to more than $100M, opening 50 new shops and launching the Drybar product line internationally, as well as in Sephora, Ulta and Nordstrom.

Before Drybar, Brittany spent over a decade in marketing and advertising at agencies, including Mistress (Mattel, The Coca-Cola Company, Hilton Worldwide), RAPP (Skype, Toyota) and experiential agency USMP (Home Depot).

Today, Brittany shares her journey from corporate exec to startup founder, the secrets of great marketing and customer success, plus her mission for a “Feel Good Revolution” – including leadership qualities that inspire and motivate teams and create feel good company cultures. She’s a cancer survivor and wellness advocate, and today she shares her strong passion for supporting other women in business. So, listen on and be sure to join the conversation with Brittany and me over on Podopolo, the must-download app for personalized and interactive podcasting. Simply follow wings there, and let’s keep the conversation going after the episode.

OK… So let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Brittany Driscoll.

Melinda Wittstock:

Brittany, welcome to Wings.

Brittany Driscoll:

Hi, Melinda. Thank you so much for having me.

Melinda Wittstock:

I’m always excited to talk to people who’ve made this leap from the corporate C-suite, really into entrepreneurship because both those things demand, in many cases, very different things from us on every level.

What has your journey been like? What have you learned in that transition?

Brittany Driscoll:

Yes, you are very right in terms of just having to flex different muscles in those two very different spaces. Well, I think just really quickly by way of background for your listeners, I started my career in marketing and advertising. I got an amazing chance to work with Fortune 500 brands like Disney, Hilton, Coca-Cola. Mattel was a client of mine for years and years. I got to work on Barbie and Hot Wheels. And it’s interesting how, when we look back on things, we can connect the dots a bit, and I think I’ve always had a very entrepreneurial spirit in me.

Squeeze is certainly my first true entrepreneurial venture but working with Hot Wheels is probably a good example of working that entrepreneurial side of me before I really knew what that fully meant. And what I mean by that is I worked on a campaign called Hot Wheels for Real, and most people don’t know, but the toy cars are actually designed to scale. So we built them to scale for real, and we worked with the world’s best race car drivers from Mario Andretti to Danica Patrick to all the stunt drivers that work on Fast & Furious and all the commercials that we see on TV, and we created this whole content series that lived online, and we broke world records. We subverted major sporting events like the X Games and the Indianapolis 500 and put on massive live events replicating a lot of the toy maneuvers, if you will, that take place for little kids.

And when you think about a toy company choosing to put people’s lives on the line because that’s really what we were doing. We built an 100-foot door in the middle of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. We sent a four-wheel truck down it, broke a world record. We built a double loop in the middle of downtown LA. We sent two cars through it. Those are pretty crazy, intense things, and I think what that experience really solidified in my mind and I can go back and also identify other kind of that entrepreneurial spirit in my career and in my life, but that experience really solidified for me that if you’ve got a big vision and really great people who all know their role and are committed to making it happen, truly anything is possible.

So, I always, even in my corporate roles, was very ambitious in wanting to do really big bold things. And from there, I transitioned to running marketing for Drybar, and when I started at Drybar, I was there for four years, but when I started, it was a $30 million company. There are around 25 locations. They had test-piloted the product line into 70 Sephora doors. And when I left, there were close to 100 locations. The product line was in all prestige retailers from Sephora, Ulta, Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s and then international expansion.

So, I really got just so much opportunity to scale businesses and create really disruptive, great experiences, and I think that there was just kind of always a passion and fire inside of me to do more, and the story of Squeeze really came about… it was Michael and Allie, who are the founders of Drybar, it was their brainchild. They just, of course, really didn’t have the bandwidth to get it off the ground. And when I was, after those four years, running marketing, I was really looking for a new challenge. I think that entrepreneurial spirit really kicked in, and I wanted to get back into building mode and growing and really kind of navigating, what I like to say, the chaos of the unknown, which really kind of is a sweet spot in building brands and businesses, and they reminded me that they’d always had this other idea in the back of their mind, and so we partnered together to launch Squeeze, which we can talk about in a minute.

But I do think that that experience is one that I hope resonates with a lot of people. I think people go into career tracks not really sure where they’re going to end up. I really didn’t know that I is going to end up on the entrepreneurial track, but you just never know, and so I always like to encourage people, “Be bold and be doing the best that you possibly can. Take all of the learnings that wherever you are, whatever you’re doing right now because you never know where it’s going to lead you, and it’s certainly going to serve you, no matter what.”

