From Surviving to Building: How Holos Learned to Scale Beyond Its Founders
After reinventing itself during the pandemic and through many other lessons, Holos succeeded in building systems that enabled sustainable growth. A story about the shift that transformed constant effort into an organization ready to scale.
The real turning point was not the creation of Holos, but recognizing that growth had limits when knowledge and decision-making were concentrated in just a few people. That realization sparked a transformation that reshaped how the company operates, sells, and learns.
In 2020, when the pandemic forced the closure of gyms, sports studios, and other physical wellness spaces, Fitness Pass faced its greatest challenge since being founded.
Created in 2018 by 3 sisters: Alicia, Brenda, and Mónica Vivanco, together with co-founder and CTO Philip Leesha, the company had built a integral wellness not only fitness platform connecting people to a wide range of gyms and fitness experiences through a single corporate membership. Then, due to the COVID-19, almost overnight, everything changed.
Like many startups, the team had to adapt fast. To keep the business alive, they sold fitness accessories from their home garage, helping people to continue exercising from home. Amid uncertainty, they discovered a much larger opportunity.
Companies were facing a new challenge: how to support employee wellbeing in a world reshaped by the pandemic, where new ways of working had transformed people’s relationship with both their physical and mental health.
That need led to the creation of Holos, the evolution of Fitness Pass.
Launched in November 2021, Holos became a corporate wellbeing platform that brings together fitness, nutrition, mental health, financial wellbeing, and other services designed to support employees in a holistic way.
For Brenda Vivanco, COO, the launch of Holos represented much more than a business pivot:
“I feel like I became an entrepreneur twice. The second time was different because I learned how to build, not just how to run.”
As Holos began growing, the founders realized they had carried over many of the challenges from the company’s earlier stage. Most decisions still depend on them. Processes were undocumented. Critical knowledge lived inside people’s heads. Growth relied more on the founders’ constant effort than on a structure capable of sustaining it.
They were selling.
They were growing.
But they were not yet scaling.
The turning point came when Alicia, CEO, became pregnant. It prompted a fundamental question: How do you build a company that can continue growing without depending on its founders every step of the way?
The answer was simple, but not easy: build systems.
Brenda began learning how sustainable companies scale. The team redesigned its commercial strategy, clarified its ideal customer profile, documented processes, automated tasks, aligned goals across teams, and established routines for planning and continuous improvement.
The transformation was about creating an organization where knowledge no longer depended on individuals but became part of the system. With almost perfect timing, Brenda and Alicia participated in the MXP program by Growth X, thanks to Swiss EP, where over 6 months, they focused deeply on everything needed to build a predictable revenue engine, from their tech and human resource stack, to defining their ideal customer profiles, streamlining the sales process, building targeted acquisition strategies, and strengthening customer-centric messaging. Later, with additional support from Swiss EP and expert Ethan Myers, Holos further refined its commercial strategy, structured a higher-performing sales team, and developed go-to-market approaches to support its expansion in Mexico and Colombia. These lessons and experiences became part of how Holos designed processes, made decisions, and built a company prepared to scale.
Recently, Brenda reconnected with the Swiss EP from a very different perspective. She was invited to facilitate the Female Founders Retreat, where, in her session “From Surviving to Building Systems,” she shared with 11 female entrepreneurs the Holos’ transformation story and the tools and methodologies that had shaped the company’s evolution - from lessons learned through experience to frameworks refined through programs like MXP.
Today, Holos continues to help companies improve employee wellbeing. For Brenda, the greatest transformation was not the shift from Fitness Pass to Holos,it was understanding that companies do not scale because founders work harder,they scale because they build systems that grow with them.