Minter Dialogue with Maria Garrido

In this episode, I had the pleasure of welcoming back Maria Garrido, a dynamic executive who juggles multiple roles with grace and enthusiasm. Maria describes herself as a “hyperactive queenager,” a term she embraces as she navigates her life as a mother of three, a multilingual Paris resident, and the Chief Marketing Officer of Deezer. We delved into her approach to maintaining cultural relevance in the music streaming industry, emphasising the importance of credibility and staying attuned to cultural shifts.

Maria shared insights into Deezer’s strategy for engaging diverse audiences, highlighting the significance of music credibility and user experience. She also discussed the challenges of personalisation in streaming services and the balance between business interests and user satisfaction.

Beyond her role at Deezer, Maria is the founder of Terranam Wellness, a retreat centre in Galicia, Spain. She spoke passionately about her journey from corporate life to creating a sanctuary for wellness, driven by her personal experiences and a desire to offer others the same healing she found in retreats.

Maria’s story is one of resilience, curiosity, and a commitment to authenticity, both in her professional endeavours and personal life.

Please send me your questions — as an audio file if you’d like — to nminterdial@gmail.com. Otherwise, below, you’ll find the show notes and, of course, you are invited to comment. If you liked the podcast, please take a moment to rate it here.

To connect with Maria Garrido:

• Check out the Terranam Wellness site here
• Find/follow Maria Garrido on LinkedIn
• Send an email directly to Maria

Other mentions/sites:

• Prior podcast episode with Maria Garrido when she was working at Vivendi
• Check out Deezer here
• The Quilt.ai market research company

Further resources for the Minter Dialogue podcast:

Meanwhile, you can find my other interviews on the Minter Dialogue Show in this podcast tab, on Megaphone or via Apple Podcasts. If you like the show, please go over to rate this podcast via RateThisPodcast! And for the francophones reading this, if you want to get more podcasts, you can also find my radio show en français over at: MinterDial.fr, on Megaphone or in iTunes.
Music credit: The jingle at the beginning of the show is courtesy of my friend, Pierre Journel, author of the Guitar Channel. And, the new sign-off music is “A Convinced Man,” a song I co-wrote and recorded with Stephanie Singer back in the late 1980s (please excuse the quality of the sound!).

Transcription courtesy of Flowsend.ai, an AI full-service for podcasters

Minter Dial: Maria Garrido, what a pleasure to have you back. I am so happy to have you here. You are doing so many things and I don’t see you enough in real, but I, I get to see you and I. The fun part is I feel I see you for real online, which is not something I would say with everybody. In your own words, who, who do you, who am I?

Maria Garrido: That’s a very existential question. Who am I? I am a hyperactive queenager. I’ll call myself that. I like that term for middle aged women these days. Who is eager to, who has an insatiable curiosity and who is eager to always be in a state of learning something new.

Minter Dial: Well, that, that sounds very fit for you. You’re also mom of three, living in Paris, multilingual, and the CMO of Deezer, which I must imagine is keeping the queen ageless.

Maria Garrido: You know what? I think I’m one of the oldest, if not the oldest woman in the company, but mentally, I’m probably much springier than some of the kids running around this building. It’s definitely about staying culturally relevant, you know, and I think in any industry you work in, when you’re in marketing, I really believe you have to stay somewhat humble because the user or the customer should be at the core of what it is that you’re trying to achieve. That eventually does deliver business results. And it’s no different if you’re working in a tech app. Music business versus selling toothpaste as far as I’m concerned.

Minter Dial: Right, so Deezer is a streaming platform for music based in France, a little bit the fleurion of France, one of the big ones. And, and you want to stay relevant. You presumably have a worldwide reach. I mean, that, I don’t know the whole details, but staying relevant with a large group of people, I mean, it’s a vast group. You got the youngsters, the olders, the revolutionaries, the conservatives. I mean, of course, everybody. So, how does, how does, how do you, Maria, articulate relevance? How do you get to find relevance? I mean, staying humble is part of it, but you still have to make some decisions. Which audience do you want to go after? How do you get in touch with them? How do you know that you add Deezer are going to be relevant for them?

Maria Garrido: So, in this industry, in the digital streaming platform industry, the number one box you have to tick is that you’re credible in music. Before we get to any functional or emotional connection you might have with your actual customer, it’s like, do you really know music? And that occupies a lot of our team’s time, at least from the marketing, the tech teams, that’s not their area. But we, especially on social media, have to show that we’re always in the know on what’s happening in music, what’s happening in culture, you know, what latest artists, what are they up to when their new albums coming out early? Access to things is always a special bonus for our customers. But if I’m not. If I don’t know what’s happening in music, I’m not credible as a tech app, because this is the space, this is the universe I play in. That’s the first thing I think that you have to do. So, it’s always being on top of culture at every level. Today we were bantering with one of our competitors on Instagram, and we were using Gen Z language that most of my executive committee had no idea. She’s like, what does this mean? I’m like, exactly. You’re not the audience. The people on our Instagram are younger people. So, we have to speak in a language that’s relevant to them. So, cultural relevance is super important. Music credibility is important. And then like in many other industries, it’s about what’s in it for me as the customer, what do I get out of it? You know, is your product, is it easy to use? That’s the functional aspect. And then emotionally, do I feel connected to a larger community of music fans? Do I get to see, you know, do I get access to music on my favorite artist before anybody else does? Like, what is the bonus for me as a customer? And it’s the same for us as it is for Spotify or Apple Music or anyone else who plays in this space. So, I think that understanding the drivers of engagement from your customers or how you’re going to recruit new customers are the same for all of us. You know, music, you know, me, you personalize the app, you get access to everything I want and need. It’s easy to use, and it makes me feel cool and part of a big, you know, music community.

