The week Nick Russomano graduated college, he already knew something was wrong.
Crohn’s disease had been shadowing him since 2009, marked by surgery, a brief remission, and then the disease returned. Medication was managing the inflammation, but the rest of his life was working against him: inconsistent sleep, alcohol, a poor diet, and the grind of early career pressure stacked on top of a body already fighting itself. Every week compounded the last.
His brother Anthony, a Kinesiology major with a master’s degree in Exercise Science who had spent years studying how the body responds to stress, movement, and nutrition, stepped in with something more than advice. He built Nick a system.
Anthony designed an anti-inflammatory lifestyle for Nick: low sugar, no weekday alcohol, and foods that would calm his gut rather than irritate it. The nutritional framework mattered, but the behavior-first focus behind it mattered more. Monday through Thursday, Nick fully committed to the plan with discipline. Friday through Sunday, he rewarded his hard work by enjoying the weekend without restrictions. The weekly reward of freedom allowed him to be consistent. Layered on top were specific, trackable behaviors, small enough to be achievable and consistent enough to compound over time.
That structure, which asked for discipline four days a week rather than perfection every day, turned a medical intervention into a durable lifestyle. And it held.
“No signs of active Crohn’s disease.”
That was the GI note. After two years of coaching alongside medical care, Nick’s doctor confirmed what his daily habits had been quietly building toward: remission.
With his health stabilized, Nick’s professional and personal life began to accelerate in every direction. He won Growth Champion honors as a sales rep, broke a rookie sales record, grew his income by 2.5x, and ran three marathons, cutting his finish time from 3:16 to a Boston-qualifying 2:48, all while working full-time. In 2026, he left his corporate role to join Anthony as co-founder of Mano Wellness.
Designing for Healthspan and Lifespan Together
The philosophy that produced Nick’s results is the foundation of everything Mano does. Anthony calls it designing for healthspan and lifespan together. "Healthspan" means better days right now: less pain, more energy, more presence at work and at home. "Lifespan" means more years with the people you love. The combination is the point, because living long enough to watch your kids grow up is one goal, but being physically and mentally capable of enjoying those years is a different and more demanding one.
Nick’s transformation was the clearest proof of concept, but it was replicated across very different lives. A top business development professional and mother of two lost 40 pounds while continuing to close millions in revenue. A time-constrained CEO found his way out of diet extremes, stabilized his weight, and built a consistent workout routine he has sustained for years. In each case the same pattern held: a personalized plan built around the individual’s actual life, behavior-first thinking over information-first thinking, and clear goals that accumulated rather than reset.
The brothers began asking what that pattern could look like at the scale of an entire organization. If a system built around behavior, structure, and personalization could take one person from chronic illness to peak performance, what could it do inside a company of five hundred people?
Treating Your Benefits as a Product and Your Culture as a Brand
That question became Mano Wellness. The company partners with people-first employers whose wellness benefits are underused: organizations that have invested in EAP programs, health incentives, and fitness resources, and are watching those investments go largely untouched while burnout and disengagement continue to rise. Mano functions as an embedded wellness marketing department. The employer’s existing benefits are the product and the company’s culture is the brand. Mano’s job is to get employees to actually use what is already available to them, without adding operational burden to an already stretched HR team.
The method is the Mano Participation Playbook, a three-step engagement engine built on the same behavior-first principles behind Nick’s transformation:
- Invite: Clear invitations written in the company’s own voice, so every employee understands what is happening, how to participate, and why it matters to them personally.
- Remind: Consistent, lightweight touchpoints across email and internal channels. Participation drops when wellness gets buried under meetings and deadlines, so Mano keeps it visible without becoming noise.
- Reward: Meaningful incentives and public recognition that make participation feel worthwhile in the present, building the kind of social momentum that sustains a program well past its launch window.
Underneath the playbook are the same tools that produced results at the individual level: personalized fitness and nutrition plans for participants and their families, live Healthy Habits webinars, onsite fitness classes, and human-led challenge structures designed to feel social rather than clinical.
Participation You Can Show Leadership
In a recent engagement, a company launched the Participation Playbook with an Employee Resource Group of 59 people. Within the first 14 days, 32 employees had already taken action. By day 28, 43 members, representing 73 percent of the group, were actively engaged across personalized wellness plans, live webinars, and internal communication channels.
For the HR team, the workload was minimal. They approved the dates and messaging, helped announce the kickoff, and reviewed the results. Mano handled everything else, including the leadership-ready reports delivered at Day 15, Day 30, and Day 90. Those reports go beyond participation tallies: they include benefit usage data, employee stories, and real quotes that give leadership the evidence they need to justify continued investment in employee well-being.
Mano guarantees their partners employee participation. The more people that engage with Mano means more people get life changing results. That is the mission. That commitment reflects the same confidence Anthony brought to Nick’s coaching, a willingness to be accountable to the outcome and not just the process.
“Anthony and the team at Mano Wellness have completely elevated our workplace fitness routine. Many of us have seen great improvements in our strength, energy, and overall well-being since starting these sessions.”
— Natalie Kolb, Project Manager, US HealthConnect
A Mission Built for the Long Run
What started with one brother trying to reclaim his health and another building the system to sustain it has grown into a company with a clearly defined horizon. By 2035, Mano’s goal is to serve 1,200 organizations and positively impact 100,000 individuals. The purpose is to build a smarter, faster, better company with great people and great results for the individuals we serve.
The Spring-Ford region is where that mission is being built. If you are an HR leader whose wellness budget is going underused, an employee looking for something that fits your actual life, or a business owner who wants to invest in your people with confidence that the investment will show results, Mano is worth a conversation.
The system that took Nick from the return of his Crohn’s disease to a Boston-qualifying marathon time is the same system now running inside organizations across the region. It works at the individual level because it respects the complexity of a real life, and it works at the organizational level for the same reason.
Learn more at manowellness.co or book a free scoping call to see what the Participation Playbook can do for your team.
