Our body, an impeccable machine, is a tool for us to carry out our ordinary and extraordinary works on this planet. How we treat it is of utmost importance to lead a healthy, happy, and content life. However, more often than not, we get into the trap of achieving ‘that perfect body’ which might or might not be our true requirement. Under social pressure, we often push our bodies to extremes which may prove to be unhealthier than we thought. This is why, taking expert advice, when it comes to maintaining optimal weight and good health is crucial.
Naturhouse helps people reach and maintain their target weight with the support of a personal coach. With their free and professional help, one can naturally acquire a healthy lifestyle.
Simple and Effective
The Naturhouse Method is simple and yet absolutely brilliant: alimentary education, provided for free on a weekly base by nutrition professionals, plus nutraceuticals: the client receives a weekly diet really easy to follow and pays only for the supplements.
Naturhouse has emerged as by far the most effective, 100% natural, and affordable approach to weight management in the market.
“With the great difference to give since the first meeting with any single client the cultural tools to maintain the results in the long term as we teach them how to eat appropriately according to their own lifestyle, that we do our best to improve week by week,” says Raffaello Pellegrini, CEO.
Raffaello joined the company in 2005, and started to develop from scratch the Italian retail network reaching 500 openings within 60 months; in 2015, when the company was listed on the Madrid stock exchange, the Italian market was the second of the company by turnover, and on top the Italian branch had the best EBITDA.
A few months ago, after 18 years, and after colonizing other countries as International Director of Development, the founder Felix Revuelta appointed him CEO, and now he has full responsibility for all the operations worldwide.
A Tough Journey
After studying business administration in Milan, Raffaello’s professional training ground was the Cuba of the tourism-related economic boom in the late 1990s, first managing a personal investment in the hotel industry himself, later reselling his know-how to tour operators of different countries, then finally acting as a trojan horse for some US based universities (USC and Michigan) eager to send students from their business schools to study the peculiarities of the economy of a communist country.
Upon his return to Italy, after a brief stint as commercial director of a large advertising agency, he accepted the proposal of a Spanish company, seeking a manager with fluent Spanish and previous entrepreneurial experience, to develop from scratch an innovative business format of weight management based on herbal products, an opportunity that he accepted even though he had never before entered an herbalist shop in his entire life.
In the beginning, Raffaello had at least a couple of big mountains to climb: the first was that the brand was totally unknown, and the second, the highest by far, was that the business idea was not legal. It wasn’t outlawed, but the idea was so new there was no law to regulate it, and for this reason, it was very easy for the competitors to report them to local market authorities.
With the help of his wife, Silvia, a lawyer, after 5 years the business format was finally 100% legal as a regulation custom-made for their business was finally created, also to grant the over 1.000 job opportunities created in the meantime.
“Developing the Naturhouse network in Italy I survived so many challenges that I had to write a book about it, called “From zero to 500” (500 is the number of shops opened in the first 5 years) which is now a best seller in Italy in the franchising books niche,” shares Raffaello.
He learned more by errors and bad experiences as it always happens, as such a long career in the same company has not been always as smooth as silk. But Raffaello learned a lot, bit by bit, also from all the people he met during this great professional journey, always trying to find profiles better than himself to add to his team. “I’m proud that the hard core of my pivotal colleagues is still with me after more than 15 years of daily passionate hard work. This is for sure the best recognition I received, and keep receiving daily, as a leader, and what I started to apply to all the other branches (we’re presently operating in 24 countries worldwide) since I was appointed as CEO of the group,” he shares.
Innovative and Personalized Solutions
It was company founder Felix Revuelta who had the insight 30 years ago that overweight and obesity would have become a worldwide pandemic problem, inventing the Naturhouse method and the first line of nutraceuticals focused on weight management. Naturhouse is a revolutionary model in the diet industry, which is almost totally based on the “rebound effect”: They don’t explain why you gained weight and how your body will allow you to get rid of it, only offering you a short-term solution knowing that in a few months, you’ll return with the same problem or bigger. Naturhouse’s approach is completely the opposite: starting with the first meeting with every client they start with how to eat better according to their lifestyle, giving them the chance not only to solve the overweight problem, but also the alimentary know-how to maintain the results in the long term.
