People run the business.
We make sure they are never on their own.

Phil Goodwin

Phil has run studios for 25 years. He founded Body Mind Life in February 2002 and knows the shift changes, cover teachers, new starters and small things that slip, from the inside. Before studios he spent nine years at Deutsche Bank, from trainee economist to head trader in share price index futures, so he reads a business in its numbers as well as its names.

• Founded and runs Body Mind Life, a yoga and Pilates group, since February 2002. He taught about 3,500 classes himself between 2004 and 2012 and still teaches on its teacher training programme.
• Nine years at Deutsche Bank, from trainee economist to head trader in share price index futures, then business development at an SMS messaging start-up for traders, part of the team that raised $7 million.
• Audited 24 years of Body Mind Life’s job history and found 102 recurring management jobs, close to half of which stopped, lapsed or became unclear when the person running them moved on.
• The operator’s side of every Kula decision: what a shift needs, what a manager will use, and what will not survive a Monday morning.

Peter Tippett

Peter grew up in his family’s small engineering business, where he trained as a production and industrial engineer in New Zealand, with an extension in operations research and time and motion study, and programmed CNC lathes from 1977 to 1985. In 1985 he left to found SapphireOne, a software company building software for small businesses, and ran it until 2000. SapphireOne is still in business today, and he has been building software ever since. He writes much of Kula’s code himself. That is what he brings to Kula: how work really flows, how to measure it fairly, and how to improve it without burning people out.

• Left the family engineering business in 1985 to found SapphireOne, software for small businesses, and ran it until 2000. The company is still in business today.
• Co-founded iPowow, live TV audience engagement used by ESPN, NBC, CNN and Fox. It opened the second-screen market in 2010 with UFC as the first client, then Channel Nine’s Cricket Viewer Verdict.
• Rebuilt Body Mind Life’s software stack off its old booking platform, the work Kula grew out of.
• Builds Kula Intelligence: the platform that connects a business’s systems into one governed model, its MCP connection for Claude, ChatGPT and other AI tools, and the model of how a business works that Kula Ops runs on.

AI-built platforms, not off-the-shelf software.

In September 2024 we published a paper arguing that businesses would stop buying off-the-shelf software and run platforms built around how they work, with AI doing the building. We thought that was a 2030 story. AI made it a 2026 story, and it is why a business can add its own Apps to Kula Ops today.

The judgement calls around the work.

Every business has routine work that is the same each time, like opening checks, rosters and payments. Around it sits the part that takes judgement, where managers notice, understand, decide, act and check. Software never served that part. Extra admin hours and consultants did. It is the part Kula Ops is built for.

The outcome is a person who feels they belong.

In fitness, the outcome is a member who feels they belong, and a person delivers that moment. Kula takes care of the routine work and keeps the judgement calls moving, so staff can do the part only they can.

One test for every line.

Time and money Kula gives back go to the business first, as capacity for its people and never as a reason to cut. If a line fails that test, our price is wrong, not the business.