I Left My Career In Consulting To Run Mindfulness Retreats For Exec Teams

September 18th, 2025

save

About
Business

Max Schneider

Founder, Ritual Retreats

$35K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Ritual Retreats

thisisritual.com

from Charlotte

started December 2024

$35,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools recommends to grow your business!

Discover what books Max recommends to grow your business!

Want more updates on Ritual Retreats? Check out these stories:

Who are you and what business did you start?

I'm Max Schneider and I run Ritual Retreats, where we curate mindfulness retreats for executive and leadership teams. In 2021, I was 10 years into my consulting career when I burnt out hard - shingles, anxiety attacks - the whole nine yards. My mindfulness practice was instrumental in my recovery, to the point where I started a company, Sand and Salt Escapes, curating mindfulness retreats in Nosara, Costa Rica. As that work grew, leaders from my consulting days started reaching out and asking if I could curate retreats for their leadership team. With that, Ritual Retreats was born.

The company launched at the end of 2024 with six figures in booked revenue - quite a different story from starting Sand and Salt Escapes. We've worked directly with CEOs from 10 different companies. Our clients are CEOs who understand the value of stepping back to gain perspective and genuinely care about their team as human beings. Our work is incredibly unique in the executive development space because of our ability to blend deep expertise in both the boardroom and in the mindfulness space. We design our retreats around grounding mindfulness practices, reflective conversations, and space to just relax and rest - staying at beautiful villas, with private chefs, and every detail thoughtfully curated.

How do you come up with the idea for Ritual Retreats?

My first day of being unemployed after walking away from my consulting career with April 9th, 2022. That morning, I sat down on my yoga mat and started bawling my eyes out. It was a super cathartic experience and the beginning of leaning hard on my mindfulness practice to reconnect with myself. I eventually started a company running mindfulness retreats in Nosara. We ran 15 retreats in the first 30 months, which was a wildly fast pace. But it taught me so much on how to curate high-end experiences where the guest feels deeply cared for.

As I shared the work I was doing, it piqued the interest of leaders in my network. I had initially sworn off doing anything corporate, but I was presented with a really unique opportunity to work with Young Presidents Organization. I stepped into it and saw the power this work could have on CEOs and their teams. Over the next six months, three other organizations reached out. With the pull from the market, I decided to launch leadership team retreats as its own service line within my first company, Sand and Salt Escapes. But as that work grew, it was evident that it needed to be housed under a separate entity if we were going to speak to prospective clients with the nuance that we needed to.

Rather than just spin the service line off into a separate company, I took the opportunity to totally revamp it. I interviewed past clients to hear more about what they'd want from us. I was introduced to others who became mentors along the journey. The process of building out the new company, Ritual Retreats, took way longer than I anticipated - almost nine months - but that was essential to do it right.

How did you launch Ritual Retreats and get initial traction?

I launched the business slowly and intentionally. We curate small-batch, white glove engagements - so every detail matters. The first several months were all about delivering on work we carried over from Sand and Salt Escapes and making incremental changes to processes that elevated the value we were delivering for clients.

Once that was solidified, I shared the launch of Ritual Retreats to my network on LinkedIn, did press releases, and joined podcasts as a guest - which was great practice to hone how I articulate our value proposition. The response in my network to launching Ritual Retreats felt super supportive, but I think most people saw it as "I thought you were already doing that," whereas for me it was a massive undertaking. It was a good reminder of a quote I love from Schitts Creek - "No one cares about you the way you care about you."

What was the growth strategy for Ritual Retreats and how did you scale?

When I launched Sand and Salt Escapes, we had little social proof and zero reputation in the retreat space. So I looked at our GTM approach through two phases. First, we had to spend money to get people interested in joining. That equated to an average of $6,000/month on ad spend for the first 12 months. We experimented on Google Ads, IG, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Ultimately, we focused in on Google Ads because people searching things like "wellness retreat Costa Rica" were much more qualified than the targeting we could do on social media platforms. We tested different ad copy, landing pages, and iterated constantly till we found formulas that worked well.

While that was going on, I focused intently on building our organic SEO presence - something that takes time. Interviews, podcasts, PR, blogs, influencer reviews. At the same time, we hired a photographer and videographer (shoutout Davey and Sky Media) who joined multiple retreats to give us the professional imagery and videos we needed to show what our retreats are like.

At the end of the first 12 months, I was able to cut the ad spend and our organic presence led to us selling out all 2024 retreats before January 1st of that year.

A lot of our business for Ritual Retreats is repeat clients and referrals. It's important to me that how we go to market is aligned with our services, and anyone who is launching a company, I would highly recommend making sure the way you go to market is a reflection of and aligned to the service or product you sell.

What that looks like for us is we stay away from tactics like cold LinkedIn messages. But that's not to say we don't reach out to prospective clients. If I read or listen to an interview with a CEO who has similar values to our work, I'll send a handwritten note to introduce myself and what we do. It's a much more personal way to connect than getting a cold email from an AI bot. And it starts to build a relationship with the person right away, because they know there's someone on the other side of that card who truly cares and took the time to write and send the note.

What were the biggest lessons learned from building Ritual Retreats?

I've learned that leading a business can be a mindfulness practice unto itself.

In mindfulness, you learn that you experience life through your body - your mind is simply interpreting it. When you slow down and tune into your body, you can observe and learn things that allow you to live in deeper alignment with life.

In that same way, we experience being an entrepreneur through the business. When we can get out of our minds and notice what the business is telling us, we can lead in better alignment with that it's asking for.

This mindset has helped me better decipher signal from noise in the business and stopped me from taking ideas that I think are great - but are actually not aligned with the business - and moving forward with them.

It's a practice of mindful leadership.

Discover Similar Business Ideas Like Ritual Retreats

	Idea	Revenue
Rankings.io Build This	SEO agency elevating personal injury law firms'... SEO agency elevating personal injury law firms' search rankings.	$2.5M monthly
Eden Data Build This	"Flat-rate virtual CISO service for growing sta... "Flat-rate virtual CISO service for growing startups."	$230K monthly
MPC Builders Build This	"Transparent custom home builders at the Jersey... "Transparent custom home builders at the Jersey Shore."	$500K monthly
Rebel Book Club Build This	Online non-fiction book club with themed meetups.	$13.3K monthly
Bio-One Build This	Crime and trauma scene cleanup franchise.	$1.25M monthly
Simply Decor an... Build This	Event decor company creating bespoke, elegant c... Event decor company creating bespoke, elegant celebrations.	$35K monthly
The Blog Proofr... Build This	Blog proofreading service for content creators.	$2K monthly