Minter Dial: All right, just one piece of those. Which sort of deals with a few of them is, for example, I feel sometimes that the personalization is coming to Minter for some kind of variety. Based on my clicks and my appetite before, there’s always a risk. I feel that the choice I’m given is relative to the margins of the company that’s providing them to me. So, in other words, oh, well, they’re liking that one because they’re sponsored or they’re sending me this one because they make more money on it. And this. This happens in many industries.

Maria Garrido: Yeah.

Minter Dial: To what extent? I mean, you guys are publicly traded. You’re obviously, you know, seeking to make money out of all this. To what extent is. Are you able to. To keep pure to that desire of. Of what is actually what Minter really ought to have.

Maria Garrido: Okay, so here’s where some interesting habits about people’s behavior comes into play. So, most people will make the majority of their musical memory archive between the ages of 18 and 24, maybe even 16 to 24. Right. If you think about what’s on your playlist or your favorite tracks, there’s a lot of music you listen to when you were young. We use. Exactly, yeah. This way you use that moment to sort of express yourself and you’re coming of age. So, a lot of discovery on music streaming platforms is driven by younger generations. It doesn’t mean that someone like me or you isn’t looking at new music on our apps, but most of. Most of the engine behind discovery of new music is happening with younger generations. And they’re, of course, the labels and the artists we work with. Their interest is that these young people will get to see what they have to offer. Right. So, the algorithms in the products, depending on how much discovery you do, will do different things. We have a feature in the product called Flow, which is our most popular feature. I think it’s like 38% of people use it on a daily basis. And that feature, basically you go in and you say, I’m in the mood to go for a run, or I want relaxation music. And it will mix your favorite tracks with new songs in similar, let’s call them, musical universes that you might be interested in listening to. And for people like you and me, that’s how we discover new music. And if you don’t like it, you skip it. And the algorithm learns that you’re actually not interested in that piece of music, that artist, that genre. And what we’ve done this year is you can actually move that spectrum. Like, I want to do more discovery and less of my favorites, I’m going to do. I don’t want to listen to reggaeton. Like, I am not a big fan of reggaeton, maybe because I understand what they’re saying in Spanish, but I really am not a fan, so I can say I don’t want these genres. And today I’m in the mood for more discovery. So, pitch me new music and don’t just feed me my own stuff. Which lets the. The customer a bit Control, in a way, the algorithm, and that is our most popular feature.

Minter Dial: So the listener has a little bit of agency. You mentioned 16-24, 18-24. And one of the observations I’ve had in my little anecdotal mind is how many of that ilk today i.e., my kids have dug into and really like the old farts’ music. So, I’m going to be talking about Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Grateful Dead or any of this old, this old stuff. Led Zeppelin. And there’s something about them. And I was wondering what sort of insights you might have as to sure, what on earth is going on there.

Maria Garrido: Okay, there’s a lot of interesting things happening there. So, a couple of interesting statistics for you. So, I think 80% of the people who listen to Bob Marley are under the age of 35, which means they weren’t around. Bob Marley was a well-known artist. The movie Bohemian Rhapsody was an aha moment for a lot of people in this industry because it made Queen discoverable and fresh and brand new to a new generation of users. If you and I were talking earlier, you know, we collected music, we collected vinyls, we collected tapes, we collected CDs, and that’s what you had at home. The fact that today the average teenager has 100 million tracks available to them at the touch of a finger on their mobile phone means that people like Elton John, Sting can come back and be rediscovered to a new generation of artists. So, that’s why you see things like Elton John doing duets with Dua Lipa, who’s popular as a pop singer in the kids realm. It is opening the spectrum that all music is accessible to everyone. So, there’s no reason why bands like the Grateful Dead can’t be relevant to a new generation who doesn’t have a dusty old vinyl at home.

Minter Dial: Well, in that usually kids tend to reject the parents. You know, oh, dad, you know, dad music. Dad jokes. It feels rather reassuring somehow that my taste in music is pleasing. And I would argue at some level there seems to be a certain level of rejection of the contemporary music in favor of that. I mean, I don’t know to what extent that’s true, but it, it, my reading is there’s a sense of it’s still more, it’s more authentic. Back then they actually were musicians were not augmented by synthesizers and a million other things to make their voices sound as they are. Anyway, react.

Maria Garrido: I think that’s more fluid. I think you’re speaking from your generation. With all due respect, of course, we all think Our generation was the best one, naturally. But I think it’s much more fluid. I think the kids today have grown up in a world and this has its good things and it’s massive bad things of content overload. But if you think about, I think about my, my youth, right. I didn’t. My parents were foreign so that helped. But my friends didn’t see movies in Korean or do they listen to music in languages they don’t speak? Right. Today my 17-year-old son will listen to rap in languages he doesn’t speak. He’ll go see movies in Japanese and Korean, in Turkish and doesn’t hesitate that that’s a different language or a different culture. There is much more openness to all kinds of content that comes from different parts of the world. And that has translated into music too. And artists have caught on. You have a lot of artists who are mixing genres. You can find songs that have five different genres of music in one track, in one three-minute track. And the kids are totally open to that way of working. So, I don’t think they’re looking at the music. The Grateful Dead is like, oh, those guys actually really know how to play.