Raffaello’s contribution at the beginning, developing Italy starting with the very first shop, was to realize the fine-tuning of the business opportunity for the Italian market, to choose the right people for his team, and to create a winning strategy to develop the network. “And now, on a daily base, to keep doing my best to have my team focused on our mission to deliver results to our clients and to have happier franchisees possible,” he says.
Quality and Affordability
Naturhouse has a unique business format and provides free weekly dietary education and affordable nutraceuticals. The real secret, explains Raffaello, of their system is their capacity to find and train talents in the nutrition world, as their added value is the professional effort of their nutritionist, always cost-free, and their capacity to build long-term empathic relations with the clients, nurturing them, delivering results in terms of losing overweight but also, even more important, giving them the chance to have a better life in terms of quality. And probably longer for obese people.
No doubt that in this business Naturhouse represents the most ethical approach to weight management, due not only to the affordability of their products in terms of retail price but to the fact that they teach people how to maintain results in the long term. And this is priceless.
Driven by Passion
Raffaello has been with Naturhouse for over 18 years. He is more passionate about the way he does his job than the job itself. “I’m totally in love with the franchising system, the perfect way to make business being your boss but at the same time lowering the entrepreneurial risk at minimum as you’re applying consolidated retail know-how and you’re 100% supported in terms of training and marketing,” he says.
He feels that the only way to franchisee seriously is to make your franchisee happy giving them the chance to make money out of their investment, a goal that you can reach only if you try to do your job better every day, not losing any chance to make your business format every day better.
Aligning the Personal and Organizational Mission
The most difficult part for Raffaello is keeping his body coherent with his mission and not gaining overweight. It seems extremely challenging for someone always traveling like him: more than 100 flights last year, and eating at home as a rare event represent the worst combination of trying to have healthy alimentary habits, not to mention the lack of time to exercise regularly, the other indispensable cornerstone of a quality lifestyle. Regarding delivery results to franchisees, and shareholders, the daily commitment translated into hard work aimed to achieve always better results is the only way he knows to run the business.
“And numbers confirm it has been a good recipe, so far,” he adds.
Human First; Technology Next
Naturhouse is a ‘human to human’ service offering help to everybody to learn how to fight overweight, eat the proper way, and consolidate better alimentary habits to maintain the results in the long term. So, it will always be human-centric.
But technology can help them to optimize their business in many different ways, with new tools, apps, and miracle machines arriving every day in the market. Raffaello feels they have to be open to new tech opportunities, and try in their online and offline shops if they think they could be useful. If they get results, they’ll apply it to their franchisee shops as soon as they’re sure tools will represent an added value.
“But we’ll always have to keep our focus on finding the right people to train to implement our method,” he adds.
Planning Ahead
Raffaello’s personal next big goal is to write a second book whose title he has already decided: “From 500 to 5.000”
5 thousand Naturhouse shops worldwide is a reachable goal, considering that they’re still unknown in the biggest and “fattest” countries of the world. He thinks about the US, for example, where they have actually only one shop testing the market, and where within 2030 more than 50% of the population will be obese, or China, where even if the percentage of the overweight population is under 20% the number of potential clients is numerically higher than the whole US population.
“I still have a lot of work to do, and many great markets to colonize with the “Naturhouse method” as actually out of the 20 countries with the bigger population we are only operating in Mexico, where we signed the master franchising contract only last year. The challenge has just begun! And being based on teaching people how to eat better, there’s no doubt that the “Naturhouse method” can be applied successfully everywhere. We have only to choose the right quality people to work with us and train them properly,” concludes Raffaello.
Quote: “Live as You’d have to die tomorrow, behave as You’d never die.”
Quote: “Our mission is to educate clients on eating habits, so they can reach and maintain a healthy weight.”
Quote: “After more than 30 years in business, we have almost 1,500 establishments in 25 countries worldwide and provide nutritional advice to more than 7 million people.”