Melinda Wittstock:

I love what you said about the chaos of the unknown. I mean, because that is something that the entrepreneur, by definition, has to actually, weirdly enjoy because…

Brittany Driscoll:

Yes. Absolutely.

Melinda Wittstock:

… all stages from ideation to that early team to minimum viable product or minimum viable community or whatever it is through scale, there are so many things that you can’t control. There are so many things that you don’t know. You’re like a scientist in a lab testing hypotheses until you get it right, and it is a chaos of the unknown, so you’ve got to kind of weirdly embrace it.

Did you ever feel… in your career for these major brands, including Drybar, but then now with Squeeze, is it a little bit different because it’s yours?

Brittany Driscoll:

Absolutely. Business is problem-solving, right, no matter where you sit in the world of business, whether it’s on the corporate side, the vendor side, the client side, and/or you’re an entrepreneur, you’re solving a problem at the end of the day. It’s just a different level of chaos, I suppose, is probably the right way to put it. And I think that when you’re starting something from scratch, you have to have this very irrational, positive outlook. I mean, you just kind of have to unabashedly believe in whatever it is that you are doing because starting something from nothing just is… it’s an indescribable experience until you’ve actually done it. I’m not a parent, but I imagine that it’s very similar to having a child, but there’s just so many things that you don’t really know are going to stretch you, to challenge you, to really test why you started, which is kind of why I go back to that unabashed positivity and that irrational just belief in what you’re doing because it’s really hard to start something from scratch. And it’s one thing to have an idea. It’s another thing to make it actually happen and come to life and execute it.

So I think it’s interesting. I launched Squeeze, which is a massage concept, in March of 2019, and we were open for 11 months before the world had different plans for us, and we were shut down for nearly a year, and it’s taken probably two years to rebuild the momentum that we started with, and it’s funny because I look back on the last couple of years and I really realize that I don’t think the most successful people are the most educated, the most experienced, the most well-connected, although that helps. I think the most successful people are the people who have the absolute, most intense persistence, tenacity, the belief, again, that you can and just that willingness to get up every single day to keep going.

Brittany Driscoll:

And so I think I do kind of have that in my blood. I really do kind of believe… I believe in people. I believe you can do anything that you want to do. I really do. And I love really good, big, bold ideas. I feel like life is short. Why not try because even if it doesn’t end up the way that you want it to, you’ll have learned so much and better to look back on life and have tried than to regret not putting yourself out there, so-

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh gosh. So important.

Brittany Driscoll:

… yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

So wise for anybody, whatever you do. There’s so many studies of elderly people who, on their deathbed, the one thing they say is, “I really regret I just didn’t do it.” And so when I think in terms of my journey as a serial entrepreneur, I’ve just always also had it in my DNA just to go and do big things, big missions, swing for the fences. Some of them work. Some of them don’t. I always learn. I’m always getting better

But one of the things I learned is it’s just as hard to start a small business as it is to start a really big swing for the fences business. It requires the same… you got to do a lot of the same things. [crosstalk 00:09:43].

Brittany Driscoll:

Well, [crosstalk 00:09:44]. Yeah, I mean, especially because big businesses start small. I think that’s one thing that’s so hard in the culture that we exist in today with social media and people seemingly thinking that success happens overnight and it doesn’t, and big companies start small, and great successful people were beginners at one point in time. And so I think that that’s the misnomer in why people don’t start is because they think that they don’t have the proper perspective, that everyone starts really, truly in the same position. Again, you can have the connections. There’s certain components, if you will, that could be different for people’s experience, but you still, at the end of the day, have to be willing to put all the ingredients together to create something and then from there, who knows where it goes, but…

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, 100%.

Melinda Wittstock:

So with Squeeze, what have been some of the hardest challenges to overcome because I mean, you know what you’re doing, obviously, on the marketing side. That’s a huge asset, right?

Brittany Driscoll:

Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

So what have been some of the biggest challenges?

Brittany Driscoll:

Well, so to quickly paint the picture of Squeeze for those who don’t know it, so new massage concept. I partnered with the founders of Drybar. It was their brainchild and really, the way that we view our concept, our business within the landscape is on one end of the spectrum, there’s the low-end discount chains which I always say, to their credit, have made massage accessible to the masses. They just lack a lot from a consumer experience standpoint today, and on the flip side, you’ve got high-end hotels and spas which are lovely, but unattainable for a regular experience.