Minter Dial: A guitar well, by the way. Sometimes they didn’t, sometimes they didn’t.

Maria Garrido: But, or, or, you know, and this over here is all done by a synthesizer. It’s much more fluid in my mind.

Minter Dial: You’re bringing up another pain point for me which is genres. And I, I have this idea that I need to sort my music by genres. So, if I’m in the mood for reggae, I want reggae. And in the middle of reggae, I do not expect to have is he pop or you know, something radically different happening. So, I try to have these genres but like you say there are sometimes in one track, five genres.

Maria Garrido: Yes, that’s.

Minter Dial: You can react to that. But I also wanted to get into Deezer and how it’s fighting against the big, the Goliaths out there. What, what are the types of approaches? What, what if someone’s listening this and never heard of Deezer, which I’m going to guess is for some of them it’s, it’s.

Maria Garrido: Yes, very likely.

Minter Dial: Right. What, what, what would be the reasons why they should go and try Deezer? Give us some ideas why Deezer is the. Is a. Is an interesting new discoverable streaming.

Maria Garrido: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think. Let’s go back to the origins of this industry and then we’ll get to the response to your question. So, these, the people who founded Spotify and Deezer and all of these music apps were pirates. There were young guys who had an idea of democratizing access to music to the entire world. And they went out and they were faster than governments and faster than the music industry. And they basically gave access to all the music in the world to anybody who wanted it.

Minter Dial: I remember Napster, right?

Maria Garrido: Exactly. The Napsters of the world, right. And then what happened? That an industry that was highly profitable, you know, think about like, it’s like a bit like a VC model. You know, 30 years ago, a music, a big music label would launch 10 artists. They invest in 10 artists. One of them would make it pretty big and they would cover the cost of the other nine. They spent it. Okay, today that’s not very possible, in fact, because there’s so much content out there, they have to launch 20 artists for one to do decently well. And who knows if they cover their costs. I don’t have their numbers, but that they were doing pretty well with CDs. DSPS came in digital streaming platforms and said, guess what? Music is free for everybody. It’s a free for all. And their business went boom. And then they got their act together, they came back, they lobbied governments about rights. Because it’s true. Artists need to be paid. Producers, songwriters, composers, sound engineers need to be paid. And the pendulum swung in the other direction. So, it made every DSP highly unprofitable because of all the money that they, that they generate in revenue. There’s quite a big chunk of that that has to go to pay the rights of all of the music labels and all of the artists who are on the platform. That makes it difficult for these businesses to financially survive. So, every single one of these companies, whether it be a Spotify, a Deezer, is in a course correction mode. Like how do we optimize costs? How do we get. Render the ROI as efficient as possible on our marketing spend on our product development, on our technology innovations in a way that we can make our business profitable. Because the way it’s set up today, it no longer is. And they’ve created, they’ve created their own problem because they commoditized the music industry, the music access of customers. Where we used to pay 1499 to buy an album, today you paid 1299, 1199, 1099, or if you still have a student offer, even less than that, and you have 100 million tracks available to you on a daily basis, there.

Minter Dial: Is, that’s a monthly fee. That’s a monthly fee, the subscription, and that gives you access to everything. Whereas 1499 before was one album.

Maria Garrido: One album. So, the economic model just literally like was. It’s not even disruption, it’s a nuclear bomb in the, in the industry. So, a lot of artists are like, okay, well how am I going to make a living now, right? I used to sell albums. I do live events. Live events is a big generator of income for them. But the split now their pie chart is like, I do merge, I do brand partnerships. They have to be much more, you would say in French than they used to be to be able to generate income for themselves at the level they did before.

Minter Dial: Well, I can understand that. Obviously where I think the differences will lie will also be in the functionalities on the site. Like you talked about the flow that would be. That seems like a really neat thing which I’m looking forward to trying out. So, you do many things, Maria. And I don’t want to just talk about Deezer because I could and I would like to. But you also are a founder of the Terranam Wellness. So, I mean I would imagine being CMO of Deezer is enough to occupy you eight days a week. To quote. To quote another song. You’re also the founder at Terranam. You are non-exec. You’re an advisor, advisor at Quilt AI. So, how do you actually manage your time? I mean, give us some insights as to how to deal with that and still be a ray, you know, array of sunshine personality and so active.

Maria Garrido: Thank you. M. That’s a. I don’t always manage it well. I’m going to be really honest. I’m not superhuman. I’m very efficient about my time. It’s not always easy to prioritize. That’s what makes it difficult. Minter. I think I sleep well at night. That’s important. Like I have to sleep. My business in Spain, Terena Muldes was, which is an 18th century manager that specializes in wellness retreats is my weekend job. I have a team that I trust that’s doing a fantastic job there. In fact, our greatest pride and joy is in the two years we’ve been open. We’ve gotten nothing but five-star reviews from the customers that we and I. That for me is super important and that that is a purpose project that is so deep in my heart that I will. I believe wholeheartedly in what we’re doing there. But that’s my weekend job. So, Saturday mornings and Sunday mornings I, you know, pay the bills and do the things that follow up on the things that my team in Spain needs. I have started to show up at my wellness business As a retreater myself, because I need the break. Right.

