How Oura Ring is redefining health tech, with CEO Tom Hale
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You know, like a sort of black with gold. And it was very, very Gucci. And it was like a rocket ship. Gucci put it into their stores and priced it at about a thousand euros for each one, a thousand dollars. So two and a half times roughly. Roughly. Yeah. It was more expensive. Yeah.

As the new CEO of Aura, Tom Hale was eager to experiment with partnerships for the health tracker Ring. But Tom says even he was surprised that the luxury model of their wearable tech did so well.

And they flew off the shelves. My jaw dropped to the floor because I couldn't, I was like, wait, you tripled the price and it goes faster? Yeah. How does that work? By the way, like the thing about Gucci that was so surprising was that like we learned that people wanted to touch the ring and they wanted to put it on. They wanted to see it against their skin. They want to see how it looked on their hand because it's a very physical and intimate product.

Since joining Aura in 2022, CEO Tom Hale has led the company to more than double the number of rings sold. It's up to more than 2.5 million now. This unicorn wearable tech business is a stunning example of scale. You've got to have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to, this is totally going to be amazing.

This is Masters of Scale. I'm your host, Jeff Berman.

Tom Hale's history of success in the software industry has informed how he's scaling Aura to new heights now, but it took some convincing for the company to let someone like Tom, with virtually no experience in hardware, take the helm.

Tom, welcome to Masters of Scale. Thank you, Jeff. I'm thrilled to have you for lots of reasons, not least of which being I have my aura ring with me. You're representing, thank you. I'm representing. It is circa 2020. Wow, Gen 2 or Gen 3? Gen 2. Wow, old school. So I am due for an upgrade soon. You are. And I'm keen to hear about the Gen 4 and how my life is going to change. But before we get there, for those who haven't yet worn an aura ring, haven't tried one, what is the ring?

So the Oura Ring is a very small device. It's very light. It's a couple of grams. It's kind of a miracle of modern technology. There's a ton of technology packed in here. A very small battery, much, much smaller than the battery on your Apple Watch. And what it is, is you wear it on your body.

which turns out to be a really good place for measuring some core biometrics. If you think about it, you ever been to a hospital and they put a clamp on your finger and that's because they're shining light into your body and then determining your pulse ox, which is your blood oxygenation. They're also determining your pulse and other things. That's why they do it there. And it doesn't beep or bloop or talk to you. It doesn't have a screen. It's not trying to notify you about somebody talking about you on Twitter or LinkedIn. It's just very sort of silently, calmly, passively tracking your body in the background.

And it's coupled with an app on your mobile phone. And the device syncs your data from your biometrics to the mobile phone. And on the mobile phone, there's a lot of computing that's going on that's making insights about your health. And every day, it gives you three basic scores. It tells you about how you slept, how much activity you had, and what your readiness for the coming day is. The whole idea is to sort of give you insights about how to make healthy choices and healthy habits with

without being too much of a load. You joined the company just a few years ago. Yeah. So when did you first encounter the product? I first bumped into it, I guess it was the fall of 2022. Okay. And there's a little bit of a story here, which is I had just been part of a company that we had sold to Zendesk. The company was called Momentive, but it was really SurveyMonkey was the main product. We had sold it.

and we were high-fiving all around, and then it was in the process of getting unsold. Basically, the shareholders of Zendesk rejected the deal. Very stressful time. Not an easy moment. Very difficult moment. And I think a lot of things were happening during that timeframe. I had some challenges with my family. I was getting older, all these things that were going on. And for the first time in my life,

I lost sleep. I don't know if you've ever had this experience where like, I'm a championship sleeper. I mean, my entire life, I could probably fall asleep, you know, in five seconds and stay asleep for 12 hours. Yeah. I long for those days. Okay. Well, yeah. So this was the moment when those days ended and I was really, I was like, I've never had a hard time sleeping and this is a real, I should really pay attention to this. And what am I going to do? So I was researching and looking for things to do and trying to learn, you know, educate myself about sleep and bumped into the Oura Ring.