And so we brought in the same fun branding approach as Drybar, the same sophisticated shop design and experience with surprise and delight moments but at an affordable price point. So we really sit in that center affordable luxury space.

Melinda Wittstock:

As you describe that, okay, as someone who’s addicted to massage, I don’t know how I’d be an entrepreneur without massage,

Brittany Driscoll:

Truly, yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so yeah, now that you describe that, that’s such a… I’m just hitting my head in this kind of duh moment. What an obvious gap in the market. And like you and the Drybar founders saw it, but so many other people could have seen that opportunity. It makes perfect sense.

Getting back to the challenges, though, because it does seem like a no-brainer, what have some of those challenges been?

Brittany Driscoll:

Yeah, I think certainly, the pandemic was probably the most trying time of my life, personally and professionally. I’ve always been a driver and a go-getter, and I really don’t let anyone or no’s or things get in the way of kind of accomplishing what I set out to do, so having just launched this business and begun the momentum of scaling it to then all of a sudden, having to really press pause was probably the most challenging thing of this entire experience so far. I mean, don’t get me wrong. It’s definitely difficult to launch a business, for sure, but that was definitely, again, just like a… it was a lesson or an exercise in tenacity, right? Just the sheer willingness to keep going even though, at times, it felt like are we ever going to get out of this, which is why I say that I think my mindset, in particular, as an entrepreneur has to be something that is consistently focused on and worked on and you need to be doing all of the healthy habits to ensure that you are in a good place mentally because man, you get knocked down day after day after day.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, I know.

Brittany Driscoll:

You know? Yeah. And it [crosstalk 00:14:03]. Exactly.

Melinda Wittstock:

Hour by hour, you’re at the top of your game, feeling like you’re on top of the world. Everything’s so amazing. You’re unstoppable. And then a moment later, you’re like, “Oh crap.” [crosstalk 00:14:14].

Brittany Driscoll:

Yeah, there’s that great graphic that’s basically peaks and valleys, and it says, “A day in the life of an entrepreneur,” and it’s like, you wake up and you’re like, “I can take on the world,” and two hours later, you’re like, “Oh shit, I think I’m going to run out of money,” and the next thing is like, “No, no, we’re not. This is the greatest thing ever,” and then two hours later, it’s like, “Oh my gosh, I’m a failure. I don’t think… why did I ever do this? I think that the whole world’s crashing down.”

Melinda Wittstock:

Thank you for describing my every day. Yeah, yeah.

Brittany Driscoll:

It’s true, and it does feel that way all of the time. And so, there does need to just be the stability that exists within your mindset, but to speak to challenges in addition to the pandemic, the other thing, for me, having come from the corporate world that I really realized it was a very humbling experience, honestly, because I had grown in my career relatively quickly. I had always gotten amazing opportunities, and I really loved what I did. I was very passionate and I mean, I still am, but when I worked for companies and people, I showed up early. I stayed late. I did all the things to really ensure that we were doing the best thing possible. And I was the expert, especially at Drybar. I ran marketing. So I was the expert in a particular function in a field and was very confident in how we went about marketing and building the Drybar brand, as I did for all the other companies that I worked for too.

But when you jump, all of a sudden, into being your own boss and being an entrepreneur and starting something, it’s like all of a sudden, you have to be responsible for all of those other things that other people did in your organization that you really had no true visibility into nor appreciation for. So it’s like, “Wow, I got…” I mean, I always say that starting your own business is like holding a silver platter out with all of your vulnerabilities and weaknesses on display for everyone to see and poke at and take, and so I think that it was certainly a lesson in good people make all of the difference and you truly need… nothing great is done alone. You need great people who are going to offset your weaknesses and allow you to stay in that zone of genius that is yours, and to start something and think that you can do everything or you’re the best at it or best at all of the things is a recipe for failure.

Melinda Wittstock:

So yeah, I mean, there’s so many parts of the business. When you are the founder and the CEO, you’re almost like a conductor of an orchestra. So you have to know enough about the violin section or the cellos or the bass or whatever, right, to be able to make sure there’s a synthesis between all these different moving pieces and everything is coordinated, and yet, everybody comes to it with their own expertise. So what have you learned along the way, Brittany, in terms of being able to manage that kind of conductor part, which is vital in terms of who we’re being as the leaders of our company, like the chief inspiration officer of the company, holding people to results officer of the company, right, in areas that are outside of your own particular expertise.