Minter Dial: Message to everyone else, by the way.

Maria Garrido: I mean, yes, I need the break. We all need to take breaks. The. The board roles are, I think, my, my. I’m so curious that sometimes it’s to my detriment, you know, I’m like, oh, this is really interesting. I’ll chase that. And then next thing I know, like, I have so many things on my plate, I don’t know how to juggle it. So, it’s not an easy situation to find yourself in. But the board roles are interesting, especially at this point in my career, because I feel like I can contribute, but I also learn from the people sitting around the table a lot. And that for me is necessary. It’s like air. If I’m not learning, I’m not breathing.

Minter Dial: Well, I do want to mention something. You, amongst the things that you’ve done that impressed me was your dancing on Live Already started or your LinkedIn dance that made me shake off the dust and tried to do the same thing. So, you were the inspiration for that. And what I. I think my reflection is two things that, as to why you are able to do all this in the way you do it is that you are in touch with your. Yourself in a way that you’re comfortable enough to express yourself in a real way. So, that takes out a whole bunch of fudge which is stuck in the mouth of people who are disconnected with who they are wondering about. Well, how should I say this to look better?

Maria Garrido: Yes, yes.

Minter Dial: Kind of entropic energy. And the second thing I believe must be within this Terranam project, which I want you to explain because Terranam, the way you even spoke about it just now was light, light up face, light up energy. So, when you are at least doing part of what all the activities professionally, such a fulfilling, deeply connected purpose. It. It seeps into or allows you. It creates the energy to allow you to deal with the other shit, including paying bills.

Maria Garrido: Sure.

Minter Dial: And things that happen, which life is full of.

Maria Garrido: Yeah. So, I was giving a talk last week to a bunch of young women and I talked about the support structure. You need to be resilient. The confidence. You need to be resilient. And I redefined confidence for them. I said, confidence isn’t about saying, I know how to do everything and I’m amazing at everything. It’s also about knowing and accepting what you’re weak at and not beating yourself up about it. Come on, like, let’s just stop posturing. Everybody’s not good at everything. And I really believe mentioned there’s power in that vulnerability. If I can sit with my team at Deezer and say, guys, I really suck at this and I need your help, it already just establishes a layer of trust with my team that is just priceless and makes us contribute and work better together. My job isn’t to know everything, my job is to know what I don’t know, what I know, what I don’t know and where to go for help to fill in the gaps that I have.

Minter Dial: Well, in this regard, Maria, you are absolutely leading. Because I mean, Brené Brown and vulnerability, it’s one thing to say it, read it, write about it, but it’s a whole other thing to actually do it. And so doing it with your team is one thing. My question to you is how does it go when you’re talking upwards? Because if you lead down with your team and maybe even your colleagues, I can totally get, I mean, a little anecdote. I was having lunch with somebody and a young 30-year-old and he started by talking about, I failed out of school. This is in Paris. I failed out of school. I was no good academically. Usually when you’re talking to a prospect, that doesn’t sound like a sales pitch. Yeah, you know, look at me, how vulnerable I am, how weak I was at studying. Now I want your job or this, you know, this business. It wasn’t a pitch, but it does speak to this idea of the challenge of presenting upwards or outwards vulnerability, a self-avowed weakness. Oh, what, you’re no good at this? You don’t know how to do this? How is that possible? You know, if the bosses reprimand you that way. So, you talked about leading within. How do you lead with up?

Maria Garrido: That’s a great question and that isn’t always easy, Minter, but I have to take a deep breath when I go into those kinds of like, like a couple of 10 minutes of deep breaths before I go in. And I’ve had to teach myself to not be the good student and respond, to respond, but to go, you know what? I don’t have that information. I’ll get back to you, you know, because I know I. There’s no way I can have every single figure in my head. I’d be making it up if I did that, you know, so I have to. It’s very, it’s like you’re holding back a dam. It’s not very easy to do. And I think experience, I think we put too much weight on these situations. You know, they’re individual situations. The sum of the Parts is not. Has nothing to do with that individual situation. So, so I try to take a bit of distance from that moment of discomfort where instead of becoming defensive because that’s so obvious, that’s it’s actually better for me to go, you know what? I actually don’t know, but I know where to get the information and I’ll get back to you.

Minter Dial: You know, it strikes me on the first hand, you still must come with a repertoire that’s positive in the eyes of the boss. And secondly, knowing just about how much of the damn bust you’re going to cover with the, you know, I don’t know and I’m going to get back to you and then get back and then it establishes rapport. And the sooner you do that, I think the better off you are because the more you don’t do it, the higher the expectation is, the higher that sort of fakeness is happening. That’s that pressure that you’re putting on builds up.

Maria Garrido: I had a boss who would say something really simple. He’s like, there’s good news people and bad news people, and I only want good news people on my team. And what he meant is, like, don’t come in here if there’s a problem, identify the problem. But I’d actually you rather you come in here and go here, here’s how I think we might be able to solve it. Even if you’re wrong, you’re always moving forward in a positive direction, you know, in a positive light and in a positive energy versus, like just dwelling on, oh my God, we screwed up. I, I really like that there’s good news people and bad news people.