And like, well, I'll give it a try. I gave it a try. And I had worn wearables before. I'm kind of fitness adjacent. So, you know, I like to try and, you know, get two or three workouts. I like to drive by the gym. You know, and I do my best, but, you know, I'm a busy person and it's hard to fit it in. So I kind of knew what the deal was with wearables. And I put this thing on and it's,

within the space of about three or four weeks, one, I'd learned a ton. I'd learned a lot about like what was going on for me when I did certain behaviors, when I drank alcohol, when I had too much coffee, when I didn't take a walk or workout, like I could see all these things in my body. And then secondary, I learned a lot about sleep. I learned a lot about how

sleep can really improve your life because within three or four weeks I kind of had improved my sleep. Yeah. And it was like night and day. It is fascinating. The three biggest insights for me were alcohol kills my sleep. Yeah. It's a massive sleep disruptor to high intensity workouts late in the day. Bad news. Brutal for me. Yeah. Like they, my heart rate's just up too high and I can't come down. And then the

The third one was caffeine after about 2:00 PM. And so those three changes have completely changed my sleep profile. And it's all order driven. For me, it was like I was living in a black and white movie. Basically, since the time I'd had my kids-- I'd had them in my 30s, and I'd been sleep deprived more or less up until that moment. And then made us a few key behavior changes, and it was like walking into a 4K Technicolor movie. I was like, whoa.

this is what life could be like? Where has it been? So, I mean, one of the great things about Aura is you get all this insight from the data that doesn't make it necessarily actionable. So how does Aura help the customer close the loop and actually act on the data to improve their health? There's three ways. The first way is the daily insights that we give you contain kernels of behaviors that might be healthy for you. So for example, your heart rate lowered late last night.

Did you eat a late meal? And that's a sort of a reinforcing an education of, hey, you should eat three hours before you go to bed, because if you go to bed and your body's still digesting, your deep sleep will be reduced and less effective. And deep sleep is how your body repairs and grows. And so if you want to be giving as much value to each minute of sleep you get.

Don't eat. So insights that sort of come up and they come up sort of on a couple times a day or they come up within the experience in a really sort of very subtle way, insights is the first way.

Second way is this idea of the advisor. And the advisor is an AI chat kind of coach that knows all about you and makes recommendations and does education and gives you visibility to trends and helps you understand and maybe place a context around that and then make suggestions. And those suggestions are things that would be better for your health.

And then the third way, and this is probably the earliest, but maybe it could be compelling, I think, is something called experiments. And an experiment is basically a protocol. Like try doing this for two weeks and then see what the impact on your metrics are. And then we'll show you actually how you compare it to everybody else. And we'll also show you, you know, what the impact was on you. And the classic one is we have this stop drinking coffee experiment. And so stop drinking coffee for two weeks and let's show you what happens. And those three things are really potent because

What's measured is managed, but you also need some context and you need some instruction. Well, and also that lets you isolate variables, right? As you do one experiment at a time that you're recommending and everything else is largely consistent, you're able to see, oh, this is the impact from that.

So the leadership position at Aura came open. Yeah. And you did not get a call out of the blue from a recruiter. Yeah. Actually, I think when I learned that there was a search going on, I might have said something like, hey, this seems really interesting. And they're like, yeah, no, it's a little out of your range. But you'd been a serial tech executive. For sure. You had a lot of experience in Silicon Valley. Like, I am probably what you would call kind of a software person by training. I've come up the ranks in various software companies and have worked, you know,

almost exclusively in software. I have a couple of investments in hardware, but mostly in software.

And I think the board had this view that what they were looking for was a CPG, you know, consumer product goods person, maybe with a sports background, you know, really like, you know, somebody who had a real name profile and there were certainly candidates in the mix. And so I didn't fit the profile and they kind of told me that. And I basically, you know, kind of did something. It's very uncharacteristic for me, which is I ended up saying like, you guys really, you really need to hire me. Like,

I love this product. This product has changed my life. I can see the impact that it can have on other people's lives. I am aligned with this mission. And by the way, I think I know what we need to do to take it to the next level. How did you do that? What was the format for that? Somebody advised me to write a letter and put your thoughts down, make the case for why you think it's a good fit and what you should do. And that's very uncharacteristic of me. I tend to be someone who, you know, like I'm happier being pursued than pursuing, you

But I really just went out there and I wrote this letter that said, listen, I think you guys, this is a software problem and a data problem. And it's data at scale, which is something that I know because of my days at SurveyMonkey and Momentive. And it's a user experience problem. And it's about transforming people's lives and behavior. And I've spent my entire life thinking about kind of how much the product experience matters for people. And like, here's the case. You should have a software person leading this company.

