Co-Founder of Workplace Wellness | Health Advocate | Corporate Keynote Speaker | NASM Personal Trainer | Nutritionist | Behavioral Change & Weight Loss Specialist
In the spring of 2020, the calls slowed to a trickle. Staffing is the first industry to feel a shutdown and among the last to recover from one, and the family firm Andrea Eimers had spent five years inside cut back hard, laying her off along with much of the team. The staffing business itself remained in operation and continues operating today. What came next was not a panic pivot. It was a company she and her mother had been describing to each other for years, finally handed the one thing it never had. Time.
The Operator Behind a 45 Percent Activation Rate
Andrea Eimers is co-founder and chief operating officer of Workplace Wellness, Inc., a nationwide corporate wellness company based in Metro Detroit that pulls an employer’s health resources and benefits into a single place employees actually open. She holds a University of Michigan degree in human resources management and NASM certifications in personal training, nutrition and behavioral change. The individual wellness market is saturated with fitness and nutrition coaches. Corporate benefits, meanwhile, rarely connects to real wellness expertise at all. Eimers occupies the overlooked bridge between the two.
Raised in a Staffing Office, Certified in a Gym
The résumé reads like two careers running in parallel, because it was.
Eimers took her first job at a Livonia staffing firm in 2010 as an office assistant, filing and answering phones while she was still in school. She returned in 2014 as a human resources assistant, then moved to AMJ Staffing, where she spent five years climbing from recruiter to account manager to operations manager. Along the way she finished her degree, first at DePaul, then at Michigan.
That decade put her in rooms most wellness founders never see. She was on calls with HR leaders when they were losing people, absorbing turnover costs, and explaining benefits packages that employees did not use.
“Growing up around my mother’s staffing companies gave me early exposure to HR leaders, the challenges they face in supporting employees, and the issues employees experience within the workplace.”
The second career was quieter. She was certifying through NASM in personal training, nutrition, weight loss and behavioral change, learning the unglamorous mechanics of how a person actually changes a habit and how rarely they do it alone. The two tracks kept contradicting each other. One side of her working life measured retention and cost per hire. The other measured whether someone came back next Tuesday.
“Organizations have traditionally treated health and well-being as completely separate from work, even though work directly affects people’s time, stress, habits, and ability to care for themselves.”
By 2020 she had a thesis and no vehicle for it. Then the layoff came, and the vehicle became the only thing left to build.
Two Years of Building Before Anyone Could Buy It
Workplace Wellness was founded in May 2020. The first two years were spent building before anyone could buy anything, starting from scratch.
The delay was intentional. With no outside funding and no playbook, Eimers and her mother taught themselves how to build a mobile platform, working through tutorials and trial and error, while getting known among HR leaders through speaking and teaching and sitting in on the same conversations she had spent a decade listening to from the staffing side. What started from scratch became a fully functioning app within two years. The company soft-launched in 2022 and launched fully in early 2023. Client growth and employee utilization became the two numbers she watches.
The industry she entered runs on wellness fairs, occasional workshops and digital resources nobody revisits. Roughly a quarter of a workforce touches a typical program.
“Our model brings wellness resources and company benefits together in one place that employees can access 24/7, alongside a consistent, human-led engagement strategy.”
Her platform runs between 40 and 45 percent employee activation, close to double the marketplace average. That gap is the entire business case, because a benefit nobody opens is a line item, not a strategy.
The proof shows up in specifics. One higher education client tied its rewards program to annual physicals, letting employees submit primary care forms through the app for HSA incentive points. More than 85 percent of that population enrolled, and preventive care visits came with it.
An oil and gas client presented the opposite problem. Field-based crews, low adoption, months of flat numbers.
“We put ourselves in the employees’ shoes and worked with the organization to identify a competition and prize they would genuinely value.”
The answer was a step competition and a high-quality massage gun. Participation and app usage rose 285 percent. It is a small detail that says a great deal about what she pays attention to. Nobody on a rig wants a mindfulness webinar. They want something that helps their back.
She is equally direct about the most expensive question in employer benefits right now.
“I advise HR leaders to view GLP-1 coverage as one part of a broader wellness strategy, not as a complete solution.”
Employers writing those checks, she argues, are buying a result they have not built the conditions to keep. Without nutrition, movement and behavioral support running alongside the prescription, the weight returns when the coverage ends.
“Without that support, employers may ultimately face higher long-term healthcare costs despite their initial investment in coverage.”
It is not a comfortable message for a buyer who has already signed. It is a useful one.
What the Shutdown Made Room For
A staffing company exists to put people into jobs. When Eimers lost her role in the family staffing business, she and her mother built something that starts where the placement ends, at whether those people are healthy enough to stay. The Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program sharpened how she scales it. The years in HR are why she knows what to scale.
Six years on, Andrea Eimers has turned a layoff into a company whose entire argument fits in one line she repeats often: wellness should not be a perk, it should be a performance strategy.
The layoff changed Eimers’ role, not the future of the family staffing business. What it created was the space for her and her mother to build the company they had already been talking about for years.
Andrea Eimers is co-founder and chief operating officer of Workplace Wellness, Inc., based in the Detroit metropolitan area. She works with HR leaders to build wellness programs employees use, combining a mobile platform with human-led engagement across physical, mental and lifestyle health. To connect with Andrea or learn more, visit www.workplacewellnessus.com or find her on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrea-eimers/