Minter Dial: Well, just going back, one of the things I tend to trying to do when I’m working with customers and so on is to think about how to orientate the solutions that we’re talking about. In other words, bringing purpose into the solution, having some sort of North Star that’s ethical within our ethical bounds. It’s not being perfectly good. It’s just about knowing what my ethical lines are and what are we trying to achieve here and allowing that to guide me in the creation of solutions. And the more that’s shared, that’s better. Now let’s talk about Terranam because think.

Maria Garrido: You’re right on it.

Minter Dial: Yeah, I mean, I, I’d like you to talk us through the founding of Taran and Wellness, where it is and, and how can people go and why would they go and, and how many types of possibilities are there?

Maria Garrido: Okay. So, this is a deeply personal part of my Life. But about 15 years ago, I started to go on wellness retreats for my own sanity. I’m a single mom with three boys. I left a very abusive relationship that has kept me busy in court for many, many years. I had a very demanding job and I thought I was going to do everything and pull off everything. And I didn’t have a nervous breakdown. But I came pretty close multiple times and my instinct wasn’t. I’m not paying enough attention to my kids, to my employees, to my team, to my friends, to whatever. But I need to start paying a little bit of attention to myself. So, I booked on a whim. Once I booked myself on a wellness retreat and it gave me permission to pause, which I’m very bad at. Minter, I, I don’t, I’ve never been diagnosed as hyperactive. I don’t know, maybe I am. But it’s difficult for me to slow down in every aspect of my life because I have an endless to do list that never, it just, it just keeps going. Whatever I scratch off, new things get added below. So, I started doing the retreats. I have always gone by myself. If I was on business trips and in, you know, Singapore, I tack on a four-day retreat in Indonesia for the weekend. Like anything I could figure out to give myself a bit of time to exist as a human being, not as a mom, not as a boss, not as a friend, as a human, as a woman and a human being. And they were so beneficial to me over the years that I sort of started cherry picking what I liked about each one. And I thought, you know, someday when I retire, I would love to build a business that does for other people what this has done for me. And I built the business plan and I knew I wanted to do it in Galicia in the northwest coast of Spain. My family is from there. I wanted to contribute to that community and all the boxes, you know, I had a lot of data available to me because I run the insights and analytics teams. So, I was like, wow, the tourism numbers. Check out the projections on Spain. The wellness business is exploding. I’m like, oh, okay, rationally speaking, this actually makes sense. It’s not just my passion project. I built a beautiful little plan, stuck it in a drawer and said, when I retire someday from the rat race of the corporate world, I’ll do this. And Covid hit. And the only trip I was taking was to see my elderly parents in this part of Spain. So, I was like, okay, you know, I’m just going to start familiarizing myself with the real estate. What you Know what’s out here. I don’t even know if what I’m looking for exists really casually. And I walked in to the fourth property I visited and I was with my oldest son. And 10 minutes in I went, oh shit, I have to do this now. And I always make this joke that I’ve never fallen in love with a man like I fell in love with that house. I mean it just, it was instant winter. I walked in the property owns the mountain spring. There was the sound of like fresh running water overlooking the ocean surround eucalyptus forest. It just the space gave. You would walk in and you deep breath and it gave me permission to pause. It was feeding my soul. And I said this is it. Like I, there’s no I can’t wait till I retire. So, I, I purchased the property, hired some interior designers to come in and gut the place and then we opened in the summer of 2022. And I don’t come from the hospitality business, I don’t know anything about the luxury hospitality business and I don’t know anything about running a hotel. Minter. But, but I was so convinced of the purpose behind this project and I, you know, I made, I hired only female entrepreneurs to help me. You know, female interior designers, female website designers, brand designers. The woman and who helped me conceptualize the menu was a female founded business.

Minter Dial: Like, I mean the woman you, the woman you, not the men.

Maria Garrido: You know, the woman who helped me.

Minter Dial: No, no, no, no, I’m just joking about the women, the menu, the menu.

Maria Garrido: I really focus on that. I said the day we turn a profit, I will give 10% of the profits to provide wellness retreats for women who are survivors of domestic violence for free. So, and I everything is locally sourced. Like there were so many ESG elements that were important to me. They were difficult to put in place. And I spent many, many hours in my room by myself behind my computer screen. You know, you go from a corporate world with a big team and social interaction into the entrepreneurial world, which is very lonely at the beginning and along the way very lonely. But we started the business and so many of my theories have been debunked on what I thought I was building, but in such a fabulous way. Minter I thought my client is going to be a middle-aged woman like me who’s burning out and needs a break. And suddenly I see men showing up and I’m like, what’s going on here? More men, elderly people showing up, you know, 80-year-olds who are retired, who have the time and the dispensable Income and have never done a yoga class. But they’re super curious, you know, and we realized that and I had big discussions. We hired a PR agency. Lots of controversy. You need to hire supermodels to come in and be Instagram influencers. I’m like, no, that’s not what I’m doing here. This is a place for anyone who’s interested in wellness. It doesn’t matter where they are in their journey. We are going to be accessible. We’re not judgmental. If you don’t want to get up and do yoga at 8:30, we don’t care, sleep in. And I, at the end of the day, what I see happening is people cry when they leave us on Sunday because we are that we have the kindest team, I think, of any retreat or wellness center in the world. They are here to pamper you, to not judge you, to let you do your journey. Everybody who’s coming to retreats is not there as by accident. You know, the startup founders I have that show up from Boston and Tel Aviv who’ve never shut their computer in 20 years are not there by accident. The man who’s been widowed after 40 years of marriage and hasn’t left the house in three months and his sister buys him a retreat to show up in our house is not there by accident. So, in essence we are collectively hugging our clients. We are giving them a collective hug and allowing them just to be. And that every time I see somebody leave crying all of the headaches of spending my weekends paying bills and trying to figure out how I’m going to found it, you know, how to fund it and all of the, all of the work is absolutely 100% worth it.