Brittany Driscoll:

Yeah, it’s very interesting. I think that I actually had a friend who is the CEO of a fitness concept, and she changed her CEO title to chief empowerment officer because I do think that that is ultimately the core role of a leader within an organization is to be the one that is setting the vision and encouraging and empowering people to carry it through. And I learned very quickly that I had to do that and if I wanted to get to where we were going.

I mean, with Drybar, we had so much experience around creating a great brick and mortar disruptive experience, but we had never built a technology platform, and for us at Squeeze, that’s our biggest differentiator. We actually have an end-to-end platform that enables our guests to do everything from booking appointments and all their personalized massage preferences through to rating, tipping, and reviewing. It’s like Uber and Postmates. You do it at your leisure and through your own device, so there’s no clunky checkout experiences. There’s no awkward tipping. We like to say guests walk in and flow out.

And so, building a technology platform and app and really, all of the components that came with that was very unknown to us. So I brought in a chief operating officer really early on to lead those things that I knew we needed in order to be in order to be the best and really recognizing that I needed to rely on him and his expertise more so than what I thought maybe was the right thing. So I think humility is such a huge piece of it.

I also feel like it’s so important to really know what you’re good at and what you’re not, and I’ll give a tangible example of that with Squeeze. So when we started Squeeze, we knew that we were planning to scale it. We knew that this was a 300- to 500-unit brand. That’s our goal to build and scale this business, and you can do that in one of two ways. You can do it through building corporate locations or you can franchise, and someone who I wish I could remember who told me this because I say it all the time and they deserve the credit, but one of the many amazing mentors that I have said to me early on, “If you want to run an operations- and HR-heavy business, build corporate-owned stores. If you want to run a sales and marketing organization, sell franchises.”

And for me, it was just that moment of, “Oh, I know how to build a brand. I know how to create good foundational processes that someone else can follow, but at the end of the day, I don’t have the true operational experience that would be required to open corporate doors, but I can certainly support great operators to do it in their communities.” And so we chose to franchise Squeeze, and I bring that up only as an example because I think wherever it is that you are in your space, those who are listening, it’s important to recognize where are you going to thrive? Where is your expertise and your passion really going to deliver strongly for the business and make sure that you’re making the strategic decisions that leverages those.

Brittany Driscoll:

And so there’s kind of been many moments like that, but I would say that’s a good example of just recognizing my strengths and my weaknesses and where I would also get very excited to get out of bed every day because I think we have to remember that too is going back to entrepreneurship is much harder than we see on social media or online in the media magazine publications, the headline stories, et cetera. So it’s like, you got to make sure that there’s enough good and enough things get you really excited to get out of bed. So it’s been… it’s still a learning… it’s a journey. [crosstalk 00:21:53].

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s always a journey. I mean, we could talk two years from now and likely, we would both be saying exactly the same things. No matter the success, there’s something new or there’s something out of left field. There’s another competitor, or there’s a pandemic. I don’t know, whatever, right?

Brittany Driscoll:

Yeah, totally. Exactly. Always something.

Melinda Wittstock:

Going back to the chaos of the unknown.

Melinda Wittstock:

I love that you really created the business around your own strengths, and I want to get into the franchising side of it and because this is really interesting. This really gets into the realm of repeatable processes and SOPs where you think of, say, something like McDonald’s and what they did right was making sure that everything was always going to be the same experience no matter where, right? You think of other franchise kind of success stories and you know how, say, Ray Kroc did it or whatever, right?

What are some of the things that you have learned as you build the franchises, and what sort of person are you looking for to run those franchises?

Brittany Driscoll:

Yes, it’s funny that you bring up McDonald’s because you know that scene in the movie, The Founder, where they’re practicing on the tennis court, how it’s [crosstalk 00:23:23].

Melinda Wittstock:

Exactly.

Brittany Driscoll:

I actually-

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s exactly what I was thinking, yeah.

Brittany Driscoll:

… yes. I drew in chalk the Squeeze experience on my driveway. This was before we even had a location at all, and I would go through the guest experience and the team experience with my team. We would kind of do the same thing like, “Okay, what is it going to feel like when someone walks in? How are we taking them to their suite? How are the exchanges going? What are we saying?” So all that kind of stuff is just… it’s fun. That is the fun stuff.

But franchising, yeah. So the benefits of franchising, gosh, really are that it’s a business in a box. So we have created a business. We have proven the model, through our flagship corporate location, what it takes to be successful in running this operation. And from there, we are really putting playbooks together or toolkits for every functional element of the business. And for us, that’s everything from real estate site selection through to construction project management to hiring, interviewing, recruiting, training your team through to operating your business on a daily basis and then marketing, of course, the consumer acquisition component.