Every company's a covered dish. You think you know what it is, you come in, you lift the top off and it's something different. So how did you have such confidence? I think for me, the sort of foundational belief was wearables are going to be a thing. Everyone's going to have one. And a wearable that's tracking your health and continuously monitoring your health, which is what the Oura Ring kind of does, is going to be a thing that everyone's going to have. And the thing that was different about the Oura Ring, and I knew this because I'd worn a bunch of other wearables, was a seven-day battery life.

unobtrusive, and it's just on your body.

producing this stream of data and then making sense of it is something that software and data analytics and machine learning is going to have to do. And by the way, the whole point of this is that on the averages, it's personalized to you. And so the sort of vision of an AI intelligence that was tuned to your needs and understand everything about you and understands all your context and then can make recommendations about your health, whether it's an intervention or a prevention, that's an incredibly powerful idea. And I think at the heart of it, that's a software and data problem. Yeah.

And that's what convinced the board? You know, I think so, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My winning personality maybe. I don't know. Naturally. Naturally. When you came into the company, I believe the company had sold about a million rings to date. And you're now at like two and a half million. That's right. That's right. So you have this significant jump in a very short period of time on the hardware side, which still accounts for what, like 80 plus percent of your revenue, right? Sure.

So what did you do? What did you bring to the company? What did your team bring in that accelerated this growth so extraordinarily? Yeah, well, let's set the scene. Okay, yeah, please. Because it is like early 2023. There's still kind of a growth at all costs mindset going on where like,

We, you know, keep spending money, keep hiring people, spend more money on marketing, you know, like you've just got to break through. That was kind of the mindset. And, hey, we just introduced this subscription business model. And quite frankly, I think it was a change in the bargain with our customers. Right.

Six bucks a month. Six dollars a month. Yeah. Like, you know, barely a cup of coffee and a half. Yeah. Depending on where you shop, depending on where you drink your coffee. Right. And in L.A., it's like half a cup of coffee. Exactly. Exactly. So it's a nominal fee. And I think the idea was that, hey, we really believe that this should be a subscription product and it should deliver enough value, more than enough value to sort of justify that. And I think that's true. We've seen that in the last two years. We've seen that.

It's absolutely true that people see the value and renew and pay and they pay us every month. So we made that transition and it was pretty rough. And so I came in in that post transition moment and there was a lot of upset. And I think this is sort of a classic maybe lesson for me in my career, which is that

you got to engage with customers directly and you got to like kind of be present, particularly in early businesses that are building up because the people who are, you know, evangelizing you in your early days as a company and a product, um,

They feel like they own you. And in some ways they kind of do. They've made some incredible contributions. They're your best marketers for sure. So sort of the first thing was like, let's engage. Let's go out there. So I wrote a blog post and said, hey, here's what I think about the subscription business model and why I think it's really a great value and why we're doing it. And just having some level of transparency and engagement actually made a big difference. And actually the economy had gone a little south at this time. We were like, what are we going to do here? How are we going to navigate this? And we thought,

There's two or three things that really matter. One is women, because women love the product. They retain better. It's a ring. You know, that's a form factor that there's no other substitute for it. You know, it fits in with every fancy outfit you've got. So we thought women would be important.

Second thing we thought was going to be really important was going to be retail. And we learned this by launching with Gucci. I don't know if you remember this, but there was a Gucci ring and it was like a rocket ship. Gucci put it into their stores, put it into their online stores, and they have, you know, Gucci stores around the world. And we had made a whole bunch and priced it at about a thousand euros for each one, a thousand dollars.

So two and a half times roughly. Roughly. Yeah. Yeah. It was more expensive. Yeah. And they flew off the shelves. And my jaw dropped to the floor because I couldn't get enough. It's like, wait, you triple the price and it goes faster? Yeah. How does that work? I think it shows you the power of both a brand like Gucci.

But it also shows you the power of jewelry. We learned that people wanted to touch the ring and they wanted to put it on. They wanted to see it against their skin. They want to see how it looked on their hand because it's a very physical and intimate product. They care what the thing looks like. The ring looked like something that a Roman emperor might wear to a Colosseum, you know, like a sort of black with gold. And it was very, very Gucci. But for a certain set of people, like that kind of statement was that's what they wanted.