Minter Dial: So, on the funding piece, have you completely kept it within your funding or have you managed to get some. Or do you want funding? Is that something you’re looking for that.

Maria Garrido: I, I would like it for. Because I’m impatient. Because I would like to go faster. Right now it’s completely self-funded. So, I manage everything on both on the, you know, on my side and living in Paris and the proper. The business in Spain. I would, I am interested in angel investors for the simple sake of acceleration. Because I would like us to go faster.

Minter Dial: I want to get into the attitude of your employees.

Maria Garrido: Yes.

Minter Dial: Because most of my clients I work with struggle with engaged employees. Employees who are actually delivering the service that aren’t the founders. They’re going to get the big paycheck at the end when everything’s successful that may not even have anything in terms of relationship with the people who are coming. In terms, for example, the person who’s coming is paying a large amount of money that they could never pay in their own way. How do you. So, any other companies dealing with this, you know, take the luxury companies, Chanel or whatever, the employees who are serving the clients are walking in the door to buy the €5,000, whatever, way beyond the means. So, there’s no relationship in that sense and therefore disconnection with what they’re doing can happen. How have you embarked these people on? How do you keep them motivated? I mean, presumably they feel like they’re being hugged in some way as well. But I wonder from you, how have you managed to do that? Is it the choice of people, the type of questions you’re asking in order to get them to come on board, the care you give to them going on, the implication of your purpose, what is it that’s keeping them in that state?

Maria Garrido: We call them the Kindness tribe at Terranam and very early on we noticed that a lot of guests were saying things like, I’ve come here as a guest and I leave as a friend, which was for us the ultimate compliment. Right? So, my hotel manager and his partner host the retreats. So, they actually do all of the activities. It’s as if you’re in their home. They do all of the activities with our clients and they foster the community aspect of what we’re doing. The woman who cleans our property, who we call the shadow of perfection because she doesn’t like to be seen. There’s two great blogs on our website that you should look at that are called the Kindness Tribe. And I highlight every single member of our team. She loves that. She was there when that house was a ruin 15 years before I bought it. And she came with the deal. Like when I bought the property I had to keep run as an employee, she loves that property more than I will ever love that house and takes care of it like it’s her own child and is a literally a shadow of perfection. She wants to make sure that everything is perfect in the room for our customer. Because. Because it’s a reflection of her own talent and the skills that she brings to the team.

Minter Dial: So, she owns it, guys.

Maria Garrido: She’s for her, it’s hers, you know, it’s hers. To be honest, she knows where everything is way better than I do. Like if the electricity drops out, she knows where the fuse box is. She knows everything. We went through a couple shafts before we found one that had the attitude that we wanted to just embrace Our clients and that kind vibe that we were looking for. All of the other people are people that come in from externally. Our masseuse is unbelievable. She’s a body healer more than anything else. Yoga teachers, we’ve been through a few, I have to say before we find one that knows how to handle somebody who knows how to do a downward dog or stand on their head standing next to an 80-year-old who’s never done a yoga class in their life. We don’t want. We need people who are open and embracing of different people, different backgrounds, different journeys. Some of them have been bumpy. We haven’t headed straight out of the gate, but we’ve slowly figured it out. We have a woman who does sound healing, who’s amazing and just gives off this unbelievable vibe. But it takes time to get there and it’s a little. A bit of trial and error, Minter. It’s a bit of trial and error because sometimes you can go through the interview and it’s great. And then when you know, when you’ve got the person on the property and we’re rushing because we have a stack of journalists coming in for a PR event and they start having, they start treating the rest of the staff poorly, that’s where I draw the line. Like if we’re trying to do kindness, you can’t treat each other like, like this.

Minter Dial: You know, I, I reflect on comment that John Vervaeke I, I follow a lot turn. Vervaeke is professor in Toronto and writes just through the Crisis of Meaning, the Awakening. And he went on a tour with Jordan Peterson, the famed professor psychologist from Canada as well. And what one of the things he remarked in a podcast that he held with Peterson afterwards was, well, one of the things I really liked about you, Jordan, was that you treated the person who was sweeping the floor around us in the same way as you treated me or any of the other dignitaries that came around. And that kind of integrity of meaning, integrity of person is super important. That back to this idea of having this team. Of course, you’re going to have difficulties finding that human beings are complex. I was wondering to what extent, Maria, you are actually involved in all the recruitments and to what extent you feel the need or do share your deeper personal link and reason for pounding this.