So we have functional playbooks for each element of the business to support our franchisees who we call operating partners, and I love the term operating partner because we really… it is a partnership. I mean, what we’re providing as the franchisor is that business in a box, the paint by number, that this is how you do it, but ultimately, we’re handing the tools over to our operating partners to execute.

And so, how I see our role is to always be the visionary behind the experience, what we stand for as a brand, the innovation, absolutely. We’re a technology-driven company, so we’re always going to be criticizing ourselves and really pushing ourselves to be best in class from that standpoint. But on the flip side, the responsibility of the franchisee, our operating partners, is to create an amazing in-person experience. This is a highly connective brand, and so we need people who are involved and passionate in their community, certainly business leaders who have had success in business across many industries. We have people from finance to technology to sales to beauty to lawyers to… we’ve got ex-Amazon, ex-Coca-Cola executives, so it runs the gamut, but certainly, strong operators is an important evaluation component for us.

But probably, the most important thing that we are looking for at Squeeze is people who have a passion for people. I always like to say that we’re in the people industry, not the service industry. At the end of the day, we need happy employees to service happy guests to make for happy owners, and the world goes round, and so, so much of actually my passion and my excitement around what we’re doing is really focusing our energy on our employees first. And so from an operator standpoint, we need people who have team management experience and who understand what it takes to motivate and connect with a team because our locations can have upwards of 30 people that are working in them at any given time.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, so the customer experience is vital and to be in alignment with the marketing promise. And sometimes, people get the marketing right but not the customer success, or they get the customer success right, not really the marketing. I mean, there are all these pieces. We go back to the conducting of the orchestra, but yeah, absolutely vital. People expect this now. If people are even thinking about the experience or thinking something’s off, yeah, it’s so vital,

Brittany Driscoll:

It’s interesting that you bring that up. I always used to joke, very tongue-in-cheek, that I wanted to work myself out of a job at Drybar being the head of marketing and not because I didn’t love my job or the brand, but I actually believe that the strongest marketing channel will always be word-of-mouth, and the impetus of word-of-mouth is an amazing experience.

And so, when you’re thinking about marketing, when you’re thinking about building a brand, it needs to be from the inside out. It needs to be in every interaction and component that someone has with your brand and experience. What are they feeling? How do you want them to feel? Because if you can create something that has enough thoughtfulness, it just catches people’s attention. It really does make them excited about the differentiation of what that particular thing is, and that’s what we’ve tried to focus a lot on at Squeeze.

I mean, it’s what Drybar did so well also, and so, that naturally dovetails, then, into great marketing that also makes you feel something, but I’ll always go back to you can have the best creative. You can have the best copy. You can have cheeky things here and there that bring the brand to life, but if your experience doesn’t deliver against what you’re saying, then none of it matters, which is why on the franchising side, it’s so important for us that we’re finding operators who really understand the people side and the experience side because that is what guests are going to love the most when they’re coming into the business is what are the people like here? How does it feel? What’s the energy? Is the thoughtfulness around my experience curated in a way that is so differentiated from anything else that I can get?

And that’s what we’ve done. That’s what our focus is, and so, yeah, I always go back to the experience side of things. Word-of-mouth piece is make or break, truly.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, it’s also the least expensive form of marketing, as well as the most effective because if you have this great experience and you’re the… oh gosh, the holy grail is that your customers are your best salespeople, in fact, and then once you have people that are return, repeat customers where you’re extending the lifetime value of the customer, it’s actually also less expensive to have repeat traffic than always having to bring in new people, so…

Brittany Driscoll:

Exactly.

Melinda Wittstock:

… just reducing the churn and all of that.

And I think it’s interesting with women entrepreneurs because often, this comes up on this podcast a lot, and I think of all the different women entrepreneurs that I’ve mentored over the years where there’s this resistance to kind of knowing your numbers, right, or knowing what’s really going on in the business because the numbers tell the story, so, what’s your experience or… sorry, what’s your take on that in terms of how you really keep track of, “Okay, so what are the metrics for really understanding that word-of-mouth and what your targets are and how you’re executing against them, et cetera?”

