It's a Team Effort: Meet the People Behind Reclaim Lifestyles
In our last blog post, we told the story of the earliest beginnings of Reclaim Lifestyles and how our co-founders Jeff White and Tom Pecht were inspired through their own quests to optimize their healthspans as active men in their 60s. Besides an all-too-brief mention of our developer Nick Gartmann, we didn't get the chance to introduce you to the whole crew of talented, passionate folks on the Reclaim Lifestyles team. Now, to tell the next chapter of our story, we would like to highlight everyone who has come aboard to take our mission to help people live healthier lives at any age to the next level. (If you missed the previous post, make sure to go back and check it out here to meet our first co-founder, Jeff White.)
Meet Tom Pecht
Tom and Jeff have been training partners since 2012, when they met swimming together at Swim Atlanta. A casual bike ride invitation from Tom one day paved the way for the rest of their relationship and training partnership when Tom recognized Jeff's ability: "Oh wow, you're the real deal on a bike!" As two active men moving through their 60s, they quickly connected over their shared passion for learning to age well.
Jeff describes Tom as very much on mission. "We live what we do. Every single day." Both Tom and Jeff are extremely interested in applying science-based principles to their personal lives and continuing to grow and optimize their physical and mental wellbeing well into their later years. For Jeff's 60th birthday, Tom joined him on a 60-mile bike ride to celebrate the occasion, and together they completed their first Half Ironman triathlons. Most recently, Tom swam 68 50s for his 68th birthday (that’s about 2 miles of swimming!). So naturally, when the Reclaim Lifestyles story was just beginning, Tom was immediately on board, bringing with him decades of experience in business. Building Reclaim Lifestyles and the Restart! app together has been the latest chapter in their supportive friendship, allowing them to channel their passion for health and helping others in a truly exciting and impactful way.
Meet Nick Gartmann
Nick Gartmann is our backend developer who's been on board since before Reclaim Lifestyles was Reclaim Lifestyles. As Jeff worked on developing and then narrowing the initial concepts, Nick was instrumental in guiding him through the process of testing his earliest ideas and iterating until they arrived at the Restart! app and the Reclaim Lifestyles brand. Nick's belief in Jeff and Tom's mission was so strong, it apparently caused him to forget to send an invoice for his services for the first two years of development.
Nick is a grounding force on the team, helping to keep the app focused and true to the Reclaim mission. He was immediately drawn and devoted to that mission, not seeing the project so much as a business opportunity, but as a purpose. And with him, Nick brought a support network that soon followed him to Reclaim Lifestyles, from his inventive RokkinCat colleague Sabrina Stangler to his super-smart brother-in-law, exercise expert Ben Dreyer. Without Nick, there is no Restart! app, nor is there the Reclaim Lifestyles team of all-stars we have today thanks to his contagious commitment to the cause.
Meet Sabrina Stangler
When Jeff describes meeting Sabrina for the first time, he remembers standing in a parking garage listening to a bubbly 20-something passionately explaining her vision of the Restart! app (then called Step 3) interface and how to make it accessible no matter what a user's level of activity or fitness is—and that vision has become reality thanks to this brilliant frontend developer's intuitive and people-focused approach to building the app. "She's the brains I just had to trust," Jeff says of Sabrina.
Sabrina followed Nick from RokkinCat, joining as an independent consultant in those early days, similarly inspired by Jeff and Tom's mission to help people live better lives through regular physical activity. Now she lends her infectious energy to not only making the Restart! app experience the best it can be, but by giving demos through which you can clearly see how much she lives and breathes the Reclaim Lifestyles cause. The response after one of Sabrina's demos? "She's awesome."
Meet Ben Dreyer
Ben Dreyer is "one of the smartest people when it comes to exercise I've ever met in my life," says Jeff. Ben got connected to Reclaim via his brother-in-law Nick Gartmann, and thank goodness for family connections. Ben’s not just a runner and a trainer: he was a two-time NCAA National Champion at 400m and 10-time All-American athlete in three different events while he was a collegiate athlete at St. Norbert College. He then trained as a professional Track & Field athlete at the Olympic Training Center, where he began laying the groundwork for his training career.
His passion for using science and mechanics in exercise led to him co-owning Studio Melt, a fitness studio in Madison, WI that uses a collaborative and inclusive approach, specializing in helping people with preexisting conditions get back to their health. Ben is obsessed with making sure his clients are exercising safely with the right mechanics, and we are so lucky to have his experience and expertise in building out the Restart! app exercise programs. If Nick and Sabrina are the mechanics of the app, Ben is the guts, making the exercise routines as accessible, effective, and specific as if he were training you one-on-one at Melt.
Meet Tabitha Aquino
Tabitha drives Jeff batty in the best way as our perfect UI/UX person. Tabitha is always thinking of the client and comes to Reclaim Lifestyles via Jeff's network at Mastercard. Her mission in life is to build from the user's perspective. She takes her role as the advocate for the end user seriously, never being afraid to say the hard thing when it comes to making necessary adjustments to the app's interface. "Let the customers tell us what to do," is Tabitha's credo.
While it's not always easy to make changes based on user surveys, Jeff trusts Tabitha implicitly and values her ability to tell him when he's wrong. Her stalwart belief in letting the customer's will be the most important driving factor keeps us between the rails, and with her guidance, the Restart! app is made all the better, and in fact, truer to its stated goal of being incredibly easy to use.
Meet 1406 Consulting
The most recent members of the Reclaim Lifestyles team come to us from 1406 Consulting, an Atlanta-based marketing consultancy and HubSpot Diamond Solutions Partner, led by CEO Matt Smith, a fellow Ironman triathlete. Matt's team consists of Rebecca Salzman, VP of Creative Services, Justin Godfrey, VP of Growth Strategy, Ben Hardman, Associate Account Manager, Hayley Brown, Content Writer (hi!), and Samantha Gagliano, Social Media Manager.
Rebecca's creative design work took Reclaim Lifestyles' initial... let's call it "homemade" pitch deck and developed it into the full-fledged brand identity you see all over our materials now, online and off. Ben, Hayley, and Samantha have kicked off our content creation and deployment strategy with blog articles, such as the one you are reading now, an email newsletter, and social posts to grow our brand presence and get the word out about the Reclaim Lifestyles mission. In the process of defining the Reclaim Lifestyles brand and voice, the 1406 team has also become advocates of the cause, excitedly sharing the story with their networks and getting even more folks excited about the Restart! app. Heck, Hayley even got her dad to sign up for the beta!
Who’s Next?
As we look ahead at the next stage of development for Reclaim Lifestyles and the Restart! app, we can't wait to see who will join us on this journey. We're all so proud to be a part of something that seems to attract genuinely good-hearted, passionate, and intelligent people who see Reclaim as a chance to bring more purpose to their work in creating something that will help so many live longer, healthier, more vibrant lives.
Could you be the next member of our team? If you're interested in getting involved as an investor, a beta tester, or something else, reach out here: [CONTACT LINK]