Maria Garrido: I am. I approve all of the hires. I was heavily involved in the beginning of the team, but I do approve all of the hires. I. Not everyone on my team knows my own personal story. I have to tell you the funny story. When I first, when I first bought the property I sat down, the woman who is what we call in Spanish la ama de ll, you know, the keeper of the keys. And I explained the house is being used as a big, beautiful Airbnb for big Madrid families that come for the summer and rent it out as, like a luxury property villa. And I said, we’re going to do something different now here. And I remember, I will never forget the conversation. She looked at me like I was nuts. Who’s this half Galician woman coming in here, Tell me we’re going to serve gastronomic vegetarian food, that we’re going to do wellness. All of the neighbors in the village were thrilled because wellness is quiet, so they were no longer going to have big parties. But she looked at me like I was nuts, and she said, what do you mean? But Spaniards aren’t going to come. I’m like, well, it’s not likely. It’s probably. Our guests will probably be British and Irish and Northern European because this wellness idea is much more advanced. And she was very upset. And this. I was just there two weeks ago and she said we had some Spanish guests. And she goes, oh, God, please bring the foreigners back. I couldn’t stop laughing. I’m like, no, she’s drinking the punch more than I drink the punch. And we. She puts. Every day when we, when we have clients, the day they come in, we cut fresh wildflowers from our own gardens or from the woods, from the eucalyptus forest in the mountains. And she’s in charge of making sure that everyone has their own unique bouquet in the room like she is. So, she, she cares more about the ESG things than I do, which I appreciate, because then she. I give her space to tell my hotel manager, you know what, like, the compost bed needs to be bigger because we’re not. We’re not recycling and composting as much as we should. I give her every space to go tell myself, you know what? Instead of buying the Basel you bought today, there’s some sitting in the herb garden. You can just pick it there, you know, little things like that. I give her space because I know that’s the area where she’s going to push my mission. My director is the guy that knows how to deliver service. And he’s so obsessed with our five-star rating on Google that, like, he’s scared to death if somebody ever gives us four. So, I don’t need to push him. That’s. That’s what he created. He created that five-star rating. I had a vision, but he implemented it. And those actual experiences of our Guests are his responsibility and his talent and his contribution, not mine.

Minter Dial: I have an interesting parallel story in my mind, you know, like when you tell a story, how it pops stories in your mind. I had recently on my show a man called Vincent Kouwenhoven, a Dutchman who went and fell in love with Africa and went and started creating safaris. Yes, it’s about showing animals, but he decided to make them unique experiences. You can’t really wave a wand and say, well, I want, you know, the tiger to show up here. Of course, no tigers, but, you know, the nature is what it is. What you can control and work on is that hospitality, the, the experience within the camp. And I can say that he freaking created the six star with his at, because I experienced it at one of his camps in Zambia which called the Sausage Tree Lodge, which is just unbelievable.

Maria Garrido: And I’ve been to Zambia, but I wasn’t there.

Minter Dial: Oh well, this is where I really recommend you go. He, he adds one thing into the luxury thing, which I really appreciated, which is the notion of total surprise.

Maria Garrido: Oh, yes, yes. Minter, yes. There’s always. Yes, 100%. 100%. So, as I was doing retreats around the world, like I started cherry picking what I liked about each one. But I said there has to be something they don’t expect. And there is. And we’re not going to talk about it here because reveal it, but absolutely. On Saturday night after dinner we get. Make all. We do it on Saturday night we do a celebratory dinner which celebrates the local culture. So, they eat fish and seafood and wine from the region of Galicia. But at the end of the dinner we make everybody get up and we take them away to something and I won’t say what it is. And it is always the highlight of our retreat, which is something they do not expect.

Minter Dial: Yeah. And the fact is that, you know, you have to, they have to have a trust in you at that point. They’ve gone on a certain journey already and then they just, you just, they blithely follow you because you’ve led them along the garden path and yeah, there’s some tulips there, them staying here and then oops, bingo. Love it. All right, well that, that’s cute. Anyway, so how can people find more about Terranam?

Maria Garrido: So, they can, they can follow us on Instagram at Terranam Wellness. So, Terranam is T E R R a N a M which means: terra, which is earth, and Anam is soul in Celtic.

Minter Dial: Oh, I see.

Maria Garrido: So, it’s the link of Earth and soul. We really believe in the power of nature to help heal people in our business. So, they can follow us on Instagram. They can go to our website@terranamwellness.com we have retreats running most of the year. I don’t know who thinks self-care is just a summer thing. I need to take care of yourself. Year round. We do. Next year we’re doing a lot more. We realize there’s a lot more interest in other kinds of retreats. So, we’re. We’ve. We now do men’s only retreats. The first ones I sold out Minter men’s only retreats. We do menopause retreats. There’s a lot of women who need to feel they’re not alone in that process and get some basic tips on how they can help themselves. We’re starting to do gastronomy retreats which are not about doing yoga. It’s just about eating. In Galicia. I don’t know people outside of Spain know or not, but Galicia is known for its seafood and its wine. In fact, I don’t know if you know who Massimo Botura is. Yes, the chef. He. I met him in New York a few months ago at an event and he told me, Galicia, the best seafood in the world. I said, exactly. So, we do a. We do a seafood tour. People get to go on a boat and look at the mussel barges in the ocean and eat all you can eat mussels. The village next door to us is known for its clams. So, we go visit the people as they’re climbing in the morning so they can explain what they do and they get to taste clams. We go on tapas tours of Santiago de Compostela. We take them very locally to something called the Furancho, which are these homes up in the mountains that only the locals know about. Where you walk in the secret door and it’s all you can eat and all you can drink.