This growth through kind of non-obvious partnerships is fascinating and you all have done hundreds of partnerships. Was that something that changed when you came in? Did you empower the team on that? Did you bring a team to do this or had this been like latent in the company and people were dying to try it? I think we'd always believed that there was going to be things like Gucci where brand partnerships were going to be the key. What we didn't necessarily think about until I came in was the platform.

and how to think about a platform enabling other partners. And by enabling other partners, they become your salespeople and your distribution channel and your referral network. What's a good example of that beyond Gucci? Natural cycles would be one. Strava would be another. Chronometer, the CGM apps like very, like there's basically a whole set of apps for health and wellness. And in many ways, we sort of power them with our data. Natural cycles in particular is one that has been

Very successful. So partnership was a clear catalyst, but we saw these three things. We saw women, we saw retail from Gucci. Number three, we thought about like, how do we provide access to people? And the idea there was something called HSA and FSA. These are basically kinds of accounts that your employer usually provides for you. And they hold back a little bit of your paycheck and put in these accounts. And then you can spend it on,

health, whether it's a doctor or glasses or band-aids or whatever. It's a whole range of things you can buy. So by putting the Oura Ring into HSA FSA, we are effectively giving people the ability to use pre-tax dollars that

frankly had been sort of already set aside. So it's already been taken out of their pocket in some way and that they actually have an incentive to use because some of the programs are spend it or lose it. Yeah. And so going into that second year, we ended up launching with Best Buy and later with Amazon. We introduced HSA, FSA, and we really focused on women and women's health. And those three things, it was like we set a fuse on a bomb and it really blew up.

More with Tom Hale on leading Aura through its rapid scale story in just a minute.

Thank you.

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Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on the Masters of Scale YouTube channel. One of the interesting differences between software and hardware is software you sell over and over again. And I mean, Exhibit A sitting here as a super loyal, like...

Five-year user. Top tier net promoter score user, lover of the brand, by the way. Thank you. Or is not a sponsor. We're not. This is just pure love for the product. Thank you. But also, I'm sure that the Gen 4 will give me massive upgrades over the Gen 2. And it's not $1,000 or $2,000 or $10,000 purchase like a mattress or refrigerator or whatever. But it's still hundreds of dollars. So the business model is different. You don't have the customer coming back every month or every quarter, every year to buy

How did you think about approaching that part of hardware versus software? It's a really spot on question. And I'm guessing because you're a Gen 2 user, you haven't experienced our subscription business model quite yet. So and you're about to. I think the way I looked at it and I've spent a lot of time around subscription business models and there's something about subscription business models that's.

that, you know, it's great. Investors love them because it's recurring revenue. It's very predictable because you're booking revenue before you recognize it. There's a lot of really great properties of a subscription business model.

But what I like about it, because I tend to think about customer needs and whether you're meeting your customers' needs and serving them, is that you kind of have to earn your money with every time someone renews. And whether they renew on a monthly basis, which is the way most people do it with Aura, or an annual basis like people do with Software as a Service, you kind of got to have delivered the value or else you're not going to get the re-up. And so having been around subscription businesses and having observed this product, I was like, this is a great opportunity.

subscription business because the reality is, is that your health is not static. Your health changes. In fact, your physiology changes, you know, on a 24 hour time period. As you go to sleep, your physiology is going through some transformations. If you are a woman, your body is changing on a 28 day cycle as hormones are being released into your body. As you age, your body's changing. And so the idea, and it came to light actually through sort of women, was that

that this was some wearable that you would pay a subscription business model and get tons of value from over the course of your entire life. And, you know, we kind of had this idea that like, you know, a young woman might get their first ring in their teens. And then, you know, in their twenties, it might all be about contraception. And in the late twenties, it might be about conception, trying to get pregnant. In their thirties, it might be about pregnancy and postpartum. And in their forties, it might be about perimenopause and menopause. And like the idea of a product that like was,

connected to you really personally and knew you and knew all this history and could be like the doctor you never had, the doctor who knew everything about you and had oodles of time to talk to you and was conversant with all of the things that were going on with you.

Wow, what an idea for a subscription business. And if we can meet our customers and deliver value to them, then that's a great opportunity. Maybe I'll zoom back a little bit. Sure. So think about that founding moment, you know, and kind of that culture of the product being one that's like it's submission driven product.

It's a product to help the world move from sick care, where you're only getting health care at the end of your life, to preventative care. It's about making you the CEO of your own health journey and doing it in a way that's incredibly supportive and helps you find balance.