Brittany Driscoll:

Yeah. I mean, there’s several KPIs. We have a net promoter score. Obviously, Google, Yelp reviews are massive for our type of business and our experience. We also, naturally, have an internal rating system through our app. Again, guests are able to rate, tip, and review at their leisure, post-massage, and then those ratings and reviews are shared publicly through our platform. So when you go in to book a therapist, you can see those ratings and reviews right online. You can see what other people are saying about them. Does it validate their bio that exists on the site, et cetera, cetera. So there’s certainly components and goals that we have for each one of those channels. And then we also have scorecards for our team that, again, is… there’s certain components of those that tie back to the guest experience.

So yes, I mean, it doesn’t have to be overly complicated, to your point. I mean, sometimes, I think that that’s where the hesitancy lies for anyone, women or men. I think that what’s important is you really understand the core metrics and the things that move the needle for your business one way or the other, and you need to have a system, in a way, to monitor those on a regular basis and then also, then responses and a plan on how to address them when they’re not where you want to be, and that’s the fun of starting something too is kind of evaluating all of that, right, and figuring out where is the sweet spot? What needs to be done to get where we want to be? But I don’t think it has to be overly complicated. It shouldn’t be, really.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s so true.

Melinda Wittstock:

So Brittany, I mean, there’s so many things that you’ve done, but there’s one that really does need to be called out is you recovered from cancer. And tell me about that experience and what it was like for you and what you learned from it, how it’s changed your life?

Brittany Driscoll:

Gosh, well, it does change your life when you get a life-altering diagnosis, for sure. I was diagnosed with melanoma when I was 25, and melanoma is one of those forms of cancer that can spread rather quickly, and there’s not a lot that can be done after a certain point. And thankfully, we caught mine early enough, but it was quite jarring. I mean, I had to have pretty intensive surgery. I had to have lymph nodes removed. I had months and months and months of recovery.

My husband is also a cancer survivor, believe it or not.

Melinda Wittstock:

[crosstalk 00:33:48].

Brittany Driscoll:

He had colorectal cancer and was Stage Three, so he was very almost, again, at the point of, I shouldn’t say no return, but really just… it could have certainly taken a different turn, and he went through all the chemo and radiation, and it’s interesting. I think for both of us, we had… I’ll always go back to mindset. We had this mindset that we weren’t going to let this experience or this diagnosis define us. I don’t even really let the idea of being a survivor define me either because I feel like I want to thrive in life, and I feel very grateful for every single day.

Brittany Driscoll:

And so I think we both just approached that period of time as we’re going to do the best we can, as much as we can. We’re going to get up every day grateful for the day and hope for the best for tomorrow and just really get through it. The only way through anything is through. And I think what it does for both of us today is… it’s so interesting. I don’t… it’s hard to describe, I guess, but I think there’s probably just a different level of appreciation. There’s also a lightness that exists. Things don’t need to always be so serious or so heavy or life should be enjoyed and really, we should approach every day with gratitude. I try and focus so much on gratitude because it’s important to really focus on the good and have the right perspective as we go about our days and maybe that’s what it’s done for me is just given me a different perspective, one, hopefully, that’s positively impacting other people along the way, I think, would be my hope for it all.

Melinda Wittstock:

I love that. So powerful. Gratitude is everything when we’re in that vibration or however we term it. Miracles happen because when we’re really in gratitude for what we have, we open up the doors to receive more, I think, of what we actually want and the impact we want to have on the world, the legacy we want to have, the business we want to create, all of it. So, so powerful.

Brittany, how can people find out about Squeeze, find where there’s a location in their area, sign up, whatever, follow you on social? What’s the best way?

Brittany Driscoll:

Yes, so head to squeezemassage.com. You can book an appointment there. You can see our upcoming locations. You can also inquire about franchising. So if you’re interested at all in owning a location, you can learn all about what it takes and everything involved there. There’s a form to fill out at the bottom of our franchising page, and our team will be right in touch with you.

And then definitely follow us on social. We’ve got all the fun happenings and announcements that go on there. Our Instagram handle is @squeeze on Facebook or Squeeze Massage. And then myself, I’m @BritDrisc. I always love connecting with people who are doing awesome things and hopefully, we’ll encourage you in some way, shape, or form to keep going because that’s really all it’s about.

Melinda Wittstock:

Fantastic. Well, the massages… I know massage keeps me going, so I can’t wait till I see you near me in Santa Monica.

Brittany Driscoll:

Thank you. Yes, fingers crossed, hopefully sooner than later. Come visit us in Studio City in the meantime, though.

Melinda Wittstock:

Absolutely.

Melinda Wittstock:

Brittany, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Brittany Driscoll:

Thank you.