Minter Dial: I love that.

Maria Garrido: So, we’re doing. Those are really popular. So, we’re doing more and more of those next year as well as the holistic wellness.

Minter Dial: That’s beautiful. Well, it’s for sure, Galicia is not the most well-known portion of Spain, but it does have a lot of wonderful properties. I’ve been there a few times and I’m wondering now, this is for Minters, just personally, because, you know, he’s a little bit of a goo. Is paddle any paddle tennis courts?

Maria Garrido: Oh, good question. No, we have. We have a kayaking club because we’re at the end of the ocean Bay.

Minter Dial: Oh, I see.

Maria Garrido: Starts to become a river when you go just a little bit up the road. So, we have a kayaking club, but as far as I know, I know paddle is very popular in Spain. But I’ll look around, Minter. I’ll let you know if there’s any paddle.

Minter Dial: I always travel with my paddle racket just to finish off Maria. So, we mentioned the beginning. You have these other roles, Neds, and you’re an advisor at Quilt. Your choice of Quilt was of intrigue to me. So, just give us a little pitch on what is Quilt and why you join it.

Maria Garrido: Yeah. So, I met them when I was working at Havas as the chief insights and analytics officer globally for the company. And I met Quilt very early on in their own story, when I think there were five employees, the two founders and three employees based out of Singapore. And we were interested in them because they were using artificial intelligence and machine learning to do market research. And market research reported into Meet Havas. And what I found fascinating about their approach is they’re a very human company. There’s a lot of kindness at Quilts. They’re very obsessed with doing a lot of projects for NGOs for the World Health Organization, for UNESCO. So, there was an aspect of, like, AI for good that I thought was quite interesting with them. And the scale of what I can do with them as a client at speed was so different from the traditional market research models that we use. And it is an industry that is absolutely ripe for disruption and has been for a long time. So, for over the years, I have very much stayed in contact with the Quilt team. I worked with them on several projects, advised them on a couple things. And now that the company is half based out of the US and half based in Singapore, they’re much bigger now, working for big, big clients all over the world. They’ve worked for McDonald’s, they work for Coca Cola. They work for LVMH in France. They work for Bell. They work a lot for Bell as well, the cheese company. So, I have been on their advisory board, which is relatively new. We started a few months ago, so there’s four or five of us. And we sort of help them build their models and look at new tools they can create. I’ve used them at Deezer on a couple of projects. We’ve done some very interesting work with them around Fandom. And I think it’s always, you know, we were talking about the humility of the marketer at the beginning. We sometimes we make some very big assumptions of what we think motivates people in their behaviors of media consumption.

Minter Dial: Based on me, based on me, based on me.

Maria Garrido: You know, I know because I did it. But I’m not my average consumer. And we’ve done some really great work with them around fandom this year that has sort of broken the myths and the hypothesis that we all have around what we think, the reasons behind why people are, are part of a fan community. It’s not what we think it is at all. And I love that about them. There’s always a light bulb moment when I do some work with them.

Minter Dial: Makes me think how in, in my group of people my age anyway, typically I feel that we, we’re men in particular, are less good at accepting their weaknesses, showing vulnerability and having mentors, having somebody who they, they look up to and feel like can be a better person than them somehow. And yeah, and I, that was that thought. But I do this Quilt work and this is maybe a personal interest with smaller companies as well. Is there, is there a version that is useful for smaller entrepreneurs?

Maria Garrido: Yeah, of course. I mean, I think what they, what they do so well is they can do market research at scale, but you can certainly bring it down to a local market. Like a couple weeks ago I asked them, one of the other boards I sit on is a commercial real estate company and they have an incubator where they look at new retail models and they invest in retail models to spread them all over their shopping malls. And I asked the team, like, what kind of insights are you using to inform those decisions? Right. So, if they’re only financial, you might be missing out on trends. Right. I don’t know what’s happened, but Krispy Kreme has showed up in France and there are queues a mile long to get a donut, right? So, I said, how can you guys get on top of what’s happening in France before it happens? So, I asked Quilt to do some very small amount of work for them on like understanding retail conversations and trends happening in France around fast food and quick service restaurants, QSRs in France so that they could have a more informed decision on what they look into next.

Minter Dial: For incubation insights and data. Quilt.AI Maria. How can anybody get in touch you follow what you do, write about, connect or however, whatever links would you like people to run off? Well, LinkedIn, except for Terranam Wellness.

Maria Garrido: Wellness, yeah, you can find us on Terranam. The easiest place to find me is on LinkedIn. Just look my name up, you’ll find me and you can send me a message there. And then if it’s related to Terranam, it’s very easy. They can just write me at Maria at terranomwellness.com.

Minter Dial: Beautiful. I’ll put that into all the show notes. It’s always pleasure to get some energy from you. Thank you for coming on.

Maria Garrido: Happy anniversary. By the way, Minter, 14 years is an amazing, amazing achievement. Happy anniversary.

Minter Dial: Keep on going.