That's the culture of the product. That's the culture of the company. Everyone at that company is really driven to help people. By the way, I found that incredibly intoxicating. And my kind of like strength, honestly, is in scaling companies from like sort of 200 to 2000. That's kind of where I live. People, not dollars. People. Yeah, people. Good point. Just for clarity, let's be sure. From 200 people to 2000 people. Okay.

When you're 200 people, there's probably some things that are maybe not working so well. Yeah. And maybe you haven't solved that problem as effectively as you might. Maybe you don't have a system for that. And it's really it's like a popsicle stick and two pieces of rubber bands and some glue and you're trying to hold it all together. Yeah. And then by the time you get to 2000, you're like a real company and you've got some real scalability. So that and I've done that particular ride maybe twice.

Three or four times. You've got some real pattern recognition.

performance into that culture. So I thought first you need to build trust. All right, well, let's articulate where we want to go in a way that's compelling and simple and easy for people to wrap their minds around. And, you know, that became kind of the construction of our strategic plan and how we talked about our vision, which was to improve the world of healthcare.

And, you know, we sort of have this view of how health care can evolve and we can play a role in it. It's not, you know, we're not going to become a hospital or anything like that, but we're going to help change and empower people on their health journey. That's a very, that's a very compelling thing. In order to do that, we provide them information and insights about their body from a wearable device that they put on their body 24-7.

And the data that comes off of that, you know, they use to optimize either their performance or their health or to manage a chronic disease. That's what they do. That's what the product does. Oh, guess what? That's what we do too at this company. We actually look at the data that comes off of the things that we're monitoring and we optimize around that. We're just like this product and sort of the very simple kind of idea that we're doing something noble.

trying to improve the world of health for millions of people and that we're trying to do something that's very practical and tactical, which is to optimize this business, much like you might optimize your health. Yeah. It sort of connected with people because it was immediately understandable. And I think coupled with sort of like the big emphasis on listening to customers and being connected to customers, I think it, it really resonated with people. And I think it gave us that opportunity to say, and now we're

How do we want to take this to the next level? I mean, it sounds like you really invested in building trust with the existing team before coming in and pushing forward with these new initiatives. You got their buy-in in you before you went ahead. Is that fair to say? This is absolutely true. And by the way, I think this is the best advice for anybody coming into any group of people, which is that you have to earn trust. In fact, it's one of the sort of five values of Aura. You entrust us with your most sensitive healthcare data. Like you are trusting us and we need to earn your trust.

So we are very serious about protecting your data and making sure that no one can see it and making sure that it's not, you know, we don't have advertising. We have no incentive to do anything other than protect your data. So earning trust is such a foundational element of like the company culture and the people. And frankly, you know, for me personally, like I don't know how to lead if I don't have someone's trust and confidence. And the only way I know how to build trust is to kind of be like,

vulnerable and open and say, this is kind of what's going on. And here's what I think about it. And here's what I think we ought to do. And I'm more of a servant leader and maybe a lead from the front person than I am a, you know, dictator who's leading from the back. That's kind of the approach that I take. And I think it sort of hit the moment well. Was there a particular experience earlier in your career that informed how you came in and led this change? I think we have had at various companies kind of moments where, you

You can feel the momentum pick up and you can feel, I'm going to call it the bit rate, which is like a technical term about the, you know, the clock speed of a company. Like how quickly are you moving through decisions and actions and you know, how, what's that doing to the business? And so I've seen that four or five times. So I kind of know how to do it. And I think it does start with trust, but it also starts with this kind of like, do you watch the bear?

- I love "The Bear." - Who doesn't love "The Bear?" "The Bear" is such an amazing show, oh my God. So it's like, it's actually filled with all these kind of like leadership lessons. - It is, yeah. - It's just, it's such a great study of like a small group of people trying to do something hard, oh my God. So I started saying, hey, every second counts. And things like, there's periods in my life where like that kind of, you have to take a moment to go slow to go fast. You have to think about what it is that you wanna do, but then once you know what you wanna do, you're gonna run like hell. You've gotta just go for it.

And that moment I've seen enough times to know that that's kind of where we were. And, you know, we just needed to like start to run.

Tom, one of the challenges in health broadly is you talk about a regulated industry and for good reason, but also with the rise in devices like origin for and the gender of applications that can be in billions of people's hands now who don't have access to a primary care physician or quality health care.

Is there a change that we should be making to the regulatory universe when it comes to health that would allow us to leap forward in building a healthier country and healthier world? How much time do we have? I mean, you can take as much time as you want. What time is your play? Oh, my gosh. That is a subject that would probably overfill the banks of any amount of time. But I do think that

digital health, meaning the fact that you have a powerful computer, the fact that you're surrounded by data and sensors that can talk to you or have access to ones that you can put on your body that can feed that device. I think that is transformative. And I think that the FDA is like

working hard to understand how digital health should transform. The reality is that there are so many incentives aligned behind fee for service. It's gonna be very hard for that to change. And I think it's going to play out over a decade or more just because the inertia of the system is there. And so in many ways, strategically, we're focused on people who are like going to drive their own health journey, independent, not

without but independent of the kind of clinical infrastructure. And where we think we have a really interesting opportunity, and maybe this is where the regulatory stuff comes in, is you find those sort of connection points where it really matters

somebody is going through chemotherapy, they want to be at home with their family, and they want to understand if they're at risk for infection. Now wouldn't it be nice if you had a device that would tell you, one, when the best time physiologically would be for your next bout of chemo, and when and if you were getting sick that you needed to get to a hospital and get some antibiotics on board because you're starting to get an infection. Okay, that's really profound and really powerful. But guess what? That would be regulated. We don't do that today. That is not what aura does.

But take that vision for a moment and imagine what that could be. Wow, that's a really compelling idea that people could really understand their health at a, you know, not in a annual checkup kind of way, but in a minute to minute kind of way. So,

So I'm curious as you look ahead, you've had remarkable scale journey in a very short period of time. There has been, Scott Galloway has been talking about a fitness rundle, revenue bundle for some time now that someone is going to roll up

several of these companies or Peloton, Strava, all companies that get mentioned in this. Do you see yourself as part of a much bigger fitness company where you are either leading or taking part in a roll-up of these bigger companies? How do you see it playing out? I don't think you can really say how it's all going to land. I do think that this idea of a health OS, which is all of your data, all the entities and context about your data, all your history, maybe even your medical records at some point,

Whether that's distributed or centralized, whether that lives in a walled garden or in a bunch of apps that are user choose, user decides, I don't know. I don't know how that plays out. I think it's too early to kind of call that. I also tend to think that particularly as you start to get to very large scales of users, members, humans, the

degree of difference between each pocket of human means that it's very hard to generalize something for all of them. In fact, I think this is kind of the problem with medicine, which is medicine is practiced on the averages and pharmaceuticals are dispensed on the averages. In fact, in many cases, the averages are based on, you know, men, not women. So, you know, women have been historically underserved by medicine because people weren't studying women's physiology in clinical trials up until the last 20 years or so.

Okay. So I think this idea that it's not going to be one system for everybody. Yeah. And maybe that's not scalable, but I think the thing is that it might be different solutions for each person. The person who is

chronic fatigue syndrome or long COVID. Very different from the person who's training for a marathon. Very different from the person who's trying to lose weight. Very different from the person who is going through menopause and has lost sleep and is gaining weight. Very different from end, end, end, end, end. And so it's probably not one product or even one platform. Now, do I think Aura has a really important role to play in that? Yeah, I think we can be feeding data to the people who are really solving problems in a really specific and really meaningful way. Great having you, Tom. Thanks for being here. Thank you.

From the moment Tom Hale wrote his letter to the Aura team, asking them to give him a super fan, a chance to be its next CEO, he's been hell-bent on taking the company to the next level. It's thrilling to see his passion in action and all the innovation he's inspiring. I'm Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening.

We've grown exponentially since we opened 10 years ago. We initially started with, I think there were 10 of us, maybe, total, which is just completely ridiculous. That's Jillian Field, Capital One business customer and co-founder of Union Market, a popular neighborhood market and cafe in Richmond, Virginia. With her growing success, now with 45 team members, Jillian has always kept sight of what really matters.

We felt since we opened that having some sort of employee appreciation event was really important to us. Every year, Jillian holds a company-wide celebration to show her staff how vital they are to the success of Union Market. Recently, she used points from her Capital One business card to host her employees at Busch Gardens Theme Park for a day of fun with family and friends.

We buy all of their tickets as well as their plus ones. It's a lot of fun and definitely a great team bonding experience. Capital One really has been great over the years. It's so easy. We could apply these points to supplies, masking tape and Sharpies and ticket receipt paper, but we like to retain them for our employees. That's been really important. To learn more, go to CapitalOne.com slash business cards.

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